Bush's Not-So-Big Tent
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| Fri, 07-16-2004 - 3:17am |
By BOB HERBERT
July 16, 2004
Just as George W. Bush is on track to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs, he is now the first president since Hoover to fail to meet with the N.A.A.C.P. during his entire term in office.
Mr. Bush and the leadership of the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization get along about as well as the Hatfields and the McCoys. The president was invited to the group's convention in Philadelphia this week, but he declined.
That Mr. Bush thumbed his nose at N.A.A.C.P. officials is not the significant part of this story. The Julian Bonds and Kweisi Mfumes of the world can take care of themselves at least as well as Mr. Bush in the legalized gang fight called politics.
What is troubling is Mr. Bush's relationship with black Americans in general. He's very good at using blacks as political props. And the props are too often part of an exceedingly cynical production.
Four years ago, on the first night of the Republican convention, a parade of blacks was hauled before the television cameras (and the nearly all-white audience in the convention hall) to sing, to dance, to preach and to praise a party that has been relentlessly hostile to the interests of blacks for half a century.
I wrote at the time that "you couldn't tell whether you were at the Republican National Convention or the Motown Review."
That exercise in modern-day minstrelsy was supposed to show that Mr. Bush was a new kind of Republican, a big-tent guy who would welcome a more diverse crowd into the G.O.P. That was fiction. It wasn't long before black voters would find themselves mugged in Florida, and soon after that Mr. Bush was steering the presidency into a hard-right turn.
Among the most important props of that 2000 campaign were black children. Mr. Bush could be seen hugging them at endless photo-ops. He said a Bush administration would do great things for them. He promised to transform public education in America. He hijacked the trademarked slogan of the Children's Defense Fund, "Leave No Child Behind," and refashioned it for his own purposes. He pasted the new version, "No Child Left Behind," onto one of the signature initiatives of his presidency, a supposedly historic education reform act.
The only problem is that, to date, the act has been underfunded by $26 billion. A lot of those kids the president hugged have been left behind.
And why not? They can't do much for him. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" captured a telling presidential witticism. Mr. Bush, appearing before a well-heeled gathering in New York, says: "This is an impressive crowd: the haves, and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base."
It wasn't really his base. But the comment spoke volumes.
Mr. Bush said he was a different kind of Republican, but what black voters see are tax cuts for the very wealthy and underfunded public schools. What they see is an economy that sizzles for the haves and the have-mores, but a harrowing employment crisis for struggling blacks, especially black men. (When the Community Service Society looked at the proportion of the working-age population with jobs in New York City it found that nearly half of all black men between the ages of 16 and 64 were not working last year. That's a Depression-era statistic.)
In Florida, where the president's brother is governor, and Texas, where the president once was the governor, state officials have been pulling the plug on health coverage for low-income children. The president could use his considerable clout to put a stop to that sort of thing, but he hasn't.
And now we know that Florida was gearing up for a reprise of the election shenanigans of 2000. It took a court order to get the state to release a list of 48,000 suspected felons that was to be used to purge people from the voting rolls. It turned out that the list contained thousands of names of black people, who tend to vote Democratic, and hardly any names of Hispanics, who in Florida tend to vote Republican.
Once their "mistake" was caught, the officials scrapped the list.
Mr. Bush plans to address the Urban League convention in Detroit next week. That would be an excellent time for him to explain to an understandably skeptical audience why he campaigned one way — as a big-tent compassionate conservative — and governed another.

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What dirty tricks will they pull this year. I don't think this was a innocent mistake.
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This is the alternative black audience that is mostly Republican. Bush will strut and say all kinds of nice things and the audience will applaud and cheer. Were it to be otherwise Bush wouldn't go.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/16/politics/campaign/16kerry.html
With President Bush declining to attend the N.A.A.C.P.'s annual convention, John Kerry seized the opening Thursday, accusing Mr. Bush of dividing Americans by race and class and promising to "be a president who is truly a uniter."
Addressing thousands of cheering convention delegates in Philadelphia, Mr. Kerry declared: "The president may be too busy to speak to you now, but I've got news for you. He's going to have plenty of time after Nov. 2."
The senator pointedly said that "when you're president, you need to talk to all the people, and that's exactly what I intend to do.''
Mr. Bush angered members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People last week by refusing its invitation to speak, making him the first incumbent president since Herbert Hoover not to meet with the group during an entire term in office.
Though citing "scheduling commitments,'' Scott McLellan, the White House spokesman, left little doubt Thursday that Mr. Bush, who addressed the group in 2000, saw no benefit in doing so again.
"I think it is really disappointing to see the current leadership continue to repeat the hostile rhetoric that they have used, which really shows that they're not interested in a constructive dialogue," Mr. McClellan said.
The N.A.A.C.P.'s top two officers - Julian Bond, chairman, and Kweise Mfume, president - have attacked Mr. Bush frequently and harshly over his civil rights record. Mr. Bond said Sunday, for example, that Republicans "preach racial neutrality and practice racial division."
On Thursday, Mr. Bond introduced Mr. Kerry by saying the president's decision not to attend was "his loss."
"He said he didn't come because we criticized him," Mr. Bond said. "But if he didn't go anywhere people criticized him, he'd never leave home."
After snubbing the N.A.A.C.P., the White House set up an appearance for Mr. Bush before the National Urban League next Thursday. Mr. McClellan characterized the Urban League as a better setting for Mr. Bush to make progress on issues important to African-Americans.
"I think the leadership of the Urban League has certainly worked closely with the president on important priorities and shared priorities,'' he said, "and they have welcomed the president coming and speaking to their organization.''
Mr. Kerry, in the first of two stops in Pennsylvania before flying to West Virginia for a fund-raiser and rally, began his 50-minute speech to the N.A.A.C.P. by pointing to Mr. Bush's refusal to appear.
"As a campaigner, I know something about scheduling and conflicts and hostile environments," he said. But "when you're president of the United States, you can pretty much say where you want to be and when."
Having taken the stage to the tune of the disco song "We Are Family," Mr. Kerry reached out to his audience by citing the black nationalist W. E. B. DuBois, the Bible and the poet Langston Hughes.
He suggested that the trademark theme of his running mate, Senator John Edwards - about "two Americas," one for the wealthy and the other for have-nots - could be traced to DuBois, who he said "called it a nation within a nation."
He also dipped into Scripture, quoting Matthew. "My faith teaches me, 'Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,' " he said. "Let me tell you where my heart is: it's with the middle class, who are the heart of this country. It's with the working families who built this country. It's with the veterans who saved this country. It's with the cops and firefighters and soldiers who protect this country. And it is with the children who are the future of this country."
Mr. Kerry also said Mr. Bush falsely accused him on Wednesday of wanting to raise taxes on working people. "This president just really seems to have a problem with the truth,'' he said. ""I don't think he even knows what working people really are.''
Mr. Kerry was well received, though William Ishman, president of the Las Vegas chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., said the senator still had a ways to go in courting black voters.
"You've got to believe in someone," Mr. Ishman said of his support for Mr. Kerry. "I believe it's new ground for him, and I think he's handling it well. He hasn't had that connectedness with the African-American community. But he'll be doing a soulful dance by the time this is all over."
Several others said Mr. Bush ought to have come. "He should be used to criticism - all of us are," said Ella Green, a retired banker from Allentown, Pa. "He would've been received the same as Kerry. He would not have been disrespected."
As Mr. Kerry spoke, the two campaigns also warred on the air over the black vote. On black radio stations, the Bush campaign began running a new advertisement that attacks Mr. Kerry for opposing a requirement that a parent be notified before a teenager could have an abortion.
The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, said that in consultation with the Congressional Black Caucus, it would revise its own ad campaign aimed at African-Americans, after some lawmakers called it uninspiring.
From Philadelphia, Mr. Kerry rode to suburban Lansdowne, Pa., for the first in a series of "front porch visits" with families, where he questioned his hosts and used their financial circumstances as a way to promote his domestic platform.
About 100 people listened outside the home of a local Democratic activist whose husband said they had been asked to take part because they met several criteria, among them that their house has a front porch.
As a heckler up the street shouted antiabortion slogans, the senator took several questions from invited guests, including Ryan Mattox, 10, who asked him what he would do "about the war."
Mr. Kerry first asked the boy a few questions, and learned that Ryan thought the war was evil "because millions of innocent people are being killed."
"What do you think about Saddam Hussein and the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction and things like that?" Mr. Kerry said. The boy said that was evil, too.
Mr. Kerry drew him out further, asking: "But you're not sure you would have gone to war to deal with it? You'd have tried to find some other way if you could have?"
"Yes," the boy said.
"Well,'' the senator replied, "that's a smart young man.''
Somebody wrote this in a blog today:
"The difference between Bush and Kerry is pretty clear to me.
Bush -- rank has its privileges
Kerry -- rank has its obligations"
It hit the nail right on the head for me and this is a perfect example.
Glassy
"The difference between Bush and Kerry is pretty clear to me.
Bush -- rank has its privileges
Kerry -- rank has its obligations"
Excellent!!
And the people of this country, even those who disagree with him (and have every right to do so) have a responsibility to be respectful even when disagreeing with him, *especially* if they expect him to respond positively to an invitation to visit them.
If the NAACP were truly interested in hearing what he had to say, they themselves should have been somewhat more respectful of his office if nothing else. While I have nothing to back it up other than my opinion, I feel that if the group had been less antagonistic in 2000 and so far this year, Bush may well have shown up. That he didn't is to a certain degree their own fault.
Respect works both ways. If the NAACP wanted him to speak before their group and offer his respect for the history, accomplishments, and perceived importance of their group, they should have accorded him some of the same respect they feel they themselves deserved. They didn't, and now they're whining about his lack of respect for them and their organization.
~mark~
Badly done.
Glassy
I wouldnt meet with the NAACP either after the vicious ads they ran in the 2000 election, and the recent comments by Julian Bond.
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If Bush were to avoid open criticism all the time, he could never leave his house. They feel Bush is not representing their interests, do you have information to the contrary that would say they're wrong?
This is going to be a great political season.
Kerry -- rank has its obligations>>
Your right, this is spot on. Rank has both privilege and obligation, it's easy to enjoy the privilege and easy to overlook the obligation. A wise man emphasises obligation.
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