Bush's Not-So-Big Tent

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Registered: 03-25-2003
Bush's Not-So-Big Tent
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Fri, 07-16-2004 - 3:17am
Bush's Not-So-Big Tent

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.

http://nytimes.com/2004/07/16/opinion/16HERB.html?hp

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2004
Mon, 07-19-2004 - 11:56am
You actually find fault with Bush even after the James Byrd, Jr. ad that the NAACP ran during the 2000 elections, and the recent comments by Julian Bond?????

The NAACP is not the same organization it once was. The national leadership is out to put forth its own political agenda, and at least appears to have less interest in putting forth the ideas and views of the regional and local chapters.

I hold Julian Bond more to task than I do Mfume.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2004
Mon, 07-19-2004 - 11:57am
I think that the national leadership are the ones that should be taken to task, without condemning the entire membership.
Avatar for car_al
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Registered: 03-25-2003
Mon, 07-19-2004 - 12:36pm
Actually what Herbert said was, “George W. Bush is on track to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs”. If there is a surge in employment during the next five months, then that won’t be the case.

The point he was making by criticizing the president’s non-attendance at any N.A.A.C.P. convention was as he stated:

“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.”

C

Avatar for car_al
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Registered: 03-25-2003
Mon, 07-19-2004 - 12:43pm
IMO it was a mistake on the president's part to not meet with them.

C




Edited 7/19/2004 4:11 pm ET ET by car_al

Avatar for car_al
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Registered: 03-25-2003
Mon, 07-19-2004 - 12:54pm
<>

The following article makes it clear that the Democrats are preparing for just that scenario.

C

July 19, 2004

Kerry Building Legal Network for Vote Fights

By David M. Halbfinger

Mindful of the election problems in Florida four years ago, aides to Senator John Kerry , the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, say his campaign is putting together a far more intricate set of legal safeguards than any presidential candidate before him to monitor the election.

Aides to Mr. Kerry say the campaign is taking the unusual step of setting up a nationwide legal network under its own umbrella, rather than relying, as in the past, on lawyers associated with state Democratic parties. The aides said they were recruiting people based on their skills as litigators and election lawyers, rather than rewarding political connections or big donors.

Lawyers for the campaign are gathering intelligence and preparing litigation over the ballot machines being used and the rules concerning how voters will be registered or their votes disqualified. In some cases, the lawyers are compiling dossiers on the people involved and their track records on enforcing voting rights. The disputed 2000 presidential election remains a fresh wound for Democrats, and Mr. Kerry has been referring to it on the stump while assuring his audiences that he will not let this year's election be a repeat of the 2000 vote.

"A million African-Americans disenfranchised in the last election," he said at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Philadelphia on Thursday. "Well, we're not just going to sit there and wait for it to happen. On Election Day in your cities, my campaign will provide teams of election observers and lawyers to monitor elections, and we will enforce the law."

The Kerry campaign's legal efforts are hardly occurring in a vacuum.

The Bush-Cheney campaign says it will have party lawyers in every state, covering 30,000 precincts. An affiliated group, the Republican National Lawyers Association, held a two-day training session in Milwaukee over the weekend on "how to promote ballot access to all qualified voters," according to the group's Web site.

Lawyers for nonpartisan advocacy groups conducting voter registration drives are also working behind the scenes and in court to ensure that their new registrants make it onto the rolls and that their ballots are counted.

But it is the campaign of Mr. Kerry that appears to be doing the most to apply lessons from the Florida recount and that is adopting the more fiercely partisan posture in the early going.

Its plans include setting up SWAT teams of specially trained lawyers, spokesmen and political experts to swoop into any state where a recount could be needed.

"The U.S. has had a policy of being able to fight two regional conflicts and still defend the homeland," said Marc E. Elias, the Kerry campaign's general counsel. "We want to be able to fight five statewide recounts and still have resources available to the campaign."

The lessons of Florida include fairly mundane ones. Democratic lawyers said, for example, that they had such a hard time obtaining office space in Tallahassee, presumably because landlords in the state capital feared antagonizing Gov. Jeb Bush, a Republican and brother of President Bush .

This time, Kerry aides say, they are recruiting not only specialists in election law who work in small law firms or alone, but also litigators at large firms in every state who have the resources and office space to support a long-term, large-scale and pro bono recount operation.

"We don't want a situation where we wake up the next day and are scrambling to think of what our legal team looks like," Mr. Elias said.

The Kerry campaign has already enlisted lead lawyers in all 50 states, and those lawyers are recruiting lawyers at the county and the precinct level.

"It's our intention to have lawyers in one fashion or another covering all of Iowa's 99 counties," said Brent Appel, the Kerry lawyer in Des Moines.

Kerry aides say the campaign has set up a national steering committee with task forces tackling different issues: one on ballot machines, another on voter education, and a third on absentee, early, and military voting, to name a few..

At the Democratic convention next week in Boston, they say, any lawyers interested in volunteering will be offered training. And dozens of the lawyers already recruited by the Kerry organization will hold two days of intensive meetings to finalize strategy, tactics and assignments.

Democrats say they learned from the Florida vote, and from the Supreme Court rulings that arose from it, that the most important legal battles are those fought before Election Day, over how election laws are to be carried out, who is allowed to register and who will be allowed to vote.

Robert Bauer, a partner of Mr. Elias's who is overseeing the Kerry legal effort, took a historical view of what he called "warfare over the electoral franchise." The first phase, he said, concerned who was entitled to vote and included the all-white primary, literacy tests and poll taxes that were eliminated in the mid-20th century. The second phase was fought largely over the dilution of the vote along racial lines and used the Voting Rights Act, he said.

"Now, we're into a third phase, that was exemplified by Bush-Gore, of franchise restrictions that are accomplished through manipulations of the elections administration process or of the law," Mr. Bauer said. "It's about people who somehow can't register, or can't vote, or their vote isn't counted, and it's done not frontally, but through legal manipulations."

Those can include the seemingly picayune. In Minnesota, a lawyer for the Kerry campaign is protesting a ruling by the secretary of state — Mary Kiffmeyer, a Republican — that every registrant must provide identification that matches "with certainty" a state database containing registered voters' names, birthdates and driver's license numbers or partial Social Security numbers. "It doesn't take into account a transposition of a number by a data-entry person," said Jim Rubenstein, the Kerry lawyer in Minneapolis. In an interview, Ms. Kiffmeyer said local officials would have the discretion to overlook an obvious typographical error.

Republicans are not trumpeting their efforts nearly as much, though Benjamin Ginsberg, the national counsel for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said he expected lawyers to cover 30,000 precincts on Election Day.

He noted that the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, had been rebuffed by his Democratic counterpart when he proposed recently that the two parties agree on a list of pivotal precincts and send bipartisan pairs of lawyers to monitor them. "Obviously the goal in this is to have every valid vote counted," Mr. Ginsberg said, "and to not allow the sort of rhetorical overkill, on either intimidation or fraud, to be used in a tainted fashion to interfere with the get-out-the-vote operation."

Mr. Bauer of the Kerry campaign said: "There's not much interest in depending on Republican agents to police the polls."

Apart from the two campaigns, a host of advocacy and civil-rights groups, which often act in parallel with Democrats when it comes to expanding ballot access, are stepping up their own election-law efforts this year.

America's Families United, a racial-justice advocacy group that is registering thousands of people, has set up a "voter protection project" to ensure that its new registrants make it onto the rolls, by comparing each new voter list to its own list. Penda D. Hair, the project director, said her goal was to recruit 6,000 lawyers in 20 states who could challenge registrars when they reject applications improperly.

In South Dakota, Native American officials are suing for clarification of new election rules. In 2002, they say, a dramatic increase in voting by tribal members — who often lack driver's licenses or other accepted forms of picture identification — made the difference in the Senate race that Tim Johnson won by fewer than 600 votes. The state has since revised its identification rules, and in the special Congressional election there last month, Native Americans reported widespread discrepancies in the application of the rules, said Jacqueline Johnson, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians.

In some places, Ms. Johnson said, signs went up at polling places warning, "No I.D., no vote," even though the law allows voters to sign an affidavit if they do not have valid identification. Elsewhere, she said, people living as far as 60 miles from polling places were sent home to get identification, and partisan poll watchers sometimes insisted that voters instead fill out provisional ballots. Ms. Johnson said such ballots were more likely to be disqualified on challenges.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, meanwhile, has made a Freedom of Information Act request to review the Justice Department's communications to local and state election authorities during this election cycle. "We're being proactive, trying to head off any problems at the pass," said Nancy Zirkin, the conference's deputy director.


http://nytimes.com/2004/07/19/politics/campaign/19VOTE.html?hp

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Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 07-19-2004 - 3:39pm
Glad they're being pro-active. The 2000 election was such an aweful mess.
cl-Libraone~

 


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Registered: 04-16-2003
Mon, 07-19-2004 - 5:10pm
<< his campaign is putting together a far more intricate set of legal safeguards than any presidential candidate before him to monitor the election.>>

On one level I'm glad for the preparation, on another level I'm sad that ethics has so declined that this is necessary.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2004
Mon, 07-19-2004 - 9:15pm
If it were not for the fact that Julian Bond would be in attendence I think Bush should have gone, but Bond is a divisive racist who is totally out of his mind.

I think that Mfume gets his points across without being so extreme.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-27-2003
Mon, 07-19-2004 - 10:30pm
I agree with that. Mr Bush needs to understand that he is the president of all of the people not just the ones that agree with him.
iVillage Member
Registered: 07-02-2004
Tue, 07-20-2004 - 1:39pm
--

You actually find fault with Bush even after the James Byrd, Jr. ad that the NAACP ran during the 2000 elections, and the recent comments by Julian Bond?????

--

It's hardly a matter of 'Fault'

He is the President of the United States. That says it all. He's either unwilling, or incapable of taking the high-road.

Of course, less than 10% of Americans of color are expected to vote for him. But i guess we're to believe that has nothing to do with the current rift.

That's one thing you can hand to the Bush Administration, more Ko-inky-dinks than you can shake a stick at.