Bush's Not-So-Big Tent
July 16, 2004
By BOB HERBERT
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://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/16/opinion/16HERB.html?ex=1090975525&ei=1&en=f3bea4a7d12c3cef
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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This administration continues to repeat the refrain that Bush has created 1.2 million jobs when in fact there is a net loss of jobs between 2 and 3 million.
