Bush's Not-So-Big Tent

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

 

July 16, 2004

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Bush's Not-So-Big Tent

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.

 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company