Bush Isn’t Racist About Hurricane Katrina…
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in General Politics, Hurricane Katrina…but one journalist certainly thinks he may be incompetent…
At least that’s what Richard Cohen says in an editorial in the LA Times recently.
If you told me that George W. Bush is a dummy, I would argue with you but understand why you thought so: all those idiotic statements. But if you told me, as some have been implying, that Bush is a racist or that he doesn’t care about black people, I would not only say that you’re wrong but add, “Not the George Bush I know.”Of course, I don’t know George Bush personally. But in his first presidential campaign, I traveled with him and tried, as he might say, to look into his heart. Conveniently enough, he sometimes wears it on his sleeve — never more so, as I discovered, than when he talks about poor kids and racial and ethnic minorities. His feelings for them — especially for poor kids — are genuine. This is what I believed then and this — his incompetent performance regarding Hurricane Katrina notwithstanding — is what I believe now.
Others believe differently. The most non-nuanced statements came from the rapper Kanye West. Appearing on an NBC special to raise money for flood victims, West attributed the slow recovery effort not to ineptitude but to the fact that “most of the people are black.” He followed that up a moment later with: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” NBC snipped that comment from its West Coast feed, but no matter: West was clearly not speaking only for himself. National polls showed a racial divide in appraising how the government did after Katrina. Blacks by and large thought race played a role in the laggard relief effort.
Personally I think the charges against Bush are too harsh. I certainly don’t think Kanye’s statements are true, and I don’t believe Barbara Bush’s statements about Hurricane Katrina survivors reflects GWB’s views.
And furthermore…
But Bush is not cut from that cloth. He is a contemporary Republican, a person of another generation who, you may have noticed, has a black woman as secretary of state and had a black man before her. Under him, the GOP began an outreach to black Americans, and unless the Democrats wake up it will ultimately succeed. As Karl Rove well knows, all he has to do is pick up a small percentage of the black vote and he ends the current 50-50 electoral split. Bush, who won an impressive 27 percent of the black vote in his reelection bid for Texas governor, could have been the man to do this. His task is a lot harder now.
Bush’s task is VERY hard, but then again…that’s the President’s job.
I sincerely hope he succeeds.
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