After 5 years of failing to acknowledge the existence of the organization, "President" Bush has decided to address the national convention of the NAACP today. When asked why Bush had suddenly decided the group was worthy of his time, White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters that "there's a moment of opportunity here," and that Bush "has had a career that reflects a strong committment to civil rights."

 

Hey, stop laughing. Remember, when a reporter asked him about his commitment to civil rights a few years ago, he testily responded: "Let me see. There I was sitting around the table with foreign leaders looking at Colin Powell and Condi Rice," before flashing a 'what-an-absurd-question' look across his face.

 

OK, you can laugh now.

 

That the GOP's top elected official thinks that "looking" at black people is testament to some sort of committment to civil rights explains why, as a recent New York Times article points out, that party's efforts to woo black voters has been a long-term failure of colossal proportions. Bush, as we all know by now, is of the belief that leadership is composed mostly of being photographed in the presence of certain people or giant signs trumpeting the triumphant slogan du jour. Remember that the man spent more time in his first term being seen surrounded by black children than a public school teacher on the south side of Chicago. (Notice he doesn't do that any more? Probably because after hurricane Katrina, you couldn't gather a crowd of black kids that close to Bush without one of them wanting to cut him.)

 

So in his speech before the NAACP (which was delivered in a strange shouting mode, sort of a lame impersonation of a black preacher), Bush treated the group to a brief review of the history of American discrimination against blacks. He made the inevitable, and by now completely pointless, reference to Republicans as the "Party of Lincoln." He bragged about increases in college grants and his efforts to fight what he famously refers to as "the soft bigotry of low expectations" -- those efforts being standardized testing and school vouchers.

 

He spoke on his efforts to help people "become owners. Own something. Something to call your own," which basically involved helping some  (undefined) people with home down payments and with understanding mortgage documents.

 

Apparently figuring that the NAACP would be impressed by whichever blacks he could name check, he cited Bob Johnson -- best-known for becoming a billionaire by endlessly looping video of black girls shaking their assses in bikinis on BET (he was an owner, who owned the network, something to call his own) -- as a friend. He also tossed out Condi Rice's name, because her father struggled to register to vote.

 

After exhausting the list of prominent blacks he's close to, he went on to talk about the things he wanted to do: to see blacks own their own businesses, to see blacks live in stronger communities, to see America fight AIDS in Africa (it's not clear why, after five years as president, with the Congress run by his own party, he still has to "want" these things).

 

And he closed it out with a call for Congress to renew the Voting Rights Act (which it is already halfway through doing) so he can sign it soon. This was a far cry from last year, when he pleaded ignorance on the status of the Voting Rights Act after members of the Congressional Black Caucus had requested he proactively lead in getting it renewed. It's likely that in the interim, Karl Rove explained to him that as long as Bush appointees run the Justice Department, and as long as Bush partisans run the US Supreme Court, nothing important in the act will be enforced anyway, so its safe for him to push for its renewal.

 

We doubt even Mr. Bush is dumb enough to think that these few words can paper over the numerous slights he has delivered to blacks in America and around the world during his presidency -- for example, his opposition to affirmative action (which, in classic rub-their-faces-in-it style, he waited until Martin Luther King's birthday to announce); his non-response to Katrina; his ascendancy to the White House via blocked and/or uncounted votes of African-Americans in Florida in November of 2000; his sponsoring the removal of the democratically-elected president of Haiti, which lead to years of chaos and bloodshed there; his doing nothing while black Sudanese are being liquidated in an astonishing round of genocide. No, this was but the latest in a string of burlesque performances by Bush designed to titilate white swing/independent/moderate voters with images of the allegedly "new" -- meaning not racist -- GOP.

 

Bush has been pulling these stunts since even before he entered the White House. It was during the 2000 campaign that his Republican National Convention turned into a minstrel show featuring break dancers, R&B singers, and all 6 of the prominent black Republicans in the US. Nobody then thought for a second that the four-day blackface exhibition was anything more than an unconvincing effort to recast the image of the Republican Party with respect to race-related issues. Similarly, nobody should believe that today's appearance is anything more than a desperate attempt to squeeze out a few more votes for his GOP congressmen and women this November.

 

Republicans have tried to exploit the African-American relationship with the Christian church to win votes (gay marraige, "faith-based" funding), have tried to appeal to wealthy and business-class blacks to win votes (repeal of the "death tax"), and have tried to steal the votes of those they could not win over. But for a leader as monumentally unpopular among blacks as Bush is to finally bite the bullet and address the nationa's oldest civil rights organization, the GOP must be extremely nervous about its prospects this November.

 

Perhaps if they drop the cheap stunts and start supporting policies that address the needs of the mass of African-Americans, maybe they'll get somewhere. Otherwise, it remains for them a mission impossible.

 

Knowledge is Power

©2006 The Intelligence Squad

before Election Day

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