[Mb-civic] Incompetence, Not Racism - Richard Cohen - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Incompetence, Not Racism

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, September 20, 2005; Page A23

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.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, functionally unemployed all these years, put it a 
bit differently. Appearing Sunday on local New York television, he 
didn't exactly say that Bush was indifferent to the plight of New 
Orleans's poor blacks, but he did say this about Bush: "One has to 
suspect why he had such delayed compassion." Sharpton did point out, as 
Bill Clinton did in his Sunday TV appearances, that in New Orleans, poor 
and black are largely synonymous, but still the damage was done: George 
Bush is no friend of black people.

I have two problems with all this. The first is not just that it's 
unfair -- Bush, in this case, was an equal opportunity bungler -- but 
that it rests on a stereotype: Republicans tend to wear lime green pants 
in the summer and dislike black people all year round. There was more 
than a little truth to this at one time. The GOP, after all, became a 
safe haven for Southern bigots who fled the Democratic Party (as Lyndon 
Johnson knew they would) in the civil rights era. The fight for the 
rights of blacks turned Dixie as Republican as it once was Democratic. 
To its everlasting shame, the GOP continues to benefit from raw bigotry.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/19/AR2005091901298.html
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