Civil Rights & Estate Taxes

George Bush recently broke his longstanding boycott of the NAACP when he recently appeared before the group, as detailed by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post, Deference Prevails Over Hostility. See also, The Daily Sandwich, Bush heckled during NAACP speech.

Emphasizing the need for the Republican Party to "change its relationship" with the black community, Bush proceeded to explain just how he would do that -- by promoting the repeal of the estate tax as an issue the NAACP could adopt as a cause. Clearly, this could be an excellent way to unite Republicans and blacks. Unfortunately, as noted by Think Progress, Bush Uses NAACP Speech To Promote Estate Tax Repeal, Doesn’t Utter The Word ‘Poverty’:

President Bush’s “death tax” pitch demonstrates his stunning disconnect from the African-American community. According to an American Progress analysis, just 59 African-Americans will pay the estate tax this year, and that number will drop to 33 in 2009.

Meanwhile, as of 2004, 24.7 percent of African-Americans lived under the poverty line (up from 22.7 in 2001) — that’s more than 9 million people. The number of times Bush mentioned “poverty” in his speech: 0. (Emphasis added).

(Via The Carpetbagger Report)

Obviously, despite his bad rap, Bush is interested in minorities. He's just misunderstood. He's interested in helping the true minorities in the black community -- ultra-rich black people. That's the only possible explanation for his comments. Well, it's either that or he really is an ass.

Dick Polman also writes about the speech in his blog, American Debate, Bush and the NAACP: a fundamental disconnect:

And it’s hard to imagine that Bush made many converts when he said that blacks should join him in his quest to eliminate the federal estate tax -- a pet GOP issue of greatest interest to rich white people who want to pass on their inheritances, and thus an issue that touches the lives of a minute fraction of black people. Indeed, there was predictably not a line in his speech about poverty, or, more specifically, about the latest Census Bureau figures which show that, during the first four years of his presidency, the percentage of blacks living below the poverty line jumped from 22.7 to 24.7, an increase of nine million.

There’s a lot more that can be said about what he didn’t say -- such as the fact that he opposes an increase in the minimum wage, and that he opposes expansion of the earned-income tax credit, a longstanding program that supplements low-wage incomes -- but I was most interested in something that he did say. One quick line, during the first 60 seconds:

“I come from a family committed to civil rights.”

That, really, is the crux of the matter. Yesterday’s address wasn’t just about trying to woo some black voters away from the Democrats party in the runup to the ’06 elections. It was, more importantly, the latest attempt (among countless attempts going back several generations) by a Bush family member to win over the black community simply by insisting that he is personally pure of heart. The Bushes have long sought to trumpet their good intentions, in the hopes that this would translate into mass black political support. The effort has never worked, but they keep trying anyway.

* * * *

The problem, however, is that most black voters continue to judge politicians not on their good intentions, or whether their family has long been “committed to civil rights,” but on how they actually perform. President Bush may have admitted yesterday that he considered it “a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historic ties with the African American community,” but the fact is that the modern GOP over the past three decades has successfully wooed white voters with race-coded messages about crime, welfare, and job competition.

Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” was specifically designed to woo whites who couldn’t abide the northern Democratic-led crusades for desegregation and voting rights. The plan worked, and the GOP's dominance below the Mason-Dixon line is the result. Variations on the plan have worked ever since.

* * * *

All told, it’s a cinch bet that Bush’s NAACP listeners care more about policy and performance than testaments to a family’s personal decency. As black politics expert David Bositis, an occasional GOP adviser on minority issues, told me right after the Katrina debacle, “Republicans always think that if they make some small (outreach) gestures, that African Americans will applaud their good intentions. They still don’t understand that African Americans would look at (the record) and conclude, ‘Those people really don’t like us.’"

As a counterbalance to Bush, there's the fiery oratory of Dick Gregory at the NAACP convention, see African-American Political Opinion, Why Bush Only Gave the Second Most/Least Believable Speech at the NAACP Convention.

Citing a Boston Globe article, Civil rights hiring shifted in Bush era, All Spin Zone provides a pertinent example of actions speaking louder than words, in Oh Pity the Poor White Christian Male!. The piece notes the shift in hiring by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice under the Bush Administration. For example:

Jon Greenbaum , who was a career attorney in the voting rights section from 1997 to 2003, said that since the hiring change, candidates with conservative ties have had an advantage.

``The clear emphasis has been to hire individuals with conservative credentials," he said. ``If anything, a civil rights background is considered a liability."

The result?

At the same time, the kinds of cases the Civil Rights Division is bringing have undergone a shift. The division is bringing fewer voting rights and employment cases involving systematic discrimination against African-Americans, and more alleging reverse discrimination against whites and religious discrimination against Christians.

``There has been a sea change in the types of cases brought by the division, and that is not likely to change in a new administration because they are hiring people who don't have an expressed interest in traditional civil rights enforcement," said Richard Ugelow . . . . (Emphasis added).

Right. Well, as Polman noted and Kayne West remarked after Katrina hit New Orleans, "Help," cuz "George Bush does not care about Black People".

Tags: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Bush, NAACP