He Comes from Such A Nice Family, Too
The clueless Richard Cohen is predictably making the vapid cocktail party argument that Bush can't be a racist because some of his best cabinet members are black and because he thinks little black children are just adorable. Here's Cohen scolding those of us who suspect that all those black people down in Louisiana might be giving some red state Republicans the vapors:
We owe the poor our special consideration. We especially owe the black poor an appreciation of their plight and their dolorous history. But in general it was incompetence, not racism, that slowed the relief effort -- incompetence on the local and state levels, too, and incompetence on the part of black as well as white public officials. The search for racist scapegoats does the poor no good. This relief effort ought to start, above all, with some clear thinking.
How about simple minded bullshit? Apparently, one can't be racist and incompetent at the same time. Or racism is impossible if some of one's best friends are black and you are kind to little black children when you see them. And if some black people are incompetent then whites can't be racist. My goodness, just look at all the things that make it impossible for George W. Bush's administration to have even one racist bone in its collective body! You have to be out of your mind to think that George W. Bush isn't completely color blind.
Bush, in this case, was an equal opportunity bungler -- but ... 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.
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.
That nice man George W. Bush is being unfairly tarred with all that old racist nonsense when all he wanted was to reach out. Damn you Kanye West, you little stereotyping bastard.
But it isn't just Kanye, is it? The more than 90% of African Americans who vote for the Democrats also need to be schooled about what a nice friendly color blind party the GOP is. They seem to think that Republican racism still exists and that George W. Bush leads a party that could quite believably refuse to respond to a national disaster promptly because many of the victims were black. Somebody needs to clue them all in about how racism is dead and the Republicans have their best interests at heart. They don't seem to have gotten the memo.
It's guys like Richard Cohen, millionaire liberal beltway pundit who know the score. African Americans are the racists and it's the millionaire conservative Republicans who are being unfairly stereotyped. He knows this because he knows George Bush. Like when he wrote:
Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush."
He's got quite the insight, doesn't he?
Pay no attention to the fact that the modern Republican Party remains in the clutches of a strong minority of racists --- potentially as large a faction as their conservative Christian base, which likely overlaps it. Bush may not personally be a racist, I have no way of knowing what's "in his heart." But he is quite well aware of the fact that all the racists in the country who voted, voted for him.
And this is what that racist constituency thinks of Bush's famous choices of black faces for his cabinet:
Tokenism
to·ken·ism Pronunciation Key (tk-nzm)
n.
1. The policy of making only a perfunctory effort or symbolic gesture toward the accomplishment of a goal, such as racial integration.
2. The practice of hiring or appointing a token number of people from underrepresented groups in order to deflect criticism or comply with affirmative action rules: “Tokenism does not change stereotypes of social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse” (Mary Daly).
While Bush's tokenism is designed to soothe gullible dipshit white urbanites like Richard Cohen it also placates the racist base with winks and nods. Cohen may not know tokenism when he sees it, but African Americans, neo-confederates and general bigots certainly do.
Tokenism does not mean that the token is unqualified. Condi Rice and Colin Powell were completely qualified for their jobs. But their purpose in this administration was to soothe the white Republicans who are uncomfortable with overt racism into believing that the Party is no longer affiliated with such unpleasantness.
We know exactly what game they are playing by simply observing that in South Carolina, George Bush made a trek to the notoriously racist Bob Jones University to make sure that certain people understood that his happy talk about Condi and compassionate conservatism wasn't anything they had to worry about. They needed to make sure they stopped John McCain dead in his tracks and they did --- with a purely racist appeal that included some very nasty stuff about his having a black daughter. This is the line they walk. The majority in this country are no longer comfortable with overt racism and frowns upon those who embrace it openly. But it is completely absurd to think that it has been eradicated or that the leader of the Republican Party rejects it. He can't reject it, even if he wants to. Racists are a significant part of his constituency.
As to whether it affected the hurricane response, it's highly unlikely that anyone sitting in Washington said, "take your time Brownie, it's just a bunch o' negroes." I don't know why people persist in thinking that this must work on the most obvious level in order to be true. It is, as I've written, far more likely that the response was delayed because the authorities in New Orleans at all levels held back out of fear of a black mob.
It's what happens going forward that will really show how the lines are drawn. Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, after all, are red states. (Louisiana is only ever Democratic by dint of the African Americans in New Orleans --- a problem that may have been solved by Katrina if Karl Rove has his way. ) These are his people and it's the very heart of the Republican south; you had better bet that Haley Barbour expects him to deliver the goods. But he also has to be careful that this federal money isn't seen as going to blacks at the expense of whites. So, they are sending signals, loud and clear, to anyone who's paying attention.
For instance, the Section 8 issue. It seems that many Washington types still harbor some idea that if only the government would beef up Section 8 money all these displaced people in New Orleans could find apartments and there wouldn't have to be any Bushville trailer parks built. And it is a nice thought. However, nobody wants to admit why it isn't being pushed despite it's long history of bipartisan support. It isn't a big guvmint liberal program after all. It's a voucher program, used in the private sector.
The reason the Bush administration is not pushing this is two-fold. The first, of course, is that the contracts for the Bushvilles are going to be very lucrative and Brownie's bud Joe Allbaugh needs to deliver some love to his employers. The other is that Karl Rove knows very well that many people in the region are very hostile to the idea of all these black New Orleanians moving into their neighborhoods. Section 8 is one of those neat idealistic conservative ideas that comes smack up against long term racist attitudes. It's all well and good in theory, but when it comes to living next door to these displaced victims, a lot of southern Republicans hit their limits. Yet these people have to live somewhere, hence the segregated Bushville trailer parks that will serve everyone's needs very well --- except, of course, the black citizens of New Orleans who have no place else to go.
One might also ask why are they making a show of eliminating affirmative action plans? It's just a three month temporary exemption for certain small firms that have never worked for the feds before, yet the headlines are screaming. Why would they hit the hornets nest at a time like this for something so insignificant? Plenty of work is going to be available so there is no serious competition for jobs. But it does make a serious statement, doesn't it, and one that seems inexplicable in light of the fact that there are so many poor black people who need jobs. Unless, of course, it's to placate a base that wants federal money but believes that blacks are always the beneficiaries instead of them. This says that Bush is making sure the money is going to the "right" people --- the ones who really deserve the jobs.
Richard Cohen does not want to believe that a nice well-educated baby boomer from a good family can be a racist. And when he sees that Bush can sit in the same room with the extremely well educated, accomplished Condi and Colin, he is assured that it is impossible for him to be one. But even if that were true, Richard Cohen needs to open his eyes and see that the Republican party's base contains a significant faction of racists who must be catered to by the well bred son of the white pompadoured lady, Barbara Bush. It's unpleasant. I understand that. But unless liberals at least learn to read the language these people are speaking we are never going to be able to combat it.
If we want to break the electoral hold the Republicans have on the south we had better recognise that listening to Mudcat Saunders wax on about fast cars and big guns doesn't really address the problem. Bill Clinton had a good ear for this kind of thing and was able to make enough inroads in the south to eke out two wins in two three person races. But he was a very talented fellow who was able to walk a fine line, drawling a middle of the road code that leaned heavily on "welfare reform" and "putting 100,000 cops on the streets" to convince certain wafflers that he felt their pain. (Of course, his FEMA would have done a much better job of managing the recovery so perhaps he could have succesfully mitigated the knee jerk racist recoil against big guvmint.)
We will never get there as long as anyone on the planet thinks that the likes of Richard Cohen speak for the Democrats. As I've said before, guys like Cohen are what's killing us. Here is exhibit #567.
.