Julian Bond NAACP chairman

If there is any constituency in America to which the Bush administration needs to build bridges, it is the African-American community. Yet when the opportunity presented itself this week - in the form of an invitation for the president to attend the 92nd annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - Bush and his aides seemed to go out of their way to burn what bridges remained.

Unlike past Republican presidents, Bush has made little effort to reach out to mainstream African-American leaders and organizations. Six months into his term, the president has yet to meet with NAACP Chairman Julian Bond or with NAACP President Kweisi Mfume. So limited has been the Bush administration's involvement with the civil rights organization that White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, in a bizarre gaffe, mistakenly announced to the White House press corps this week that Mfume was no longer the NAACP's president.

Fleischer's lapse makes Bush's decision to skip a chance to address the NAACP - during a week when newspapers were filled with photographs of the president golfing - all the more bizarre. And troubling.

Acceptance of the NAACP's invitation would have given Bush a chance to make real his "president-of-all-the-people" rhetoric, and the move would have posed minimal risk for him. Despite his disagreements with the group and its members on a host of issues, Bush would have been accorded a respectful response.

The NAACP has always welcomed Republican speakers - there was a time when members of the party of Lincoln were more frequent guests at the podium than members of a Democratic Party that harbored within its ranks segregationists such Strom Thurmond. Even in the worst days of the Reagan-Bush era, former Health and Human Services Secretary Jack Kemp earned warm applause for recognizing the need to reach out to all Americans. Bush himself was accorded a respectful response when he appeared at last year's NAACP convention.

Last year, of course, Bush was a candidate.

This year, he is the president. And, instead of a personal appearance, Bush dispatched only a cursory taped message to a convention attended by 4,800 of the nation's most active African-American leaders. The taped statement from Bush, an opponent of affirmative action, began by ticking off the names of his African-American appointees. The president had to reach back to the 19th century for the names of Republicans with sound civil rights credentials, however. "We must continue our work to make sure that my party keeps faith with the memory of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass," he declared.

No one disagreed that work on this front was necessary. Mfume put Bush's remarks in perspective when he said, "I welcome the president's words, but I will welcome more his actions."

It is the rhetoric-versus-record gap that has long vexed Bush's relations with the African-American community.

Bush's "compassionate conservative" rhetoric was always a tough sell among voters who have witnessed the "transformation" of people like Thurmond and Jesse Helms from "segregationists" into "conservatives." As Mfume told the 2001 NAACP convention, "For over a year we've heard about compassionate conservatism. Wouldn't it be wonderful if every conservative was compassionate?"

An awareness that this was not the case made the packing of the Republican Party's "rainbow convention" of 2000 seem a comic exercise in style over substance. Yes, Bush had a handful of black backers, as all Republicans do. But Bush's record was that of a southern governor who signed death warrants without concern for evidence of racial bias; who refused to support new hate crime protections even after white racists dragged a black man to his death in a Texas town; and whose vapid references to a "colorblind" America failed to acknowledge an economic apartheid that denies children with black skin equal access to nutrition, health care and education.

No wonder, then, that African-American voters rejected the Republican's candidacy by a 9-1 margin nationally. Even in the face of that dramatic defeat, it was only after the election that the crisis in relations between Bush and the black community exploded.

It was then that the candidate and his supporters battled to prevent a recount of votes in Florida - where 54 percent of discarded ballots came from majority-minority precincts. Revelations about the purging of voter rolls, police stops outside polling places and harassment of Creole-speaking Haitian immigrants all added to the sense that, in the rush to a Bush presidency, African-American voters were casually disenfranchised - a reality well documented in the report of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission on the Florida fiasco.

Once in office, Bush nominated John Ashcroft and Gale Norton, both on-the-record apologists for the Confederacy, to serve, respectively, as attorney general and interior secretary. It was a reference to those nominations that illustrated just how deep the divide between African-Americans and the Bush White House has grown. At this week's NAACP convention, Bond, a veteran of the civil rights struggles in which self-proclaimed "Sons of the Confederacy" loosed police dogs on student demonstrators, decried Bush for having "chosen Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection."

That brought a rebuke from the hapless Fleischer, the White House spokesman who informed reporters that "remarks like that reference to canines were not made under Kweisi Mfume's leadership, when Kweisi Mfume was president of the NAACP."

Of course, Mfume is still president of the NAACP. He was the man who dispatched the invitation for Bush to address the convention.

Perhaps Fleischer would have known a little more about the NAACP if Bush had ever bothered to meet with Mfume and Bond - or if the president had taken time from his golfing to attend this year's NAACP convention.

Copyright 2001 The Capital Times

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