Randy Davis
New member
The George W. Bush minority outreach tour
Bush reaches out to Latino and black voters in his latest campaign swing.
By Jake Tapper
June 27, 2000
(Salon.com) - Texas Gov. George W. Bush kicked off an unofficial "minority outreach week" Monday with more than just more photo ops.
Monday, at the very least, brought a surreal hodgepodge of tangible proposals that legitimately break from the Republican Party's less-than-inclusive past, and presented some odd moments that illustrate how tough it is for a conservative Republican to negotiate racial terrain.
Bush kicked off the day with a speech to the League of Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, which has publicly slammed Bush on several occasions.
Last year LULAC president Enrique "Rick" Dovalina was quoted in the Austin American-Statesman saying that members of his organization were "very disappointed with the way [Bush was] parading around with taco politics. He doesn't have the Hispanic vote sewn up just because he's speaking Spanish."
The conservative politics of the second group Bush spoke to on Monday, the Congress on Racial Equality, or CORE, has led critics to question how representative it is of the African-American community.
From its beginnings in the 1940s leading the charge on integration, CORE has morphed into something else entirely under the leadership of national chairman Roy Innis.
Innis is a member of the National Rifle Association, testified in favor of the Supreme Court confirmation of Judge Robert Bork and has spoken out in favor of "subway vigilante" Bernhard Goetz.
In 1988 he got into two physical tussles on TV -- one with the Rev. Al Sharpton on Morton Downey Jr.'s television show, and another with a young skinhead on "Geraldo." Innis and his son, Fox News Channel talking head/CORE spokesman Niger Innis, have endorsed Alan Keyes for president.
One year ago, Bush was criticized for skipping conventions of not only LULAC, but the National Council of La Raza -- which met in Houston -- and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. La Raza conference attendees wore lapel stickers reading "Where's George?"
This year, Bush chose the LULAC convention to announce his plan to split the Immigration and Naturalization Service, an agency as hated among many Latinos as the Internal Revenue Service.
They won't have to accessorize with "Where's George?" stickers this year; the La Raza convention in California next week is the third stop on Bush's unofficial minority-themed swing.
In Bush's quest to put an inclusive face on the Republican Party, he has made moves both courageous and craven. As governor he supported some limited moves to make up for healthcare and food-stamp dollars that the federal government cut off from the children of illegal immigrants.
On a more symbolic basis, during the South Carolina primary -- even as his surrogates and allies played ugly racial politics -- Bush would wax inclusive, exhorting to lily-white conservative audiences that "family values don't end at the Rio Grande River."
Quite boldly, and counter-intuitively, he would make a point of telling these crowds that many illegal immigrants cross the border so that they can feed their families.
Evil Dubya, on the other hand, seemed to have a high tolerance for various racial Cro-Magnons. Though he said that he opposed the ban on interracial dating at fundamentalist Bob Jones University, his first stop in his South Carolina primary campaign, he didn't condemn it until after a reporter asked him about it, and only after he had spoken there.
For a spell he refused to condemn a South Carolina state senator who -- in the heat of the state controversy about the Confederate flag - called the NAACP "the national association of retarded people."
And yet, long before that, Bush was boldly going where few Republicans had gone before, stepping into several inner-city neighborhoods and even appearing at a charter school in Harlem alongside the Rev. Floyd Flake.
Flake, a leader in the school-choice movement who was raised in Houston, went so far last fall as to call Bush his "homeboy."
But as the Washington Post's Terry Neal pointed out in a story earlier this month, after that visit, Flake "never heard from Bush or his campaign again ... Today, Flake's supporters in New York accuse Bush of, essentially, using him as a political prop." Flake eventually endorsed Vice President Al Gore.
Thus it's tough to gauge how much of it is substance and how much is just a naked appeal for votes -- not necessarily for minority voters, but for white swing voters who like the idea of Bush caring about blacks and Latinos.
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com
Bush reaches out to Latino and black voters in his latest campaign swing.
By Jake Tapper
June 27, 2000
(Salon.com) - Texas Gov. George W. Bush kicked off an unofficial "minority outreach week" Monday with more than just more photo ops.
Monday, at the very least, brought a surreal hodgepodge of tangible proposals that legitimately break from the Republican Party's less-than-inclusive past, and presented some odd moments that illustrate how tough it is for a conservative Republican to negotiate racial terrain.
Bush kicked off the day with a speech to the League of Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, which has publicly slammed Bush on several occasions.
Last year LULAC president Enrique "Rick" Dovalina was quoted in the Austin American-Statesman saying that members of his organization were "very disappointed with the way [Bush was] parading around with taco politics. He doesn't have the Hispanic vote sewn up just because he's speaking Spanish."
The conservative politics of the second group Bush spoke to on Monday, the Congress on Racial Equality, or CORE, has led critics to question how representative it is of the African-American community.
From its beginnings in the 1940s leading the charge on integration, CORE has morphed into something else entirely under the leadership of national chairman Roy Innis.
Innis is a member of the National Rifle Association, testified in favor of the Supreme Court confirmation of Judge Robert Bork and has spoken out in favor of "subway vigilante" Bernhard Goetz.
In 1988 he got into two physical tussles on TV -- one with the Rev. Al Sharpton on Morton Downey Jr.'s television show, and another with a young skinhead on "Geraldo." Innis and his son, Fox News Channel talking head/CORE spokesman Niger Innis, have endorsed Alan Keyes for president.
One year ago, Bush was criticized for skipping conventions of not only LULAC, but the National Council of La Raza -- which met in Houston -- and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. La Raza conference attendees wore lapel stickers reading "Where's George?"
This year, Bush chose the LULAC convention to announce his plan to split the Immigration and Naturalization Service, an agency as hated among many Latinos as the Internal Revenue Service.
They won't have to accessorize with "Where's George?" stickers this year; the La Raza convention in California next week is the third stop on Bush's unofficial minority-themed swing.
In Bush's quest to put an inclusive face on the Republican Party, he has made moves both courageous and craven. As governor he supported some limited moves to make up for healthcare and food-stamp dollars that the federal government cut off from the children of illegal immigrants.
On a more symbolic basis, during the South Carolina primary -- even as his surrogates and allies played ugly racial politics -- Bush would wax inclusive, exhorting to lily-white conservative audiences that "family values don't end at the Rio Grande River."
Quite boldly, and counter-intuitively, he would make a point of telling these crowds that many illegal immigrants cross the border so that they can feed their families.
Evil Dubya, on the other hand, seemed to have a high tolerance for various racial Cro-Magnons. Though he said that he opposed the ban on interracial dating at fundamentalist Bob Jones University, his first stop in his South Carolina primary campaign, he didn't condemn it until after a reporter asked him about it, and only after he had spoken there.
For a spell he refused to condemn a South Carolina state senator who -- in the heat of the state controversy about the Confederate flag - called the NAACP "the national association of retarded people."
And yet, long before that, Bush was boldly going where few Republicans had gone before, stepping into several inner-city neighborhoods and even appearing at a charter school in Harlem alongside the Rev. Floyd Flake.
Flake, a leader in the school-choice movement who was raised in Houston, went so far last fall as to call Bush his "homeboy."
But as the Washington Post's Terry Neal pointed out in a story earlier this month, after that visit, Flake "never heard from Bush or his campaign again ... Today, Flake's supporters in New York accuse Bush of, essentially, using him as a political prop." Flake eventually endorsed Vice President Al Gore.
Thus it's tough to gauge how much of it is substance and how much is just a naked appeal for votes -- not necessarily for minority voters, but for white swing voters who like the idea of Bush caring about blacks and Latinos.
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com
, I wrote something to the effect that we've got to turn the conceptual tables around and express our disdain for idiocy, lunacy, and dishonesty. By doing so we have a fighting chance of getting people to understand that they've got to earn OUR respect. As it stands, every sick, twisted ne'er-do-well thinks that by manipulating our virtues against us we'll be more sensitive to them, thus getting us to pander to them for their votes. This is doomed from the start. It's a little like teaching poisonous fourteen year olds. A demanding teacher gets their respect, and a big buddy gets their disdain.