Bush's snub of NAACP shrinks GOP 'tent'
From the Houston Chronicle:
Once touted as a `big tent' with room for all Americans, the Republican Party has taken on the look of a teepee after the president's NAACP snub.
In his first White House campaign, President George W. Bush said the Republican Party was a "big tent" under which there was room for Americans of every stripe. It's a wonderful political metaphor, but like the big-top circus it was built on, the big tent packed up and left after the 2000 campaign.
The latest evidence that the Republicans are less interested in an inclusive party than they were before Bush's election is the president's refusal to address the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which ended Thursday in Philadelphia.
Bush cited scheduling conflicts, but the excuse of being too busy to meet with the nearly century-old black civil rights organization is even more insulting than the real reason Bush didn't go: He was offended by NAACP president Kweisi Mfume and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond's harsh criticisms of his administration.
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What this essay doesn't mention is the reason that it's so easy for Bush to get away with such a snub: Republicans neither seek out, nor believe that they need African-American voters in order to win the White House, or any other elected office, for that matter. Ever since Nixon first used the "Southern Strategy," which uses carefully coded language and policy aimed at stoking racist fear and hatred in white southern voters, the Republicans have slowly moved down the slippery slope toward racism. Most Republicans may very well be just fine with black people on an individual basis, but their policy and politics ultimately amount to racist oppression. Bush knows this, which means that he really has nothing to lose by blowing off the NAACP.
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