by Keith Boykin
On that summer day in Baltimore when Bush spoke to the NAACP, there was one line in the governor’s speech that stood out above all others. After scoring points for acknowledging the existence of redlining and racial profiling, Bush promised to confront yet another form of bias. He called it “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” As he vowed to “close the achievement gap” in America’s schools, he declared that “no child in America should be segregated by low expectations, imprisoned by illiteracy, abandoned to frustration and the darkness of self-doubt.” Bush’s stated goal was admirable, and almost every Black person in the audience could surely support his vision for an American society in which children of all races achieved relatively equal outcomes in public education. In fact, the very point of this book is that our racial justice policies must focus on equal outcomes instead of just slightly better outcomes. But Bush’s solution was shamefully, inexcusably, and perhaps, purposely, unimaginative. He argued that America could “raise the bar of standards” simply by adopting the platitudes of “education reform”—“expect every child can learn”; give schools flexibility; “measure progress”; insist upon results; “blow the whistle on failure”; and, of course, give parents charter schools and school choice.
At no point did Bush address the inequity of resources in Black and white schools. In fact, his only mention of public school funding came in a statement that “resources must go to the parents so that parents can make a different choice.” Nor did he bother to interrogate the underlying causes that contributed to the nation’s centuries-long disparities in educational outcomes—the absence of jobs, the lack of quality health care, the legacy of housing discrimination, the environmental racism that targeted Black and brown communities with polluted air and drinking water, a justice system that criminalized Black and brown youth, and state property tax funding mechanisms that directed public education dollars to the communities that were already most well-off. In fact, Bush outright dismissed these root causes. “Whatever the causes,” he told the NAACP, “the effect is discrimination.”
What Bush proposed to the NAACP was not a fix for public education; it was an outright abandonment. It was as if the federal government committed to develop a cure for cancer merely by telling patients to expect that they can get better and that they should “blow the whistle on failure,” while the government redirected its dollars away from cancer research and instead encouraged cancer patients to figure out the cure in the free marketplace. If a public official gave a speech to cancer patients and told them, “Whatever the causes of cancer, let’s just focus on solutions,” no one would take the official seriously. After all, how could you develop a solution to the problem if you don’t know what caused the problem in the first place? Yet here was the Republican nominee for president telling his Black audience that whatever the causes of racial disparities in education, we should turn our attention to solutions instead.
There was a certain form of condescension inherent in Bush’s Baltimore remarks. One might even call it a “soft bigotry” that was not overtly hostile to the interests of African Americans, and, in fact, actually purported to serve those interests, but in reality, was designed to ignore the stated concerns of the vast majority of Black people and redirect the conversation to other concerns that were more palatable to Republican audiences. Instead of centering racial discrimination as a subject of concern by focusing our attention, for example, on the school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately punishes young Black students, Bush moved the discussion to school choice, which allowed Republicans to elide broader and more uncomfortable conversations about race by shifting the burden to struggling Black families who were somehow supposed to remedy centuries of state-sponsored racist socioeconomic policies with a voucher or a tax credit.
Bush’s facile approach to race was no surprise from someone who had spent his entire life blithely ensconced in the comfort of white privilege. I’ve never met the man, but almost everyone I know who has met George W. Bush describes him as a “down-to-earth” guy with an amiable personality that allows him to interact comfortably with people of all races. That’s why I would not be surprised or troubled years later by his unlikely postpresidency friendship with Michelle Obama. Bush was, after all, the guy voters wanted to “have a beer with” compared to his stuffy Harvard-educated 2000 opponent, Al Gore, and his stodgy Yale-educated 2004 opponent, John Kerry. Never mind the fact that Bush, himself, graduated from Yale and Harvard. The problem is we shouldn’t be electing presidents to be our drinking companions in the first place. We elect them to run the country, and that job requires competence and leadership skills, not just a pedigree and a pleasing personality.
George W. Bush’s unusual life story of personal advantages and second chances would also make a mockery of the conservative argument that affirmative action stigmatizes its beneficiaries. His entire career was a product of affirmative action for rich white men from famous families. He was the son of a president and the grandson of a senator and was educated in the pampered prep schools of Texas, went to boarding school at the prestigious Phillips Academy at Andover, and then attended college at Yale University. In May 1968, nearly two weeks before his college graduation—and the end of his student draft deferment from Vietnam—Bush applied to join the Texas Air National Guard, a post that would keep him out of the deadly, raging war. The commander, noting that Bush’s father was then a US congressman, overlooked a long waiting list and Bush’s low 25 percent score on the pilot aptitude test, and swore him in as an airman the very same day.
An admittedly mediocre student in college, Bush tried to return to academic life by applying to attend the University of Texas Law School. He was rejected in 1970. Then, in August 1972, Bush was suspended from flying with the Texas Air National Guard and never flew again with the unit. But as his father’s influence grew as US ambassador to the United Nations and later chairman of the Republican National Committee, the young Bush’s fortunes rose as well. A year later, he was discharged from the National Guard to attend Harvard Business School. While thousands of young men who did not have famous fathers were still fighting the war in Southeast Asia, Bush acknowledged later that he “chased a lot of pussy and drank a lot of whiskey” during those years. He would continue on in that vein, drinking and partying, drifting from one failed business venture to another, until his fortieth birthday celebration in July 1986, when he woke up one day with a hangover at the historic Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Bush decided that day to give up alcohol for good.
When I think about the special privileges and opportunities afforded George W. Bush and the reckless and repeated mistakes that he made in his first forty years, I can only imagine how differently I, or any other Black person, would be viewed under those circumstances. On the day of my own fortieth birthday party, as I gazed at the perfect sunset on the still waters of the bay, I realized I had led a relatively quiet life. I had no thoughts of running for public office that day, but if I had, surely, I would have known that I would never be president of the United States. For a Black person to be taken seriously for that office, she or he would have to be flawless. Bush, on the other hand, had been an unimpressive person for most of his life, known for his difficulty with the English language and not even considered to be the smartest among his siblings. Yet he parlayed his family privilege and white male entitlement into the governorship of Texas and the presidency of the United States. His failures made him “relatable,” particularly to white Americans who described him as the type of person they’d like to “have a beer with.” It would be hard to imagine an inarticulate, intellectually incurious African American politician with a past drinking problem who would be taken seriously as a gubernatorial candidate, much less a presidential one. Every failed business venture, every suspicious military deferment, every National Guard suspension, every allegation of nepotism, and every episode of raucous adult drunkenness would create serious consequences for a Black candidate. But here was George W. Bush,
just fourteen years after that last hangover in Colorado, standing before the NAACP, only five months before he would become president, in an election that would itself become a sore subject within the Black community.
Despite Bush’s charm offensive with the NAACP, Vice President Al Gore won 90 percent of the Black vote and won the national popular vote by a 544,000 vote margin. Yet Bush narrowly won the electoral college, as the presidency was decided by a mere 537 votes in the state of Florida. For the first time in more than one hundred years, the candidate who lost the popular vote had won the election. That bitter pill was made even harder to swallow by the thirty-seven-day ordeal that allowed it to happen. Once again, Bush’s family came to the rescue. His brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, worked to influence the outcome of the election in the state, while his father, former president George H. W. Bush, had appointed the one justice, Clarence Thomas, who would cast the deciding vote in the Supreme Court case that effectively stopped a recount of ballots.
By the time Congress was prepared to certify the electoral college vote for Bush in January 2001, a dozen members of the Congressional Black Caucus stood up in Congress to object. They argued that the certification of the results should be blocked because of the disputed election results in Florida. In a final humiliating exercise of the democratic process, Gore presided over the Senate for the certification process. One by one, members of the Congressional Black Caucus stood at the podium in the House chamber and denounced the antidemocratic election process. But each time someone rose to object, Gore asked the speaker if the objection was in writing and signed by a member of the House and the Senate, as required by law. One by one, each Black caucus member who spoke was forced to acknowledge that not a single member of the US Senate was willing to stand with them. “The objection is in writing, and I don’t care that it is not signed by a member of the Senate,” Representative Maxine Waters thundered.
The spectacle of certifying the popular-vote loser as the actual winner in a presidential election in what is supposed to be the world’s greatest democracy exposed structural obstacles embedded deep in the framework of the republic that would bedevil the Democratic Party in the years to come. The fundamental problem is that our eighteenth-century Constitution cannot power a twenty-first century democracy. Decades after the 2000 election debacle, this problem was still not fixed. The composition of the Senate would remain unreflective of the diversity of the nation. A state like California, for example, with nearly forty million people and a population larger than the twenty-one smallest states combined, received the same number of senators in 2020 as tiny Wyoming, with barely six hundred thousand residents. The two Dakotas, with a combined population of 1.6 million people, receive four US senators, while the island of Manhattan, with about the same number of people, has to share its two senators with the nineteen million residents of New York state. And the District of Columbia, with a population larger than Vermont or Wyoming, has no senators at all. The beneficiaries of this arrangement are states with small populations of overwhelmingly white residents, and the victims are the residents of larger states with urban city centers and the most diverse populations. The electoral college only exacerbates the problem, diluting the impact of millions of Black and brown voters in the nation’s largest states by giving a disproportionate voice to white voters in the nation’s smallest states. Yet George W. Bush showed no intention of addressing any of these issues in his time in office.
The nation’s forty-third president inherited a deeply divided country that was riven by the culture wars of the 1990s, by the Republican-led impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, and by the Supreme Court’s controversial 5–4 decision in the Bush v. Gore case. But nothing would shape the Bush presidency more than a Tuesday morning in late summer that changed the nation. Halfway through his first year in office, on August 6, 2001, the intelligence community presented a warning in the president’s daily briefing. The title was clear: “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” Despite the warning, and what officials later claimed was a lack of “actionable intelligence,” the Bush administration took no significant new steps to protect the homeland. Just over a month later, on Tuesday, September 11, a well-coordinated group of nineteen terrorists hijacked four airplanes along the East Coast, slamming two of them into the twin towers in Manhattan, one into the Pentagon outside Washington, and a fourth into the ground in Pennsylvania.
The most impressive moment of the Bush administration, for me, came a few days after this tragedy. Just a week after the September 11 attacks, Bush visited the Islamic Center in Washington, DC, and quoted from the Quran: “Evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil.” As he made his brief but eloquent remarks, surrounded by Muslim leaders, he made a point to recognize that “Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country,” and he added that “they need to be treated with respect.” I held back tears as he spoke. It was, in my opinion, Bush’s finest moment as president and represented the kind of inclusive America that made me proud. But soon afterward, I found myself predictably disappointed as he launched two wars against Muslim countries.
The September 11 attacks gave Bush an opportunity to prove he was a different kind of Republican; his approval rating soared in the wake of the tragedy. But despite his campaign promise to be a “compassionate conservative,” Bush largely governed like a traditional Republican, dramatically increasing the defense budget, initiating the construction of a new seven-hundred-mile border fence, and pushing through two massive tax cut laws that depleted the Clinton surplus he inherited, expanded the national debt, and exhausted the country’s available resources to invest at home while fighting wars abroad.
All that really changed was the rhetoric. It was a time when the conservative brand, under the direction of Southern Republicans like Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich, and Trent Lott, had become so coarsened that “public opinion gurus” were hired to sell the party to a wary public. Just as the first President Bush had broken his promise of a “kinder, gentler nation,” the second President Bush would do the same with “compassionate conservatism.” The very use of the term, itself, suggested an awareness of the party’s increasingly toxic reputation in some quarters. But as cable news and social media created new information bubbles for conservative consumers, talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, conservative television commentators like Bill O’Reilly, and entire conservative television networks like Fox News developed a right-wing media infrastructure to amplify the Republican Party’s message.
Like his father, Bush’s record on racial and social justice issues was built on a legacy of symbolism that was often contradicted by policy. Bush appointed two prominent Black Republicans—Colin Powell and then Condoleezza Rice—for one of the highest positions in his cabinet, secretary of state, but he deployed them to help justify the war with Iraq. He claimed to “strongly support diversity of all kinds” but then ordered his Justice Department to file a brief against the University of Michigan for using affirmative action policies that were needed to achieve diversity. He said he supported civil unions for gay and lesbian couples but then called for an unprecedented constitutional amendment to ban all gay marriages.
As Bush attempted to present a compassionate face and voice to mask the cruelty of the Republican Party’s aggressive new twenty-first-century conservatism, some of his GOP colleagues didn’t even bother to try. When South Carolina Republican Senator Strom Thurmond turned one hundred years old in December 2002, Republican Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi praised Thurmond for his racist 1948 campaign for president:
I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.
Here was the Senate Republican leader, of what was once the party of Lincoln, openly praising a racist political campaign in the twenty-first century, bragging that his state voted for a segregationist in th
e presidential election, and arguing that America would be better off if a bigoted Southern Democrat had won the presidency in 1948. Lott was forced to apologize for what he called “a poor choice of words,” but the impression was indelible. It would be impossible to ignore how the Republican Party had changed over the course of the previous four decades. Bush did little to remedy this.
During the Bush administration, a country that had previously enjoyed peace and prosperity under a Democrat would be plunged into two wars and economic collapse under a Republican. It would be a time of unbelievable headlines, from the very first year when terrorists hijacked four civilian passenger jets and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, leading the country to war, to the third year, when the administration launched a second war that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians in a country that had never attacked the United States, on the false premise that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. At the end of his first term, Bush faced a similarly divided nation. The man who came to the presidency by 537 votes in the state of Florida was narrowly reelected because of 118,000 votes in the state of Ohio.
By his fifth year in office, when Hurricane Katrina claimed nearly two thousand lives and washed away New Orleans, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had dragged on long enough to weigh down the president. Bush found himself on thin ice. His Gallup public approval rating, which had risen to 89 percent after the September 11 attacks, dropped to 31 percent in 2006. By November, Democrats recaptured control of Congress, and in January 2007, Nancy Pelosi was elected as the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Momentum was shifting quickly. When Bush finally limped to the last year of his presidency, a once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis submerged the economy into the worst recession since the Great Depression. Then, in one last memorable insult, during Bush’s “valedictory trip” to Iraq a month before he left office, the president had become so loathed in the international community that he was forced to duck and hide as a local journalist hurled a shoe at his head.