Bush Camp Opens Southwest L.A. Office : Politics: There is ‘tremendous’ local interest in reelecting the President, the GOP says.

The campaign to reelect President Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle has opened a headquarters in Southwest Los Angeles.

Bill Fahey, director of the Los Angeles County Bush/Quayle Campaign, said the office at 4710 Crenshaw Blvd. was opened Sept. 26 in response to a “tremendous amount of interest in reelecting the President in that neighborhood.”

He said the Crenshaw office was established after local members of the California Black Republican Council approached the regional Bush/Quayle campaign headquarters in Redondo Beach and asked for a campaign headquarters in the Southwest neighborhood. The office space is being paid for by the Bush campaign, with the local members of the Black Republican Council paying some operating expenses, Fahey said.

Staffed by two volunteers, the headquarters is being used as a voter registration center and also distributes Bush/Quayle banners, bumper stickers and Republican platform pamphlets.

Charging that the Democratic party has taken African-American voters for granted, black Republicans said the GOP platform of less government and incentives to small and medium-sized businesses better suits their needs.

“This is a two-party system, and we have a choice,” said Johnnie Morgan, a regional co-chairman for the Bush/Quayle campaign.

Morgan, a consultant to local Republican candidates, added that the “recent civil disturbances indicate that hopelessness is still rampant in the African-American community.” He said Bush and Quayle are the candidates who will address the needs of the African-American community with fewer social programs.

But African-American Democrats called it a token gesture.

“It strikes me as a desperate attempt to at least appear that there is a significant Republican presence in the African-American community. That is simply not true,” said Brenda Shockley, executive director of Community Build, a Los Angeles-based economic development company. “I have met people who are not crazy about Clinton/Gore, but I have yet to meet someone black who wants Bush or who thinks he will do anything in his second term that will be for the good of the African community.”