The business of race

WOULD President Bush have had the worst three weeks of his administration if Karl Rove hadn’t been stricken with kidney stones and preoccupied with an investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA agent?

Remember the deputy chief of staff’s mission: It’s not just to make people’s blood boil, precinct by precinct. It’s also to break the Democrats’ century-long hold on black voters, 11% of whom voted for Bush in 2004. If Rove had been at full throttle when Katrina hit, would days have passed with Bush commiserating with Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) before a black preacher got in the frame?

Bishop T.D. Jakes of Dallas, who appeared with the president in Louisiana on Sept. 5 and at Washington’s National Cathedral on Sept. 16, is hardly the poster preacher for poverty. He’s a charismatic millionaire with a line of greeting cards. But he finally came to the rescue, changing the conversation from Lott’s mansion to the shameful conditions in New Orleans.

The kidney stone footnote to history is interesting but unprovable. What we do know is that Rove is on the case now. In fact, he’s in charge of the recovery.

As the effort finally began, Bush discovered, as if it were news, that long before Katrina, people in New Orleans suffered terrible privation from the vestiges of slavery, Jim Crow laws, no credit, few jobs and schools that leave most children behind.

“Poverty,” Bush declared, “has roots in a history of racial discrimination which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.”

That’s not shocking to those who have watched poverty grow four years in a row while the rich have thrived, but it is shocking to hear from someone who previously blamed “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and the war on poverty -- not poverty -- for keeping blacks down.

Last week’s words and Katrina money ($62 billion and growing) have done one critical thing: brought the evangelical pastors who formed the core of Bush’s black support back to the fold. They’re force-feeding quotes to the media about how great Bush’s effort is. But will money -- the most devoted to poor people since Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson -- bring back the people in the pews?

It depends. Exactly how the money is to be found -- or spent -- we don’t know yet, and neither does Bush. He can’t seem to stop giving speeches long enough to figure it out.

At the moment, it looks like Bush is going into the Gulf Coast the way he went into the Persian Gulf, betting on untested theories concocted by ideologues. In this case, they’re not coming from neocons such as Paul Wolfowitz but from Jack Kemp and other free marketeers, with an emphasis on tax incentives, empowerment and enterprise zones, and a suspension of regulations Republicans have long hated.

Where the public sees war and natural disasters, those around Bush see profit centers. Market forces should decide whether (and who) will build suburban trailer parks as far as the eye can see while workers are paid less than the prevailing wage.

As for sacrifice or spending cuts, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay swears he’s not giving back a cent of the pork in the highway bill to help. It’s likely that the money to help poor people will come from the very government programs those people need, and by putting ourselves into greater hock with Asia and Europe. With that money, we know Bechtel and Halliburton will do well post-Katrina, but how about the maid raising a family on minimum wage?

It didn’t take much to woo Bishop Jakes. The cultural politics that captured evangelical pastors in the first place -- sweetened with a pile of federal cash -- will also work on the rank and file if Democrats don’t offer an alternative.

Democrats, as afraid of being called bleeding-heart liberals here as they were of being called soft on national security, don’t have a coherent plan to counter Bush’s doling out contracts to the same old cronies and making his tax cuts permanent.

The Democrats have a great opportunity: Is an evangelical who’s lost the roof over his head going to follow someone saying his biggest fear is gays getting married?

As we learned from FEMA’s disgraceful performance, cronyism and incompetence is a way of life in the Bush White House. Does anyone think those contractors who bilked the U.S. out of billions in Iraq will ever pay for it?

Maybe the arrest on Sept. 19 of a top Bush procurement appointee, caught up in the case against the world’s sleaziest lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, will shine a spotlight on White House business practices. Then perhaps the next plague to descend on the Gulf Coast won’t be a tidal wave of graft.