Katrina Pushes Issues of Race and Poverty at Bush

By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 12, 2005; A02

Hurricane Katrina has thrust the twin issues of race and poverty at President Bush, who faces steep challenges in dealing with both because of a domestic agenda that envisions deep cuts in long-standing anti-poverty programs and relationships with many black leaders frayed by years of mutual suspicion.

In the storm's aftermath, the White House has been scrambling to quell perceptions that race was a factor in the slow federal response to Katrina and that its policies have contributed to the festering poverty propelled into public view by the disaster.

Last week, Bush summoned faith-based relief organizations and religious leaders -- many of them African American -- to a White House meeting to discuss his vision for providing long-term help for impoverished people displaced by the storm.

He dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to her home state of Alabama. He also has had his political surrogates reach out to civil rights groups that previously felt ignored by the White House.

"Katrina has been an attention-getting experience for this administration," said Bruce S. Gordon, president and chief executive officer of the NAACP. "It's clear that the administration has not had [black and poor people] as high on their priority list as they should have."

Angry about how an affiliate of the NAACP portrayed him in a 2000 political ad, Bush has rejected invitations to speak at the organization's past five conventions, making him the first sitting president in more than 80 years not to address the group. NAACP Chairman Julian Bond has excoriated Bush as a reactionary conservative. In the past week, however, Gordon has had multiple conversations with top administration officials and fielded calls from aides to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

"They wanted to be sure they knew what we were thinking," Gordon said.

Bush also has resolved to tackle the poverty that ensnared 28 percent of New Orleans residents and many others on the Gulf Coast. Many of those poor people were unable to heed warnings to evacuate as the storm approached, compounding the disaster as tens of thousands of mostly black residents overwhelmed sparse government provisions when they sought shelter at the Superdome and convention center in New Orleans.

"Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster," said Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourner's, a liberal evangelical journal.

During Tuesday's White House meeting with 20 religious leaders and representatives from relief groups, Bush vowed to provide job programs, health care, life-skills training and housing aid to those displaced by the storm. Echoing a position taken by some civil rights leaders, he asserted that it was insensitive to refer to the poor people fleeing New Orleans as "refugees," a term that for some evokes people fleeing their native country.

When some people at the meeting said that New Orleans residents and local businesses should reap much of the economic benefit from the huge investment that will be required to rebuild the city, Bush readily agreed, according to one participant.

"He didn't receive many of these concerns as some kind of 'race' issue," said C. Jay Matthews, a Cleveland minister who attended the meeting. "There was a feeling that maybe what we have been doing up to now to fight poverty maybe hasn't been effective and we need to move toward long-term solutions."

But some skeptics fear these reassuring words are a disguise for pursuing long-held conservative goals that are viewed with hostility by many black leaders. Congressional Republicans, for example, have voiced opposition to federal programs that set aside government contracts for minorities. And Bush has already moved to suspend the law requiring federal contractors to pay workers the average wage in the region, holding down salaries for many minority laborers.

In the place of traditional poverty programs, Bush has touted faith-based social service programs, calling them more efficient and effective than those run by the government. Many programs of an earlier generation, he says, have served only to perpetuate the plight of the poor.

Overcoming mistrust of blacks compounded by Katrina is an important hurdle in one of Bush's political goals -- making the GOP more competitive with traditionally Democratic African Americans.

"What we've been trying to do is what we believe will help us close the gap we see in America in terms of education, health care, home ownership and wealth," said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee. "We have policies that will actually achieve those goals."

To underscore his outreach efforts, when the president toured a hurricane evacuee shelter near Baton Rouge last week, he was accompanied by the Rev. T.D. Jakes, a prominent black evangelist who has known Bush for years. He also went to New Orleans yesterday. Those trips came after Bush was criticized for having little contract with poor, black victims during an earlier visit.

"I mean, it's puzzling, given his immediate response during 9/11, that he did not feel a greater sense of empathy towards the folks that were experiencing this enormous disaster," Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said yesterday on ABC's "This Week."

Whatever approach the administration takes as it moves forward, any Katrina-inspired increase in federal outlays to alleviate poverty would represent a sharp turn for an administration that has moved to reshape government by reducing outlays for social programs by encouraging individual ownership of -- and responsibility for -- everything from housing to health care and retirement accounts. Meanwhile, White House budget makers have projected deep cuts in traditional poverty programs, including food stamps and public housing.

But the calamity spawned by New Orleans has placed Bush under new pressure. A poll last week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that two-thirds of African Americans believe the government's response to the storm would have been faster if most of the victims had been white. Also, 71 percent of blacks agree that the disaster revealed that racial inequality remains a major problem in the country -- a sentiment shared by 32 percent of whites.

A prominent Louisiana politician called this perception unfair. "The two parishes south of New Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines, are mostly white. They are devastated and they arguably got a lot less attention than New Orleans," said former Louisiana senator John Breaux (D), who has worked closely with Bush. "A lot of people didn't get out because they didn't have a car. This is more a problem of poverty, rather than race."

Rep. Barbara T. Lee (D-Calif.), however, accused Bush of being indifferent to the poor. "If anyone ever doubted that there are two Americas, this disaster and our government's shameful response to it have made the division clear for all to see."

Addressing a meeting of black Baptists in Miami last Wednesday, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said the government's slow response revealed "the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not."

Michael L. Williams, the only black member of the elected Railroad Commission of Texas and a longtime Bush friend, said the racial and class divisions pushed into the national debate by Katrina present a formidable test for Bush. The answers, he said, will come with how Bush addresses the underlying issues.

"It isn't surprising that African Americans across the country feel pain for the victims of this disaster," Williams said. "When people feel pain, they want to find someone to blame. There is no doubt that it adds to the challenge facing us. But the real story is going to be what it always is: What is really being done about education? About jobs? About housing?"

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Gulf Coast Isn't the Only Thing Left in Tatters

Bush's Status With Blacks Takes Hit

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

September 12, 2005 New York Times

From the political perspective of the White House, Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than an enormous swath of the Gulf Coast. The storm also appears to have damaged the carefully laid plans of Karl Rove, President Bush's political adviser, to make inroads among black voters and expand the reach of the Republican Party for decades to come.

Many African-Americans across the country said they seethed as they watched the television pictures of the largely poor and black victims of Hurricane Katrina dying for food and water in the New Orleans Superdome and the convention center. A poll released last week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center bore out that reaction as well as a deep racial divide: Two-thirds of African-Americans said the government's response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the victims had been white, while 77 percent of whites disagreed.

The anger has invigorated the president's critics. Kanye West, the rap star, raged off-script at a televised benefit for storm victims that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in Miami last week that Americans "have to come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not."

At the White House, the public response has been to denounce the critics as unseemly and unfair. "I think all of those remarks were disgusting, to be perfectly frank," Laura Bush said in an interview with the American Urban Radio Network, when asked about the comments of Mr. West and Mr. Dean. "Of course President Bush cares about everyone in our country."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the administration's most prominent African-American, weighed in, too. "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race," Ms. Rice said, en route to her native Alabama to attend a church service.

But behind the scenes in the West Wing, there has been anxiety and scrambling - after an initial misunderstanding, some of the president's advocates say, of the racial dimension to the crisis.

One of Mr. Bush's prominent African-American supporters called the White House to say he was aghast at the images from the president's first trip to the region, on Sept. 2, when Mr. Bush stood next to Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama, both white Republicans, and praised them for a job well done. Mr. Bush did not go into the heart of New Orleans to meet with black victims.

"I said, 'Grab some black people who look like they might be preachers,' " said the supporter, who asked not to be named because he did not want to be identified as criticizing the White House.Three days later, on Mr. Bush's next trip to the region, the president appeared in Baton Rouge at the side of T. D. Jakes, the conservative African-American television evangelist and the founder of a 30,000-member megachurch in southwest Dallas.

Bishop Jakes, a multimillionaire and best-selling author, is to deliver the sermon this Friday at the Washington National Cathedral, his office said, where Mr. Bush will mark a national day of prayer for Hurricane Katrina's victims. The bishop's style of preaching is black Pentecostal - he roars and rumbles in performances that got him on the cover of Time magazine as "America's best preacher" in 2001. More important to Mr. Rove, he has become a vital partner in the White House effort to court the black vote.

Last week, the White House continued its political recovery effort among African-Americans through its network of conservative black preachers like Bishop Jakes. Many of them have received millions of dollars for their churches through Mr. Bush's initiative to support religious-based social services - a factor, Republicans say, in Mr. Bush's small increase in support among black voters, from 9 percent in 2000 to 11 percent in 2004.

On Tuesday in the Roosevelt Room, Mr. Bush met with black preachers and leaders of national charities, and sat next to Bishop Roy L. H. Winbush, a black religious leader from Louisiana. On Thursday, two senior White House officials, Claude Allen and James Towey, held a conference call with black religious leaders to ask what needed to be done. Mr. Towey is the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and Mr. Allen, who is African-American, is the president's domestic policy adviser.

One Bush supporter, the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III, the president of the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation, a coalition that represents primarily black churches, said last week that something positive might come out of the crisis. "This is a moral and intellectual opportunity for the Bush administration to clearly articulate a policy agenda for the black poor," Mr. Rivers said in an interview.

Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who has made reaching out to black voters a priority, put it simply. "We're going to work with them," Mr. Mehlman said. "This disaster showed how important it is that we do these things."

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Katrina Leads a Lobbyist to Reevaluate His Priorities

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 12, 2005; A04

Frederick L. Webber, a longtime denizen of Washington's lobbying corridor, showed up at work one day last week and found on his desk a dozen fundraising requests from members of Congress.

He threw them all in the trash.

In a self-described epiphany, Webber, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, drafted a large check to help families displaced by Hurricane Katrina and decided that an imperative of his vocation -- political giving -- had finally gone too far.

How could lawmakers be asking for money for their reelections, he asked himself, when thousands of Americans were desperate for aid along the Gulf Coast?

"It really hit home when I was writing out that check," Webber said. "Political fundraising in this town has gotten out of control."

It's a message he was repeating passionately at lunches and in private conversations with other lobbyists all over town last week.

Webber's opinion is worth noting; he isn't just any lobbyist. At age 67, Webber has been a major player in Washington for more than 30 years. He worked both in the Nixon White House and on Capitol Hill and has headed up or helped direct lobbying groups representing car companies, chemical manufacturers, electric utilities, savings institutions and soft drink makers.

"In the Washington business community, Fred is close to the top of the list," said Michael E. Baroody, executive vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers.

"He's a pillar of the association community," agreed Donald A. Danner, executive vice president of the National Federation of Independent Business. "He's one of the guys you look up to and respect."

Webber told K Street colleagues that radical change is needed in election laws: Donations should be further limited, campaign seasons should be shortened and lawmakers, somehow, should be freed up to do more legislating and less soliciting.

He also made clear that the hurricane's devastation was what prompted his proselytizing. "All of a sudden I asked, 'What are the priorities here?' " Webber said in an interview. "It was an easy decision to make. I couldn't justify making those $500 to $2,500 [campaign] contributions. It just didn't fit."

Lawmakers' constant bombarding of lobbyists with fundraising invitations, he said, "is crazy." Yet the daily rush of fundraisers hardly slowed last week, even with the tragedy of New Orleans.

"No sooner is someone elected or reelected than they start their fundraising right out of the box," Webber complained.

"Members of Congress are trapped. They have to continue to raise money if they're going to survive, and I sympathize with them," Webber added. "But I've seen a lot of people -- very good people -- leave Congress because they're tired of fundraising. This thing has gotten away from us."

Many lobbyists and trade association leaders receive dozens of fundraising requests each week. One reason for the heavy flow is that the three-year-old McCain-Feingold law that was supposed to rein in campaign giving also doubled to more than $100,000 the amount that individuals (like lobbyists) can donate to certain political entities each election cycle. At the same time, the cost of elections continues to escalate.

Webber is particularly hard-pressed by this dynamic because his association doesn't have a political action committee, which is a pool of funds collected from what in his case would be corporate executives. The money lawmakers seek from Webber would come out of his own wallet.

But his distress is about more than his personal finances. He said he believes the system itself is "diseased."

"For those of us who have been in Washington a long time, it's almost overwhelming," Webber said. "A lot of my colleagues -- trade association executives -- want to help our friends, but this whole process is wearing us down."

This month's death and destruction brought those concerns into sharp relief. Lobbyists like Webber often grouse about being dunned for cash by the legislators that they're paid to influence. But ultimately, they rarely support the setting of limits on their gifts because much of their entree is greased by the size and frequency of their contributions.

A spot check last week found that few lobbyists were as livid about the situation as Webber. Understandably, one of those who was upset was former senator John Breaux (D-La.), who now works for the lobbying law firm Patton Boggs LLP. "You need to put out the yellow caution flag on political fundraising and direct all those dollars to hurricane relief victims," Breaux urged.

But not many people were following his advice. Most fundraisers went off without a hitch. One exception was a canceled lunch for Sen. James M. Talent (R-Mo.) set for Sept. 19 in St. Louis that Vice President Cheney was scheduled to attend.

Even Webber found himself attending a small political breakfast by week's end because, he said, "it was a reasonable request."

In the future, he said, "I'll continue to do those but, due to Katrina, I'll do them more selectively."