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 From The Desk Of
Ron Walters
Columnist Page
Friday, January 7, 2005; Page 17
Bush Meets with Mfume: For What?
For the life of me, I don’t know what to make of the last minute invitation George Bush gave to outgoing President and CEO of the NAACP, Kweisi Mfume - but I’ll try out some ideas.
The first question I have is why Kweisi Mfume tried to meet with Bush in the first place, since he wouldn’t speak at the organization’s annual conference last summer and turned the IRS loose on the organization for criticizing his policies.
Mfume then sent Bush a congratulatory note for winning re-election to the presidency, a step you might say was protocol in Washington politics, but which could also be looked upon as the head of the major organization in the Black community tucking its tail, doing an undignified shuffle. The point is, how much did that gesture represent the sentiments of the 89% of the Black community who voted against Bush and who might have felt that the last thing to do was to congratulate him on winning, especially since the way he might have won is tainted.
Look at that gesture against what happened in Ohio. Very different than 2000, when the national office was visible in Florida, holding hearings, joining demonstrations and the like, the weight of the national NAACP has largely been absent from the fight in Ohio.
I was recently called and asked, “Where is the NAACP in Ohio?” I said, “I don’t know, but it could be that since Mfume is leaving, there is a leadership gap of some sort, the organization might be reticent to take on such a role while it’s looking for a new chief.” Then, they said, “But there was not enough of a leadership gap to keep him from going to the White House to discuss the future relations with the organization, when he would not be responsible for them.” I said, “You’ve got a point.”
Then, Mfume is the “lame duck” outgoing head of the organization, and granted that he wanted to improve relations for other presidents since he is leaving. Ok, but why not send Board Chair Julian Bond to the meeting? Bush appears to be setting forth the terms of the kind of Black leadership with whom he will meet, since he told Mfume that he did not accept the invitation of the NAACP to speak at their conference because he was concerned about the potential for humiliation that might have occurred. Mfume was reported to have said about that: “I think he does have some validity in the fact that protecting the presidency from public humiliation, whether it’s he or someone else, as president, important.”
I am astounded. If the mission of the NAACP is to criticize the agenda of a sitting president when it is deserved and the president uses it to reject invitations on grounds of humiliation, why Mfume, as head of that organization, says, he understands. Well, on those grounds, if Bush won’t go somewhere because the office of the presidency might be humiliated, then why did he go to Britain, or recently to Canada, where in both cases, there were hundreds of thousands of protestors? I think this is a double standard. And I strongly oppose Mfume letting Bush off the hook.
This isn’t about civility as the basis of a leadership meeting between the President of the country and the president of Black America. It is about whether or not the NAACP will refrain from criticizing a sitting president, for fear of not being received at the White House, under the vacuous rationale that the president might be humiliated. In other words, it is about the presence of mutual respect and the dignity that underlay the basis for such meetings.
The positive aspect of the meeting was apparently an exchange of views on issues such as Social Security, the image of law enforcement (racial profiling?), affordable health care and education reform. I understand that on most of these, they agreed to disagree. But the IRS investigation was not discussed. Wonder why not?
Nevertheless, this brings up the central issue of Bush’s new posture. Emboldened by his re-election, he feels he has earned “political capital” and the way he wants to spend it is not to seek accommodation across lines of difference, but to strengthen his own conservative agenda by associating only with those who agree. Witness the recent White House Economic Summit. Most Blacks are workers, but there was no labor representation there and youth or adult Black male unemployment was not discussed. Instead, he kept the pressure on Blacks by an immigration policy that admits people from outside this country “to do jobs that Americans won’t do.” What are those jobs that Black people won’t do?
So long as the basis for a meeting with the NAACP has to be on the president’s terms alone, then what it the reason for going? If you get nothing substantive out of such a meeting, then it really is a question of the dignity you use up going in and coming out. So the dignified thing to do is not to meet at any price.
Dr. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of the African American Leadership Institute, Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland College Park. His latest book is, White Nationalism, Black Interests, by Wayne State University Press.
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