A Tale of Two Candidates
Both Bush and Kerry addressed minority journalists this week.
Guess who did better?
By Marcus Mabry
Newsweek
Updated: 12:31 p.m. ET Aug. 7, 2004
Aug. 7 - It didn’t sound like a hard question.
After George W. Bush
delivered a tepidly received address to a convention of minority journalists,
a Native-American editor from the Seattle PostIntelligencer
asked, “What do you think tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century?”
As
president and a former governor, the journalist said, Bush had a “unique experience, looking at [the issue] from two perspectives.”
The president fumbled.
“Tribal sovereignty means that—it’s sovereignty,” he
stammered. “I mean, you’re a—you’re a—you’ve been given sovereignty and you’re viewed
as
a sovereign entity.”
As Bush rambled, looking like a schoolboy
unprepared at the front of the class, many of the hundreds of Asian, black, Native American and Hispanic journalists gathered before him…well, snickered.
From the moment Bush took the stage of the Washington Convention Center on Friday morning, it was clear he would rather have been somewhere else.
Anywhere else.
Bush had come to the convention of Unity:
Journalists of
Color not because he wanted to, but because he had to. When he snubbed the NAACP’s annual convention last month his absence made headlines. Not a good
thing in a closely contested election where every vote counts, not only
among minorities but—more importantly—among the white swing voters who
value tolerance and diversity. So when Unity,
the largest journalist group
in the world, invited the president to address the meeting it holds every five years, Bush couldn’t afford to look like he was dissing the entire
American minority press corps.
John Kerry had been on the same stage exactly 24 hours earlier and had
received enthusiastic applause. But Kerry had been,presumably, playing to
his base.
The president’s challenge was greater. Bush had come to
office
promising to be a uniter not a divider, on the tails of the ugliest election in 100 years,
when, critics charge, as many as one million
African Americans were disenfranchised.
On Friday, clearly much of the audience
remained skeptical of the president. “He’s worse than I imagined,” said one Asian journalist of the president’s flat delivery.
“Why does Kerry get such
grief for not being a good speaker?” During his speech the president looked like he was getting a tooth extracted.
For the most part, though, the audience was polite.
Like Kerry, Bush received a standing ovation when he entered the cavernous hall and another
when he left. Unlike Kerry, he did not receive a standing ovation when
he finished his speech. And the applause lines that peppered his speech mostly fell flat.
The exceptions: vouchers (the president called them
scholarships) for parents to move their children from failing D.C. public schools to private schools;
the increase in minority home ownership over
the last two years; a call for diversity in hiring, “including news organizations;” and a line about faith-based initiatives saving
“America, one heart, one soul, one conscience at a time.”
There were testy exchanges with the panel of four questioners over the need
for a new voting rights amendment for minorities, Affirmative Action (the president agreed with one questioner that legacy admissions to colleges
and universities should cease, in addition to “quotas” for minority acceptances). But Bush was more at ease in the rough-and-tumble of the
question-and-answer period, his performance more impressive, when debating contentious issues like the need to protect innocent Arab Americans,
minority disenfranchisement after the Florida 2000 vote and whether he agreed with former Iraq commander Tommy Franks that American forces
would need to be based there for two to four more years. “[You’re] trying to get
me to put a timetable out there. I’m not going to do it. See, that’s—it’s
part of—and when the timetable is busted they’ll say, ‘I told you!’’’
As the audience erupted in laughter, apparently recognizing themselves in
the
president’s comments. “Yeah. A for effort, anyway!”
Kerry had made news with his speech to Unity the day before. When asked
by
a reporter what he would have done if he had been “caught in a
Florida…classroom on September 11,” Kerry said he would have politely
excused himself and told the children “the president has to something to
attend to.” For journalists attending Unity, the mini-firestorm that ensued
offered a rare glimpse into how reporters can fail to get it right.
Almost immediately, the presidents’ surrogates, led by former New York City
Mayor Rudy Giuliani, condemned Kerry for Monday-morning quarterbacking.
Most media portrayed Kerry’s comments as red meat for true believers.
But neither a groggy Tim Russert speaking the next day on the Today show nor
the front page of The Washington Post noted that the Kerry remark had been
in response to a specific question about what he would have done had he been president at the fateful moment.
More than that, there was something disingenuous in the Republican onslaught.
Most polls showed Kerry with a modest bounce after the
Democratic National Convention in Boston. But what all the polls showed was
that even those voters who would not cast their ballots for Kerry “if the
election were held today,” had decided that he was credible on issues of
national defense and homeland security.
President Bush’s double-digit lead
over his challenger on who would better handle terrorism and homeland
security—the president’s signature issue—had evaporated. On the issue of Iraq, specifically,
Kerry was polling better than Bush. The Democrat,
too hapless to get a bounce out of his Boston coronation, was nibbling at,
if not eating the president’s lunch.
The Giuiliani campaign—not to mention the volley of ads from anti-Kerry Vietnam vets condemning his right to his war medals—had more to do with
countering Kerry’s success at narrowing the leadership gap than what the
Democrat said to a group of minority journalists on a Thursday morning in
August.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc. |
