Food for thought......
December 25, 2001
By KEVIN SACK
JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Dec. 19 ? Steven Price, the proprietor of the Wise Choice Barber Shop on Jacksonville's north side, was none too happy with George W. Bush this time last year. In this city's heavily black and Democratic neighborhoods, like the one where Mr. Price wields his trimmer, one of every five votes was thrown out because of confusion over the ballot, and folks here were street- marching mad.
It was, in the eyes of Mr. Price and many other African-Americans, an outrageous disenfranchisement of black voters in a state where Mr. Bush won the thinnest of majorities and, as a result, the presidency. "I thought he was a crook, that he bought the election," Mr. Price said. "I just thought it was fixed."
But listen to Mr. Price now, as he assesses Mr. Bush's performance since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Not only does he approve wholeheartedly of the war in Afghanistan, he also has no qualms
about the civil liberties implications of the government's antiterrorism measures, including the Bush administration's interrogation of Middle Easterners and its possible use of military tribunals to try terrorism suspects.
"I think he's handled the situation properly and he's showing that he's a strong president," Mr. Price, 31, said on a quiet afternoon in his shop. "I don't even look at him now as having bought the presidency. I just look at him as president."
As Mr. Bush's father can attest, a president's wartime popularity can be ephemeral, particularly if war is followed by recession. But for the moment, a striking component of Mr. Bush's immense public approval is his high level of support from black Americans, hardly any of whom voted for him.
Pollsters and black political leaders say that Mr. Bush's ratings reflect the patriotism and unity felt by all Americans, and may demonstrate black support for the country more than for Mr. Bush himself. But they also note that the distance Mr. Bush has traveled with black Americans says much about the influence of a foreign conflict on public opinion.
The latest New York Times/CBS News poll, taken from Dec. 7 to 10, found that nearly three of every four blacks and nine of every 10 whites approved of Mr. Bush's performance.
The poll's sampling of blacks was not large enough to measure the support for Mr. Bush with precision. But its general findings are reinforced byother polls, including a Gallup survey taken Dec. 14-16 that found that more than two-thirds of blacks approved of the president's performance. In early October, Mr. Bush's approval ratings among blacks exceeded 80 percent in the
Gallup poll.
By contrast, surveys of voters leaving the polls in November 2000 found that Mr. Bush received only 8 percent of the black vote, the worst showing of any Republican presidential candidate since at least 1972, when modern exit polling began.
Until Sept. 11, Mr. Bush's ratings among blacks remained relatively low. In the Times/CBS and Gallup polls, he never received positive marks from more than half of the blacks surveyed, and typically no more than a third were approving.
Some of Mr. Bush's newfound popularity with blacks may be a product of the war's power to obscure concerns about the economy and other domestic issues.
Some blacks also have been impressed by the high- profile roles being played by members of minorities in Mr. Bush's cabinet, like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.
Whatever the reasons, Mr. Bush is finding support these days in the unlikeliest of places.
"I think he's done a tremendous job in managing the war on terrorism," said Donna Brazile, a leading black Democratic strategist and the manager of Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000. "He's rallied the country, kept us focused on goals and kept us informed. I don't have any beef with him."
Like many other black Americans, Ms. Brazile said she had put aside her bitterness over the Florida recount "because it looked quite trivial when put next to Sept. 11."
"I still believe Al Gore won the election," she said, "but it doesn't matter anymore."
Ms. Brazile and other political analysts predicted that the warm feelings of African-Americans toward Mr. Bush would not last, and that he was unlikely to win many black votes in the 2004 election.
After all, former President Bush, who won 12 percent of the black vote in his 1988 victory, had a job approval rating of 72 percent from blacks at the height of the Persian Gulf war in March 1991. Twenty months later, he won only 10 percent of the black vote in losing to Bill Clinton.
George W. Bush's support among blacks "is as broad as could be but it doesn't run deep and he doesn't have coattails," said Ms. Brazile, who pointed out that blacks voted overwhelmingly last month for the winning Democratic candidates for governor in New Jersey and Virginia.
But she said Democratic polling and focus groups before those elections suggested that blacks would not have responded well to attacks on Mr. Bush.
"They wanted to hear about issues and comparisons" she said, "but nothing anti-Bush."
Julian Bond, the chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., said Mr. Bush had benefited because the war on terrorism had "driven most of the radical conservative agenda both out of the headlines and out of present-day politics."
And David A. Bositis, a leading analyst of black voting behavior for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said blacks would eventually become discontented with Mr. Bush because of rising unemployment, which stood at 10.1 percent for blacks in November, double the rate for whites. Spending on defense and domestic security will leave little for education, health care and Social Security, he said, and blacks will then remember the impact of the Bush tax cuts.
That is already true for some blacks here in Jacksonville, a city of 780,000 where blacks make up 28 percent of the population. Fred R. Taylor, a 48-year-old construction worker, was laid off two weeks ago and blames the president.
"We had eight good years under Clinton and now we've had this guy in office for one year and there's no money left in the economy," Mr. Taylor said.
As for the war, Mr. Taylor seems satisfied with the way it has been conducted, but says he thinks Mr. Bush's "father is telling him what to do."
Similarly, the Rev. George A. Price, the longtime pastor of St. Matthew Baptist Church here, said Mr. Bush had simply made the obvious moves in leading the war effort.
"The bottom line is that in these times you've got to support your leader,"Mr. Price said. "Would I vote for him? No. But do I think that there should be any overt opposition? Not at a time like this."
But others in Jacksonville seemed almost sheepish in admitting that they had voted for Mr. Gore last year. They said that Mr. Bush had shown them something during the last three months, and that they would at least consider voting for him in the future.
"I've got all good things to say about him right now," said Robert K. Hickson, a 22-year-old firefighter who voted for Mr. Gore. "From what I get, he's keeping cool, he's showing good leadership, he's supporting all the troops. So far it seems like it's working."
Margaret A. Izevbizua, a 40-year- old nurse, said Mr. Bush had impressed her enough to have earned her consideration in 2004.
"He went forward with action, not just talk," Ms. Izevbizua said. "I didn't vote for Bush. I voted for Gore. I was born and raised a Democrat. But after all this happened, I said, `Well, you know, he turned out to be different.'I don't look at him as being Republican or Democrat."
Some polls have suggested that blacks, presumably because of their history as victims of civil rights abuses, are more concerned than whites about ethnic profiling and other civil liberties issues growing out of the war on terrorism. But little of that showed up in interviews in Jacksonville.
Several people said the magnitude of the Sept. 11 attacks and the threat of future terrorism left the government little choice but to put the rights of Middle Easterners second to security concerns.
"From my view, it's like, Welcome to my world," said Steven Price, the barber. "Blacks go through that every day. I wouldn't say it's right. But with people's lives being wasted like that, it's worth giving them a little more attention."
And many of those interviewed seemed to feel that if it had been permissible for years to mistreat African-Americans because of their ethnicity, the same should now hold true for Middle Easterners.
"If it involves the civil liberties of African-Americans, we get involved,"said George Price, the pastor, who is a veteran of civil rights protests here. "If it involves the civil liberties of anybody else, we tend to sit on the sidelines."
