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 resident Bush remains
a mystery on civil-rights issues a full year after taking office.
As a candidate, he played a nimble rhetorical game, employing made-up
terms like "affirmative access" and refusing to answer
straightforward questions, such as whether he supported
California's Proposition 209. He also presided over the Philadelphia
convention, which was advanced as a celebration of diversity but
looked curiously like an endorsement of bean counting.
His administration
has not taken bold steps against racial preferences, either.
The Department of Justice's decision to maintain the Clinton administration's
position on the Adarand case was disappointing, though excusable.
Less excusable is the continuing failure to overturn obnoxious Clinton-era
race regulations. In Bush's defense, though, this president
was not elected to shake up the status quo on civil rights, and
it's not like he's needed additional items on his agenda in recent
months.
But conservatives
ready to slump their shoulders at all this also should know that
Bush has made a series of important appointments. Picking Colin
Powell as secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as national-security
adviser has nothing to do with race or civil rights — though
their mere presence as high-ranking blacks in a Republican administration
provides powerful ammunition against the Left's constant claim that
blacks can't make it in America.
Less visibly,
Bush has made a series of outstanding appointments to civil-rights
posts. As head of the civil-rights division at the Department of
Justice, Ralph Boyd already has made a difference. He's not filing
lawsuits against universities that employ racial preferences —
an item on the conservative wish list — but he has put an end
to his predecessor Bill Lann Lee's habit of filing briefs in support
of racial preferences everywhere he could. Boyd also has refused
to file briefs at the appellate level in cases where Lee was active
at the trial level. Both of these steps are substantial improvements.
Other notable
Bush appointments include Charles James (husband of Kay Cole James)
at the Department of Labor's compliance office and Jennifer Braceras
and Peter Kirsanow at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Gerald
Reynolds is a promising nominee for the civil-rights office at the
Department of Education, though he remains unconfirmed and hasn't
even had a hearing.
Boyd, James,
Kirsanow, and Reynolds are black and Braceras is Hispanic —
and together they represent an outstanding team ready and able to
execute a conservative vision on civil-rights policy. Before they
can do that, though, they need a vision from the top. Or at least
a vision thing.
War
Partisans
Did
Dick Gephardt just promise that Democrats won't criticize President
Bush if the war on terrorism starts to go poorly? Sure seems that
way, given his angry attack on White House adviser Karl Rove over
the weekend. At a Republican National Committee meeting, Rove reviewed
some recent polls and told his audience, "we can go to the
country on this [terrorism] issue because they trust the Republican
Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's
military might and thereby protecting America." Gephardt chimed
in the next day, calling Rove's remarks "shameful" and
saying the war "is not a partisan issue."
But of course
the war is a partisan issue — and it ought to be. The public
should judge wartime presidents on the progress of their wars. This
has been the case historically — Abraham Lincoln was re-elected
in 1864 because the federal army captured Atlanta two months before
Election Day, LBJ rightly suffered in 1968 for failures in Vietnam
— and these assessments are probably more important than peacetime
ones because so much is at stake. The reason Gephardt doesn't want
the war to become a partisan issue, of course, is because it has
gone pretty well — and this is reflected in high approval ratings
for the president. But there's no guarantee it will continue to
go smoothly. Osama bin Laden remains at large, which poses an increasingly
thorny problem for Bush as time goes on. There's also the question
of Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration will bear some responsibility
for what the Iraqi dictator does or does not do in the future, depending
on particular actions it takes in the coming months.
Profiles in Courage
After spending months on a Teddy Kennedy charm offensive —
visits to the White House for movies, naming the Justice Department
building after RFK — the Bush administration may at last be
discovering that the senator from tax-achusetts is better to have
as an enemy than a friend. In this respect, somebody should call
more attention to a line from Kennedy's tax-hike speech at the National
Press Club on Wednesday. Here's what he said during the question-and-answer
session: "In the United States Senate, one of the things I
observed in the early days — and it's still used — and
that is that you take someone's argument and then you misrepresent
it and misstate and disagree with it. And it's very effective. I've
done it myself a number of times. But eventually, eventually people
catch on."
Fighting for Life
Tomorrow is the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. The White
House has released
a strong statement from the president on the sanctity of human life.
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