Bush, Blacks and Iraq - * not winning them over

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41971-2004May20?language=printer

President Bush's campaign advisers sat down and crunched some numbers after the 2000 election and hypothesized that, because of the growth of minority populations, if whites and non-whites voted in the same proportions they did in the 2000 election, Democrats would win the White House by about three million votes in 2004.

This meant that if the president planned on serving two terms, he needed to get serious about broadening the Republican base —something he largely failed to do in 2000. While there was some improvement among Hispanic voters, Bush did worse among black voters than Bob Dole had done in 1996.

But with less than six months until Election Day, it appears that Bush's handling of the war in Iraq has reinforced among black voters some of the worst impressions of the Republican Party.

<snip>

Seventy-three percent of African Americans in those states disagree that the war in Iraq is worth the U.S. casualties there because the country is safer. Sixty-three percent agree that America should cut its losses and pull out of Iraq right now.

And here's the real kicker. On the question of whether Bush intentionally misled the country, 77 percent agree at least somewhat.

It points out that the people who have died in Iraq are disproportionately from poor communities (black and white).

I wonder if poor whites are making some of the same connections between this statistic and the Bush administration that the Blacks are making.

Also, black unemployment is roughly twice that of whites. I wonder if anyone has made a study of the unemployment rate of the whites from poor communities. My guess is that they are suffering just the way blacks are.

But Bush hopes to keep their votes by appealing to their anti-gay prejudice.

who need a way out that join the military who are paying the price.

The disparity today appears to be based more on class than race. It's difficult to make a good comparison because the Pentagon does not break down casualty information by household income. But there is some evidence that poor whites are shouldering a heavy burden.

Robert Cushing, a retired professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, conducted a study for the Austin American-Statesman newspaper in which he tracked those who died in Iraq by geography. He found whites from small, mostly poor, rural areas were a disproportionately large percentage of the casualties in Iraq.

For instance, people who live in counties with fewer than 50,000 people only make up 14 percent of the U.S. population, but make up 21 percent of the deaths. Cushing said that he and the journalists who studied the trend "came away with the impression that was a way out of those places. These are small, mostly poor communities that are not growing. The opportunities are not great."

To these voters, Iraq means "money is not being spent on health care, education, on jobs," Bositis said. "Look, Bill Clinton wasn't so popular because he had some personality or something like that. African American income increased substantially under Clinton. Now you have double-digit black unemployment and the income growth that took place in the last half of the 90s disappeared."

*sigh*