-Caveat Lector- Bush's political lynching The president has created the most diverse administration in history. So why does the race-baiting left continue to plant anti-Republican paranoia in black communities? - - - - - - - - - - - - By David Horowitz May 7, 2001 | One hundred days into the Bush administration, few would deny that Washington is a changed town. In contrast to Bill Clinton -- a political quick-change artist without regrets -- the new president has already made good on the two principal campaign promises he made to voters during the recent election: a large tax refund to citizens overcharged for the expense of government, and a change of tone in the nation's capital. In other words, policy-wise, George W. Bush is as good as his word. Bush has also delivered on the political front, appointing the most diverse Cabinet in the nation's history and establishing "compassionate" issues like education and support for faith-based charities as government priorities. In fact, in the first 100 days both the president and his Cabinet have done more to reach out to minorities and citizens left behind than any Republican administration since that of Abraham Lincoln. Those of us who voted for Bush can take confidence and pride in this aspect of his governance, too. That is the Washington aspect of the story. But out in the country, the signs are not so encouraging and the future looks less bright. Bush may have changed the tone in Washington for the better. But in the rest of the nation, Democrats have continued to change it for the worse. Just after the Florida election drama drew to a close, an African-American staffer for one of the Republican House leaders was having a Christmas dinner with his family, when his 12-year-old niece asked this question: "Now that Bush has been elected president, am I going to be treated as three-fifths of a human being?" The same anecdote with slight variations has been reported from all ends of the country. A teacher at a rural black elementary school in South Carolina e-mailed and told me that her students were asking essentially the same question: Now that Bush was president, would they be made slaves again? In the April 30 issue of the Weekly Standard, Eric Cohen reports taking a group of black fourth and fifth graders from a Washington housing project to an outing in the nation's capital. The trip was taken just after the Inauguration. A few days earlier, a man had been arrested for firing shots at the White House. Cohen asked the children what they thought of their new president. "When I heard about the shooting I was pretty happy," said one of the boys with a laugh. "I thought Bush might have got shot." Other comments were just as bitter. "President Bush is going to put us all back in slavery." "He's going to round up all the black people and kill them." Where on earth could these black youngsters be getting ideas like that? The Democratic Party perhaps? The Democratic Party's presidential candidate? The leadership of the civil rights movement? The inescapable answer is this: all three. During the campaign, the Democratic Party and the NAACP sponsored millions of dollars of ads on television and black radio accusing Bush of supporting hate crimes like the lynching of James Byrd Jr., incarcerating "75 percent of minority youth in Texas" and maliciously executing blacks and Hispanics on death row. It was Al Gore who, in an election campaign attack on Bush's alleged judicial preferences, repeated the libel claiming that the framers of the Constitution regarded a black person as "three-fifths of a human being." (This is one of the most widely believed myths in black America today. In fact, it was not "blacks" as such, who were so designated but slaves -- there were thousands of free blacks -- and it was the anti-slavery Framers who insisted on the three-fifths figure in order to diminish the electoral power of the slave South.) And it was Democratic and NAACP spokesmen in Florida who described the voting booth mess as a "return to slavery." In sum, every element of the anti-Republican paranoia rampant in African-American communities throughout this nation was deliberately planted there by the Democratic Party and the civil rights leadership. Nor did the racial slanders end with Bush's election. The nomination of John Ashcroft for attorney general was turned into a star chamber proceeding reminiscent of 17th century Salem, when a man without blemish on his public record was interrogated as though he was a modern day witch: Mr. Ashcroft, are you now or have you ever been pro-slavery? Has everyone lost their senses? Slavery has been dead for 136 years, and there has never been a movement to revive it. Thousands of free African-Americans actually fought for the Confederacy, yet John Ashcroft was nearly denied the position of attorney general because in an interview with an obscure historical journal he praised the loyalty of Confederate leaders to their cause! The fact is, that in the nation's public political arena, we have lost our senses. Or, rather, have been beaten senseless by the racial McCarthyism of the left. Republicans -- and others -- had better learn how to combat this latter-day witch-hunting hysteria or surrender the fight in advance to any political opponent who is willing to employ a race-baiting attack. Ashcroft is now paying penitential visits to black churches to demonstrate that he really isn't a witch. He has announced that eliminating "racial profiling" -- a principal demand of the race-baiting left -- will be a top Justice Department priority. Will this political appeasement of his persecutors work? The visits to black churches are good in themselves -- it's time that Republicans reached out in a big way to African-American communities. But they will not buy Ashcroft peace. Not unless he surrenders to the left and gives up his conservative ideas. The same rule applies to the Bush administration, which has also signed on to the campaign against "racial profiling." Bush is a good and decent man, and there is not a racist bone in his body. There is more racial animus in a single speech of NAACP president Kweisi Mfume or Jesse Jackson or Rev. Al Sharpton than in all the words that George W. Bush has uttered in his entire life. Yet these men, and the Democratic Party, have willfully caused black children all over America to think of Bush as a "racist" who would put them back in chains. This will not go away with symbolic gestures like visiting churches or genuflections to left-wing causes like ending "racial profiling." 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