George Bush is our Bull Connor

[hoosier]

Rangel's 'Revolution'
"Comparing President Bush to the Birmingham, Ala., police commissioner whose resistance to the civil rights movement became synonymous with Southern racism, Rep. Charles Rangel said yesterday of the president: 'George Bush is our Bull Connor,'_" the New York Sun reports from Washington:

Mr. Rangel's metaphoric linkage of Mr. Bush to the late Theophilus "Bull" Connor--who in 1963 turned fire hoses and attack dogs on blacks, including Martin Luther King Jr., demonstrating in favor of equal rights--met with wild applause and cheering at a Congressional Black Caucus town hall meeting, part of the organization's 35th Annual Legislative Conference._._._.

Mr. Rangel, a Democrat who has represented Harlem for almost 35 years, spent his portion of yesterday's forum reminiscing about the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and calling on his audience to undertake similar action today, inciting them to "revolution" after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and particularly its impact on indigent blacks in the Gulf Coast region.

The storm, he said, showed that "if you're black in this country, and you're poor in this country, it's not an inconvenience--it's a death sentence." Denouncing Mr. Bush for waging "a war that we cannot win under any stretch of our imagination" instead of providing for those devastated by the hurricane, Mr. Rangel left his audience with a parting thought.

"If there's one thing that George Bush has done that we should never forget, it's that for us and for our children, he has shattered the myth of white supremacy once and for all," the congressman said.

At one level this is simply ludicrous, but at another it is troubling. Rangel is out of touch with reality--perhaps dangerously so--if he thinks calling for a racial "revolution" is anything other than a political dead end.

The civil rights movement succeeded--with great difficulty at that--because it appealed to the consciences of white Americans. This was a matter of practical necessity: In a democracy, you cannot bring about change without appealing to the majority. But it was also a matter of the uncomplicated rightness of the desegregationist cause. Winning equal rights for black Americans required overcoming a lot of history, prejudice and fear, but it didn't require overcoming any compelling arguments on the other side, for there were none.

By contrast, issues of race and poverty in America today are far more complicated, involving questions of personal responsibility, governmental ineffectiveness and corruption, and the racial attitudes of blacks as well as--indeed, we'd argue, considerably more than--those of whites.

Rangel's simple-minded approach is utterly inadequate to the task. He suggests President Bush is a racist, notwithstanding Bush's having made poverty a priority. He describes blacks as a passive, downtrodden population, then urges them to "revolution"--but who does he think would support such a revolution?

Oh, Democratic politicians will egg this sort of thing on, hoping to drive up black turnout in the next election, and white liberals will cheer, then pat themselves on the back for caring so much about black people. In other words, Rangel is urging on black America the same approach to politics that has prevailed throughout the post-civil-rights era. If after 40 years blacks remain disproportionately poor and alienated from American society, surely it is time to ask if this approach has been a failure.

- Opinion Journal