On a day when President Bush made a welcome overture to African-Americans at the annual meeting of the NAACP, state Rep. Jim Welker undermined the Republican cause in Colorado with yet another thoughtless gesture.
For five years in a row, Bush had declined to address the civil rights group, but he did so Thursday and said he wants to make a pre-election correction. “For too long, my party wrote off the African-American vote, and many African-Americans wrote off the Republican Party,” he said.
Here in Colorado, we saw a jarring example of why that would be so.
State newspapers carried stories about Welker, a Loveland Republican, circulating an e-mail from that quotes the leader of the Conservative Christians for Reform group that paints African-Americans as morally inferior, saying a post-Katrina bailout mentality is ingrained in “black culture.”
It’s not the first time Welker has engaged in such shameful shenanigans. Welker, who is not running for re-election, calls his activities freedom of speech. It’s also bigotry.
Bush himself isn’t naive on the subject, saying Thursday that he understands that “racism still lingers in America.”
House GOP Leader Mike May was quick to distance himself from Welker’s activity, saying that’s “not what my party is about.” Hans Gullickson, Colorado Republican Party executive director, said Thursday the party disagrees with Welker’s actions and with the e-mail content. “We don’t agree with Jim Welker’s sending that e-mail on or what’s in the e-mail,” Gullickson said.
These rebukes put the GOP in a far more positive light.
The White House faced a measure of cynicism Thursday from skeptics who wondered if the president’s NAACP appearance was a campaign-season effort to atone for the government’s abysmal response to Hurricane Katrina, which so severely affected low-income blacks in New Orleans.
If the president had atonement on his mind, who would blame him? How better to move forward than to meet face-to-face with critics to address common concerns?
The president said in his speech that he met several times with new NAACP head Bruce Gordon about how to recover from Katrina. “We’ve got a plan and we’ve got a commitment,” Bush said. “It’s commitment to the people of the Gulf Coast of the United States to see to it that their lives are brighter and better than before the storm.”
Today the president is making a fundraising trip to Denver, but we can’t help but wonder if the visit is necessary and appropriate. He is the most recent and most prominent in a string of national Republicans who have traveled here to raise money for Rick O’Donnell, the GOP candidate in the 7th Congressional District. It’s an important race and well worth the president’s time, but we think the timing is all wrong. President Bush should consider suspending partisan campaigning for a period in order to focus his administration’s efforts to resolve the crisis in the Middle East.
As casualties mount in Lebanon and Israel, routine fund-raising seems off chord.
The international community is waiting for Washington to advance a plan to end the violence in the region. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is stopping in the region Sunday to drop off a diplomatic team to tackle the matter. (She is en route to Asia.)
Rice is expected to travel beforehand to the United Nations to confer with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan about an eventual cease-fire.
We hope the president will accelerate diplomatic efforts to bring an end to hostilities that could escalate into a more dangerous war. President Bush has identified, in earthy fashion, the need for Syria to exert a positive influence, and it is time to press the matter forcefully.
