Editorial -- New York Times
September 25, 2005
Hard Bigotry of No Expectations
Throughout his campaigns in 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush talked about "the
soft bigotry of low expectations": the mind-set that tolerates poor school
performance and dead-end careers for minority students on the presumption
that they are incapable of doing better. Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice said recently that this phrase attracted her to Mr. Bush more than
anything else.
It was, indeed, a brilliant encapsulation of so much of what is wrong with
American education. But while Mr. Bush has been worrying about low
expectations in schools, he's been ratcheting the bar downward himself on
almost everything else.
The president's recent schedule of nonstop disaster-scene photo-ops is
reminiscent of the principal of a failing school who believes he's doing a
great job because he makes it a point to drop in on every class play and
teacher retirement party. And if there ever was an exhibit of the misguided
conviction that for some people very little is good enough, it's the
current administration spin that the proposed Iraqi constitution is fine
because the founding fathers didn't give women equal rights either.
The lack of expectations is evident even in areas where the president is
supposed to be deeply engaged. The Treasury Department's hollowed-out
leadership structure suggests an administration that is happy to coast
along with a gentleman's C for handling the nation's finances. But it has
been most graphically, and tragically, on display in Iraq and in the
response to Hurricane Katrina.
Four years after 9/11, Katrina showed the world that performance standards
for the Department of Homeland Security were so low that it was not
required to create real plans to respond to real disasters. Only a
president with no expectation that the federal government should step up
after a crisis could have stripped the Federal Emergency Management Agency
bare, appointed as its director a political crony who could not even
adequately represent the breeders of Arabian horses, and announced that the
director was doing a splendid job while bodies floated in the floodwaters.
Only a president who does not expect the government to help provide decent
housing for the truly needy in normal times could leave seven of the top
jobs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development vacant and then,
after disaster struck, offer small-bore solutions to enormous problems.
Substandard wages, an easing of affirmative action regulation and a housing
lottery that will help a tiny sliver of people apparently are considered
good enough for poor families along the Gulf Coast left homeless by
Katrina.
In Iraq, the elimination of expectations is on display in the disastrous
political process. Among other things, the constitution drafted under
American supervision does not provide for the rights of women and
minorities and enshrines one religion as the fundamental source of law.
Administration officials excuse this poor excuse for a constitution by
saying it also refers to democratic values. But it makes them secondary to
Islamic law and never actually defines them. Our founding fathers had
higher expectations: they made the split of church and state fundamental,
and spelled out what they meant by democracy and the rule of law.
It's true that the United States Constitution once allowed slavery, denied
women the right to vote and granted property rights only to white men. But
it's offensive for the administration to use that as an excuse for the
failings of the Iraqi constitution. The bar on democracy has been raised
since 1787. We don't agree that the 218-year-old standard is good enough
for Iraq.
Since his failure to notice the Katrina disaster, Mr. Bush has stopped
bragging that he doesn't read or watch the news. If he's paying attention
now, he should get a message from the outrage over Katrina and shrinking
support for his policies in Iraq: The American public has much higher
expectations than he does for the president and his government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/opinion/25sun1.html
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