Hard Bigotry of No
Expectations
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web, September 25, 2005
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.
(Emphasis Added)
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