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Friday, December 31, 2004 - 03:28 PM
However no credit from the Left on most culturally diverse Presidential cabinet in history
By Rebecca Clark
* To read more about the Bios of President Bush’s appointments to cabinet for his second term, refer to the links at the end of the story.
What is the Left to make of the uncomfortable reality that George Bush has quietly put together the most diverse cabinet in American history? Rejected by a majority of black, Hispanic, and female voters in both 2000 and 2004, Bush has appointed the nation’s first Hispanic attorney general in Alberto Gonzales who remains unconfirmed, the first black female Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, the first black Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the first black education secretary, Rod Paige.
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In his first term, Bush’s Cabinet equaled Clinton’s in numbers of women and people of color. For his second term, Bush has appointed Margaret Spellings as his domestic policy advisor and Cuban-born Carlos Gutierrez to head the Commerce Department. Two Asian-Americans, Elaine Chao in the Labor Department and Norman Mineta in Transportation, will remain from the first term. Alphonso Jackson, an African-American, has been appointed to Housing.
Most notably, Bush has been the first president to fill his inner circle with women and minorities. Powell, Rice, and Gonzales are the first minorities to ever hold any of the four top Cabinet positions—State, Defense, Justice and Treasury—and former White House aide Karen Hughes remains a close advisor. Yet the typical voices who would be praising a president for his promotion of minority persons to top positions—the NAACP and NOW and for example—have nary uttered a comment, much less praise.
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Of course, Bush’s relationship with civil rights groups has been very rocky, particularly that with the NAACP, whom Bush declined to address—the first president since Warren Harding to do so. As Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times notes, Bush’s minority appointees have not tended to take conventional “pro-minority stances”—support for affirmative action, the conventional bellwether (rightly or wrongly) of minority advocacy, as well as funding of federal housing, small business, and other programs.
Yet if Kerry had won, supporters would surely herald his appointment of the country’s first black, female Secretary of State as a milestone in the history of racial and gender equality. Bush’s record of appointing minorities to top positions deserves greater recognition than most liberals can stomach to give, but his Kodak-moment Cabinet is only part of the story.
Critics note that, below the Cabinet level, Bush has appointed a smaller proportion of blacks and women than Clinton. A Newsday analysis in August 2004 found that blacks held 7% of administration jobs in Bush’s first term and women 36%. Under Clinton, in comparison, blacks held 16% of positions and women 44%. Both Clinton and the latter Bush’s numbers far exceed those of Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
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Of course, Bush must also be judged according to the substance of his policies, a task that I will not attempt to undertake here. What interests me most is that the racial and gender diversity of the Bush Cabinet belies the singularity of mind favored by Bush, especially in his second term. The premise underlying promotion of “diversity” is that persons from varied backgrounds will bring a “diversity of approaches,” as Deggans puts it, to their work. The fact that Condoleeza Rice is a black woman doesn’t change the fact that she is being sent to the State Department first and foremost for her loyalty to the President. “Yes men,” it turns out, can be women too.
Rice, moreover, is widely perceived to have botched her duties as National Security Advisor, presenting the infamous flawed intelligence on Iraq to her boss as fact. Just as women, blacks, and other minorities should be considered just as capable as white males, they are also equally capable of incompetence. Equality is a package deal. In getting exactly what was supposedly wanted—an administration that “looks like America”—liberals are still stuck with a Cabinet that is all Bush. The deeper reason behind the silence on “Bush diversity” is recognition of its superficiality.
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Ironically, diversity “Bush-style” fails by the very definition that conservatives themselves have argued for in the past two decades, that of diversity of opinion. Especially in the academic world, where Left-leaners typically dominate and have at times squelched conservative viewpoints, groups like Students for Academic Freedom frequently criticize—and not without cause—the lack of “intellectual pluralism” on American campuses, of a lofty rhetoric of tolerance and diversity alongside a cavalier attitude towards suppression of political minority voices.
While the university certainly calls for a more thoroughgoing atmosphere of debate than does the executive branch of the federal government, surely conservatives’ notion of what diversity means does not differ fundamentally from one arena to the next. Conservatives must acknowledge that Bush has bought into, at least for political purposes, the same superficial understanding of “diversity” for which they malign the Left.
Even in his first term, Bush hesitated to surround himself with any potential dissenters. His appointment of one Democrat, Norman Mineta, as Transportation Secretary, was a lone, rather token gesture at the bipartisanship he promised during his campaign. Clinton had Republican Bill Cohen in one of the top Cabinet posts, Defense.
Bush’s appointment of pro-choice Republican Christine Todd Whitman in 2000 was touted by some as proving the President’s willingness to embrace a “diversity” of viewpoints on abortion. Whitman did express reservations with Bush’s environmental agenda and did not last very long in the office.
Most disturbing is a report by Brian Newkirk in the DLC’s Blueprint that potential nominees for all manner of federal posts under the Bush administration, the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse for example, have been subjected to a pro-life litmus test. The President has tightened up his team even more for his second term; Cabinet members are either fully complicit in the President’s agenda-vision or, well… gone. After all, the story of mass exodus from the Bush administration is at least as noteworthy as that of the many minority appointees.
Ultimately, the lack of fanfare for Bush’s minority appointments—or any future president’s for that matter—may be a testament to the progress we have made as a nation towards equality of opportunity. Ideally, there should be nothing remarkable about a Hispanic attorney general or an African-American female Secretary of State, even one appointed by a Republican. Paul Light, a political scientist at New York University who studies presidential appointments, suggests that Bush’s appointments have helped establish the idea that “this is just the way we're going to do business." As USA Today’s Susan Page puts it, “Bush's… matter-of-fact approach to [his appointments] signals a new stage in the racial history of the nation, one in which diversity in the top ranks is taken as a matter of course.” Bush has not been as vocal as his predecessor in touting the diversity of his cabinet, but in his address to the National Urban League he did say he was “proud” his record of appointments.
That the number of Republican minorities is increasing—Bush won twice as many Hispanic votes in 2004 as 2000 for example—is problematic for the Democratic party, which has historically counted blacks, Hispanics, women, Jews, and Native-Americans among its core constituents, but we must also see the retreat of identity-based politics as evidence of progress in racial equality. At the very least, is it not a sign of moral victory when your opponent co-opts your message?
Look for new entries in QueenCityForum.com daily and weekly, including “The Singles” issued each week. “The Singles” are stories and columns to be featured in the next edition of QCF magazine.
Links
· St. Petersburg Times --- “Will Cabinet Diversity Make Any Difference?”
· Newsday.com --- "Bush Not Strong on Diversity”
· Center for American Progress --- “Alberto Gonzalez: A Record of Injustice”
· Whitehouse.gov --- “President Bush nominates Margaret Spellings as Seceretary of Education”
· The Washington Post --- “Gutierrez is Pick for Commerce Seceretary”
· Students for Academic Freedom
· Blueprint --- “Political Science, Bush Style”
· Success Factors: Elaine Chow
· Opensecrets.org --- “George Bush’s Cabinet Norman Mineta”
· ProgressiveGovernment.org --- “Policy Watch: Alphonso Jackson”
Contact Information
· rebeccac@queencityforum.com
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