President Bush and Blacks

President Bush’s domestic signature in 2000 was “compassionate conservatism,” resulting in two domestic initiatives: No Child Left Behind and “faith-based” outreach to the poor, writes Mona Charen.

In other words the Republican president was concentrating his programmatic domestic agenda not on helping and paying off Republican voters but on trying to make a dent in the awful mess in the underclass.

So black and poverty leaders are ecstatic, right? Can’t get enough of the compassionate conservative George W. Bush?

Er no. Quite the opposite. Of course, this is nothing new. Black leaders didn’t like Reagan and Bush 39.

But from the beginning, George W. Bush was painted as the devil by many black leaders. It’s remarkable that this was so, considering Mr. Bush’s steadfast and unwavering interest in the poor and minorities, but there it is.

Now, of course the results are in and test scores are up in inner-city schools.

Education Week reported last month that student achievement in math and reading has risen over the past several years, with particularly strong improvements noted among fourth-graders in both subjects. Significantly, the gap between minorities and other students has narrowed.

Where’s the grudging acknowledgement of respect? Well, it’s nowhere, of course.

The thing is this. We conservatives don’t expect to get an even break from traditional Democratic groups, even when we go out of our way to help the poor and the marginalized. So we console oursleves with the notion that we do the right thing anyway.

But when political activists and voters don’t recognize and don’t understand who is helping them and who is hindering there is a price to be paid. The price, of course, does not get paid by the suits. It gets paid by the poor and the vulnerable. And that’s worse than a shame. It’s an injustice.