UNITY 2004

'My Pet Goat' splits Kerry from Bush
 
WASHINGTON - The sitting U.S. president and his challenger brought their road-show stump speeches to the largest group of black, Latino, Asian and Native American journalists ever convened in the republic.
Unity convention participants forsook their newsrooms to tackle the problem of their under-representation in the media industry. White managers plagued by an inability to spot, train and promote talent outside their majority tribe might have found the antidote among the 8,000 journalists gathered in the nation's capital.
"The bylines I read, the people I see on TV don't sound like me," said Newsday's Mae Cheng, president of the Asian-American Journalists Association. "And, if I notice it, many readers and viewers notice it as well." And so, for the third time in 10 years, this rainbow consortium put their shoulders to the wheel. "We want to participate fully and equally at every level," said Herb Lowe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists and also of Newsday. "We want to work on the big stories."
Since Unity don't go to the Big Story, the Big Story came to Unity. On successive days, President George W. Bush and John Kerry, the candidates of pallor, addressed what Kerry called the "special challenges facing people of color."
Each Skull-and Bones Yale man wore a dark suit with red-patterned silk about his neck and the American flag peeping from the left lapel. Their eyes were deep set, though Kerry had the advantage here, as he did with the big hair. But the difference in the message and what is known of their records got Kerry a much warmer reception.
Kerry wooed the ethically mixed convention with fluent Spanish, the spectre of Frederick Douglass, support for Filipino war veterans and a flat promise that he would appoint a Native American to a job in the White House. Not for nothing had Kerry trucked with the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose debate lines he borrowed to attack the "50-percent unemployment rate among African-American males." Kerry may not have stooped to pander but he certainly bent a knee.
Mainly, the challenger stuck to his game plan, aligning his crosshairs more clearly on his quarry. Fixing Bush as something of a sham 2000 victor, Kerry fired his toughest shot to date. Sketching the context of President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act four decades ago, Kerry quoted LBJ as saying, "In many places in this country, men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes."
"The harsh fact," Kerry continued, "is that in the last election more than 1 million African-Americans were disenfranchised in one of the most tainted elections in our history."
Bush got a reflected chance to engage the concept Friday when columnist Roland Martin asked: "Mr. President, you said that 8 million people in Afghanistan registered to vote. In 2000 an estimated 2 million people, half African-American, had their votes discounted, from Florida to Cook County, Illinois, to other cities. Are you going to order Attorney General John Ashcroft to send federal election monitors to Florida and other Southern states?"
After offering sympathy for blacks' legitimate historic concerns about disfranchisement, the president cited legislation authorizing $3 billion "to help states and local government to make sure the voting process is fair . . . It's not just the South, by the way. The voting process needs help all over the country to make sure everybody's vote counts . . . Just don't focus on Florida. I'll talk to the governor down there to make sure it works."
This last remark brought down the house in laughter. Among the twitter, however, there was, deep down, especially, and perhaps only, among the blacks, an echo of that most mournful sound of laughter uttered to keep from crying.
Yet, Kerry's most telling blow landed on Bush most directly. In response to a question, Kerry was allowed to place himself in the president's chair in that second-grade classroom in Florida on Sept. 11, 2001.
When the second terror jet smashed into the World Trade Center, Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered the tragic news into Bush's ear. The commander in chief stayed on message with the unknowing second graders around him. He fidgeted in his seat. At one point he seemed on the verge of raising his hand for a toilet break. Finally, after a full seven minutes - with WTC office workers leaping to certain death - the critical moment arrived for Bush. He read his assigned section of "My Pet Goat."
Kerry told the Unity convention that, as commander in chief, he would have acted differently. "Had I been reading to children and my top aide whispered in my ear that America was under attack, I would have told the kids very politely and nicely that the president of the United States has something he needed to attend to." Kerry sounded sincere.

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