Bush seizes the opportunity — to talk about the estate tax

July 20, 2006

After a five-year boycott, the president finally addressed the [tag]NAACP[/tag] today. While [tag]Bush[/tag] emphasized his desire to “change the relationship” between the Republican Party and African Americans, he had to stretch matters a bit to show how his concerns coincide with those of the African-American community.

“You know, one of my friends is Bob Johnson, founder of BET. He’s an interesting man. He believes strongly in ownership. He has been a successful owner. He believes strongly, for example, that the death tax will prevent future African American entrepreneurs from being able to pass their assets from one generation to the next. He and I also understand that the investor class shouldn’t be just confined to the old definition of the investor class.”

Seriously, the [tag]estate tax[/tag]? As Nico noted, literally only 59 African Americans will pay the estate tax this year, which will drop to only 33 people in 2009.

And while Bush is trying to sell the NAACP on his concern for “entrepreneurs,” nearly one-in-four African Americans live below the poverty line. The president who no longer likes to talk about poverty kept up his streak today, failing to mention it at all.

On Tuesday, the NYT noted that Republican outreach to African Americans in the Bush years has been an abject failure. Perhaps Bush’s emphasis on the estate tax today offers another hint why.

Does anyone else see flashbacks of the Colbert joke “Here’s a picture of me with my black friend, Alan” when Bush talks about his friendship with Bob Johnson?

  • LOL TL. Is that the picture where they had to snip out Colin Powell?

    Maybe this estate tax incident was Bush’s Sista Soljah moment. Naw, he’s just stupid.

  • CB writes: “As Nico noted, literally only 59 African Americans will pay the estate tax this year…”

    That’s what Bush means when he says “some of my best friends are black.”

  • The folks at the NAACP know all about the ownership society. Generations of their ancestors were owned by other people. Talk about finding a good park to knock a few home runs out of. Way to go George.

  • The man is totally clueless. And he’s the president. It doesn’t deserve a capital P with chickengeorge.

  • “Bush seems to think everyone is a small business.” – doubtful

    Actually that would be:

    “Bush seems to think everyone else is a small business.”

  • I think he must have choked on that pretzel for longer than anyone wants to talk about. Lord, Lord, and people thought the parents were out of touch; this guy is pathetic.

  • i’ve been thinking about this for a while, but it was never fully baked. it continues not to be, but here goes anyway. Bush likes to throw around that word, ownership, as in “He believes strongly in ownership”, and sees it as a panacea of some sort. Thus his “ownership society” nonsense. Dems should get into the habit of contrasting that with “opportunity society”, and put all their programs in the context of developing that paradigm. Will it be a perfect fit, probably not, but who cares it’s catchy, and it’s a nice contrast to “ownership.” I think it also gets at an essential difference between our worldviews. Theirs entrenches and strengthens the existing order (for worse, usually, but admittedly sometimes for better), while ours looks to create a more perfect order (for better usually, but sometimes naively, and sometimes with some negative consequences, but that’s all nuance.)

  • actually, natan, you may have come up with something really really big. one of the best ways to deflate there meme would be to belittle it in non-sarcastic, very responsible sort of way. you know they will run on the Ownership Society – they have to, it is in their blue blood, and it is the thread the ties their disparate programs.

    but our use of Opportunity Society may allow us to do the political ju jitsu much like the Dole-Clinton convention speeches (Dole: “I want to build a bridge to our great past. . .” Clinton: “The Republicans want to be a bridge to the past; I want to build a bridge to our future.” Clinton – game, set and match).

    They want big investors, the people who gave you Enron, to own your retirement fund. We want to give every American an opportunity to retire in economic security.

    They want to own your vote, and they think they can buy it for a paltry $300 rebate check, and turn around and resell it to Jack Abramoff or the highest bidder. We want every American to have the opportunity to make their vote count through honest elections and campaign finance reform.

    They want corporations to own you – your health, your work, your time. We want to create an opportunity for every American to succeed on their own terms, to be able to spend time with their families, to care for their loved ones.

    They want religion to own government and government to own religion. We want every American to have the opportunity to worship in the faith of their choosing in their own way, and without government intrusion.

    They want to own the minority populations in this great melting pot, tying immigration to being a “guest worker” for their corporate friends. We want all who respond to the Statue of Liberty’s call to those yearning to breathe free to find opportunity here to work hard, play by the rules, and enjoy the same opportunities as every other American, the same chance at the American Dream, regardless of the color of their skin, the language they speak, or the country they came from.

    They want to own your emotions, because when they own your fears they have you in their control. We want every American to have the opportunity to live in a world of hope and peace and prosperity, to have the opportunity to feel safe and secure in their homes, on their streets, in their jobs, and in this world.

    Once you get started, you can kind of go on all night. . . 🙂

  • How about instead of “opportunity society” – FROM PLUTOCRACY TO DEMOCRACY –
    My husband says no one would know what a plutocracy was. We’re all living in one! It’s time people were educated as to the meaning.

  • Once you get started, you can kind of go on all night. .

    Please do. I was starting to get inspired. Seriously.

    GOP = Ownership

    DEM = Opportunity

    I love the contrast. I hope Dean has someone on his staff reading this blog…

  • forget about “plutocracy’ – we are trying to connect with a vast majority, not the minority of the well educated…(which would be a bridge to OUR past…rather than the future…)

  • Way off topic, and I’m CB will have much to say on this tomorrow. However, this is huge news and good news.

    The Bush adminstration suffered an enormous defeat today, as a federal district court denied its motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, which alleges that the administration’s NSA warrantless eavesdropping program (and AT&T’s cooperation with it) is illegal. Most significantly, the district court, which is in the Northern District of California, rejected the administration’s claim that allowing the litigation to proceed would jeopardize the disclosure of “state secrets,” a doctrine which the administration has repeatedly exploited to prevent judicial review of its conduct. Traditionally, courts almost always defer to the executive’s invocation of that claim and accept the President’s claim that national security requires dismissal of the case. But this time, the court rejected that claim.

  • One more thing about the ownership society – if you, compared to the super rich, see yourself falling further and further behind, and you decide the only way to catch up is to own more of the things they own, and you decide to jump in to the housing market for fear of being left behind…how exactly are you an “owner” if you put no money down, and took out an interest only loan????

  • “But this court scrutinized the claim quite thoroughly, and expressed real skepticism over the administration’s assertions that national security prevents any court from determining if the law is being violated as a result of warrantless eavesdropping.”
    G. Greenwald (from rege’s link)

    Be still my beating heart. Just look at what ShrubCo has done to me. I’m in love with a district court.

  • It seems that Johnson and Bush may not still be friends. This is from October of 2004

    President Bush has turned down an offer to be interviewed on Black Entertainment Television, and BET founder Robert L. Johnson, who extended the invitation, apparently is taking it personally. “After more than a month of waiting, BET finally got an answer from President George W. Bush to a formal invitation to address African-American voters in his own primetime BET NIGHTLY NEWS interview on the network. The answer is no,” begins a BET news release.

    The rebuff also led the BET.com Web site.
    The news release continued, “BET Founder and CEO Robert Johnson first issued invitations to both President Bush and Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) on September 14. He asked each of them to appear on the network to discuss issues of relevance to BET viewers during this crucial stretch of the 2004 Presidential Election campaign. Senator Kerry accepted, and his half-hour interview was televised on October 7. But according to representatives of the White House, President Bush’s current schedule will not allow time for him to appear on BET, and they asked that the network approach him again, ‘after the election.’
    “In response to the Bush decline, Mr. Johnson has sent an open letter to top African Americans in the Bush Administration which includes Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Education Rod Paige, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson; along with former Oklahoma Republican Congressman J. C. Watts, who is leading a grassroots group of African-American Republicans supporting the Bush re-election effort.”

    The DailyNews also had the story. Now I didn’t find any stories about Bush and Johnson mending fences. Therefore I will assume that they are still on the outs. It appears that Bush was too thick skinned to notice or he found it convenient to lie about the friendship.

    Also, I like natan’s idea and Zeitgiest’s expansion on it.

  • Also, Natan, your opportunity oriented theme has real merit. But RepubCo’s retort will be that Dems want the opportunity to tax and overregulate and abort and all the other red herrings they can dredge up as usual. Doesn’t mean it can’t be used. The “opportunities” are obvious. But the biggest reason RepubCo sloganeering works is that the whole bunch reads their talking points and stays on topic like the robopoodles they are. Just look at Shruby today talking to the NAACP about the ownership society. And vouchers and social security. Of all the places you might think he would get off message just for the symbolic B.S. of it all. But they are pathologically trained to stay on message. He’s a f**kwit but he knows the Party line and he sticks to it like hot gum.

    If Dems can not only adopt the basic proposition(s) of an Opportunity Society, (whatever that ends up being), but adopt it so thoroughly that there are instant and credible comebacks for the inevitable RepubCo nastiness such a civilized concept will generate, then there could be some real potential. But are Democrats that are that disciplined still Democrats? It would be a sight to behold.

  • Re: Ownership vs Opportunity society (I, too, love natan’s — at #10 — idea of starkly juxtaposing the two concepts), one more comment:

    In an Ownership Society, especially so superficially treated as the Bu..Sh.. administration is doing, we get an ever increasing chasm between the haves and the have-nots (Tony Snow’s crap claims notwithstanding). At the same time, we have the human nature (never forget the human nature; communists did and see where it got them ) and the desire to “keep up with the Joneses”.

    So OK. Put the two together, then deny people the Opportunity to satisfy that (natural) desire legally… You end up spending bigger and bigger percentage of the nation’s funds on building bigger and better prisons, because you’re incarcerating more and more small-time owner-wanna-bes. Which, in turn, leaves less and less of the “pie” to be divided among those who are not yet ready to smash and grab.

    So… In the long-range… Are republicans soft on crime? Crime -enablers?

  • Agreed.
    Sweet ideas @ nathan & Zeitgeist

    On another tack:

    Can “B” continue to outdo himself?

    He has 913 days left.

    Is it humanly possible to continue to make a bigger ass of yourself day after day for that long?

    What will tomorrow will bring?

    Truly we are witnessing rare maleficent genius at play here.

    People of the future will wonder what it was like to be alive during the “B” years.

    To wit:

    “Great grandparent… was it a comedy or a tragedy? Did you laugh or did you cry?”

    “Child… we counted down the days. Some of us took up prayer even though we doubted its efficacy. Many of us vented ourselves in electronic print. But mostly, we shook our heads and snorted in shocked shame… that such a worthless cur as this, had risen to such high office.”

  • Please excuse this as being off topic, but I really feel every American should read this. If you have any doubts that the mess in Israel and Lebanon is leading to Iran.

    Jpost article-it’s about Iran

    CB, please, look at this if you can too.
    I hope my link works.

  • Opportunity Society is great!

    Just remember, if it catches on that we heard first here at the Carpetbagger Report.

    I like burro’s “robopoodles” too. I got a laugh out of that one because it’s so true.

    c’mere little puppy, bring daddy the slippers. arf arf arf

  • rege at #15 –

    and before any of those yahoos start screaming “activist liberal judges!” let it be known far and wide that the district judge was first nominated by Reagan, held up by the Dems, and re-nominated by Bush 41. At the time of his nomination, major media described him as an “independent-minded COnservative”

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