Analyzing Jeb!Boy
TIME
Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar: Jeb Bush Just Doesn’t Get It
Oct. 7, 2015
Daniel
Acke—2015 Bloomberg Finance LP Jeb Bush, former Governor of Florida and 2016
Republican presidential candidate, speaks during the Scott County Republican
party Ronald Reagan Dinner in Davenport, Iowa, U.S., on Oct. 6, 2015.
TIME columnist Abdul-Jabbar is a
six-time NBA champion and league Most Valuable Player. He is also a celebrated
author, filmmaker and education ambassador.
The
candidate doesn’t understand what African-American voters want
Watching the presidential candidates
over the past couple months has been like watching an old sports movie with a
desperate high school football coach whose best players have been carried out
on stretchers and who must now dig deep into the bench of inexperienced or
incompetent players. Each player he calls jumps up enthusiastically with a “I’m
ready, Coach!” But as they take two steps onto the field, they trip, sprawling
face-first in the dirt and knocking themselves unconscious.
The number of candidates tripping
over their own twisted tongues and taking a dirt header keeps mounting. Carly
Fiorina denounced Planned Parenthood over graphic
abortion video footage she claimed was from the recent dump by Center
for Medical Progress. Many news organizations called her out for
misrepresenting the footage, which was from an undisclosed source and not part
of the Planned Parenthood videos. Medical experts later said the video could
have been a miscarriage. Ben Carson gave a speech at a university claiming that the Big Bang
theory violates the second law of thermodynamics. Not true, says pretty much
every physicist in the world. Donald Trump verbally abuses Mexicans, women,
reporters, and anyone else who questions his scorched-earth march to
Washington.
Et tu, Jeb Bush?
One might understand the lunkheaded
statements by the first three because they have never held political office and
therefore treat voters more like quivering employees who must agree or get
fired. Bush, however, should have known better when he face-planted into the
turf with this statement meant to lure African-American voters
to the GOP: “Our message is one of hope and aspiration. It isn’t one of
division and get in line and we’ll take care of you with free stuff. Our
message is one that is uplifting — that says you can achieve earned success. We
are on your side.”
Nothing is more refreshing or
endearing to African-Americans than when a rich, privileged, white politician
born into a political dynasty who never had nor ever will have to worry about
money for the rest of his life, lectures us on what we want and how we think.
Thank you, Bwana Jeb. If only Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X had been
so eloquent and insightful, we could have gotten off the “free stuff” cold
turkey (unless the free stuff included a turkey).
While he’s at it, perhaps Bush can
help Sigmund Freud, who said: “The great question that has never been
answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years
of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” Don’t worry,
Sig-man, Jeb has got your back because he definitely knows what they don’t
need. “I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues,”
he said a few months ago.
Remember, as governor of Florida,
Bush took money from Planned Parenthood and gave it to abstinence-only education programs, which studies have shown to be ineffective. Even
members of his own party worry over Bush’s attempts to out-Trump Trump as the
GOP’s worst fumblemouth. In August, Politico reported this statement from GOP operative Craig Robinson:
“Every time Bush has stuck his foot in his mouth, it’s been a ‘Clean up on
Aisle 3’ moment. I think it shows a real lack of message discipline with Bush.
We’ve seen more errors out of Jeb Bush this campaign than most of the other
candidates.”
Lest we mistakenly think Bush’s
characterization of freebie-lovin’ blacks was just a one-time slip, he said pretty much the same thing in his 1996 book,
Profiles in Character: “The surest way to get
something in today’s society is to elevate one’s status to that of the
oppressed. Many of the modern victim movements — the gay rights movement, the
feminist movement, the black empowerment movement — have attempted to get
people to view themselves as part of a smaller group deserving of something
from society. It is a major deviation from the society envisioned by Martin
Luther King.” Oh, Marty, he zinged you there, my man. Except for the fact that
Bush is talking about something entirely different than what Dr. King meant.
Dr. King wanted everyone to have equal opportunity, but knew for that to happen
in a society with an infrastructure of institutional racism, civil rights laws
and government programs would be necessary to help even the playing field. Not
free stuff, but freedom to thrive.
This “free stuff” was just Jeb Bush
dusting off the long-disproved myth of the Black Welfare Mother in a desperate
effort to appeal to conservatives before his campaign vanishes for good. Based
on Bush’s statement, his book should have been titled Profiles in Caricature
because there is no evidence, as he was suggesting, that providing welfare,
Medicare, food stamps, or low-cost phones has any effect on low-income blacks
voting for Democrats.
African-Americans may be more likely
to be influenced by how much each party supports racial equality. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that only 38% of
conservative Republicans (and 42% of all Republicans) believe the U.S. needs to
continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites. This is in
sharp contrast to 78% of all Democrats who think we need to make changes to achieve
racial equality.
Perhaps Bush also believes in ending
the government’s “free stuff” to middle and upper class people in the form of
assistance to pay mortgage interest. Following his own logic, Bush’s plan
to cut taxes is like giving free money in an effort to
buy/rent/lease voters. Everybody likes free stuff (hear me, Tesla Motors), and
every politician offers free stuff in one form or another, but most
voters—Republicans and Democrats alike—will vote according to their principles.
Bush’s statement is much more
significant than just denigrating blacks. By perpetuating the myth of black
voters as (1) willing to sell their vote for “free stuff” and (2) being too
dumb to understand the larger political context in choosing a candidate to
support, Bush has shown us his own “Profile in Lack of Character.” If he
doesn’t know the research that prove his description to be false, then he’s
tragically uninformed when formulating his political agenda. If he does know
the facts, then he’s deliberately misrepresenting them in order to perpetuate
racist stereotypes to grub for conservative votes. Either way, it calls into
question his leadership ability.
Bush continued his eloquent “stuff”
motif a few days ago after the shooting massacre at the Umpqua Community
College in Oregon when he said: “Look, stuff happens. There’s always a crisis and the
impulse is always to do something, and it’s not necessarily the right thing to
do.” Again, Bush demonstrated not only his insensitivity but also his
inactivity. Clearly, he was cautioning against gun control, which would
alienate his conservative targets, but he offered no alternate suggestions for
the 994 mass shootings in 1,004 days in the U.S. How
much time does he need before he suggests some plan of action?
Jeb Bush’s lack of compassion or
street-level economics reminds me of Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) in Quentin
Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. He’s one of a group of bank
robbers having breakfast at a restaurant before pulling a heist. As they divide
the bill, Mr. Pink refuses to tip the waitress because he doesn’t believe in tipping
(giving her free stuff). When the rest of the criminals argue, he doesn’t
budge. When Mr. Blue says, “You don’t care if they’re counting on your tips to
live?” Mr. Pink rubs two fingers together and says, “You know what this is? The
world’s smallest violin playing just for the waitresses.”
This finger-rubbing concert mocking
the working people is the kind of mute music of political expediency that this
country doesn’t deserve.
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