Bush promises to confront poverty

The president’s plea for America to “renew our promise as a land of equality and decency,” issued during a national prayer service for storm victims, followed his promise of the night before “to confront this poverty with bold action.”

Some black leaders took a wait-and-see attitude.

“I feel his language is encouraging — he seems to be discovering a reality, the same reality that I see,” said NAACP President Bruce Gordon. “Now what we need to see is whether he will use the George Bush-style conviction to eliminate poverty.”

The images of storm victims, particularly in New Orleans, spending days waiting for food, water and rescue in miserable shelter conditions exposed the region’s persistent, racially rooted poverty and disturbed many around the country. A recent AP-Ipsos poll showed more than a third of Americans felt deeply that the government would have responded more quickly if most of the victims had not been poor and black. Among blacks, the percentage feeling that way shot up to 75 percent.

Bishop T.D. Jakes, the best-selling black author and head of the 30,000-member Potter’s House church in Dallas, on Friday called upon Americans not to rest until the poor are raised to an acceptable living standard and to be willing to “love them enough to pay the bill.”

“We can no longer be a nation that overlooks the poor and the suffering,” Jakes said, delivering the sermon at the National Cathedral prayer service before Bush spoke. “Katrina, perhaps, she has done something to this nation that needed to be done.”

Bush did not directly tie any of the storm relief proposals he offered in his Thursday night address to alleviating poverty and discrimination, nor did he mention a specific plan in Friday’s very brief remarks. But his domestic policy adviser, Claude Allen, said two of the new ideas Bush announced Thursday are aimed at addressing poverty and injustice in the affected region: $5,000 grants to pay for worker retraining, education and child care and a plan to let low-income citizens build homes on surplus federal property.

“As we clear away the debris of a hurricane, let us also clear away the legacy of inequality,” Bush said Friday.

Bruce Katz, head of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, called the president’s set of proposals a missed opportunity on poverty eradication. Instead of a homesteading proposal that he said will have minimal impact, Katz recommended housing vouchers and the building of mixed-income housing.

“We had a city that was terribly poor and locked people into cycles of poverty — this plan will do nothing to change that,” he said.

Gordon said $5,000 grants that would run out in weeks or less do not count as “bold” in his book and he reserved judgment on a homesteading plan that leaves the poor having to find the resources to build a home, even if the land is free. Based on discussions with regional leaders, Gordon said some of the priorities should be a victims compensation fund, priority job placement for affected residents and incentives for minority-owned businesses to share in the contracting largesse to come.

“It’s not what you say — it’s what you do,” he said.