Sure, it's schadenfreude but the arrest of President Bush’s former domestic policy adviser is too delicious to let go. Admittedly, I paid little attention to Claude Allen before he got busted for this dumb sh stuff (and here). It wasn’t personal; rather, Allen was a paper-pusher whose principal role was to defend conservative policies that are antithetical to the interests of black folks.
As the New York Times reported, this chief policy adviser didn't make policy:
At the White House, senior staff members continued to express astonishment about the theft charges against Mr. Allen, who was described as an engaging, devout and largely powerless adviser to Mr. Bush (emphasis added).
Although Mr. Allen had the vaunted title of assistant to the president for domestic policy and worked from a coveted West Wing office, he did not set policy so much as carry out the decisions of Mr. Bush's inner circle, particularly Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff. Mr. Allen managed some of the domestic policy paper flow between the White House and government agencies.
And as political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson observed:
Conservatives desperately need blacks such as Allen to maintain the public illusion that black conservatives have real clout and a popular following in black communities. Their great value is that they promote the myth that a big segment of blacks support political conservative principles. In the last presidential election, Bush, Republican National Committee head Ken Mehlman, and strategist Karl Rove spent millions on outreach efforts to attract African-American voters. Mehlman has since barnstormed the country in tow with conservative blacks to primp the GOP’s message to black groups. Allen and a handful of other blacks have relentlessly pumped Bush’s policies on TV and radio talk shows, in op-ed columns, and in debates with civil rights leaders and liberal Democrats.
The young black conservative political activists such as Allen spin, prime and defend administration policies on affirmative action, welfare, laissez-faire capitalism and anti-government regulations with the best of white conservatives. Bush’s controversial federal court appeals nominee, black California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, once brashly claimed that she was “one of the few conservatives left in America.” Allen did not make the same bold claim, but he is every bit the conservative ideologue as Brown.
But none of their efforts touting GOP policies have helped much. Bush still got only a marginal bump up overall in the black vote in 2004, and with his Katrina bumble his poll ratings are stuck even deeper in the tank with blacks. Still, Republicans have done everything possible to ease the way up the political ladder for their bevy of black conservatives.
And for good reason: black conservatives are used to make the GOP safe for white swing voters. After all, if Republicans care about blacks, it must be a different kind of party.
