Cabinet secretaries stump for Bush

The Kansas City Star ^ | Oct. 22, 2004 | DEANN SMITH

[Former Military Chick]

The U.S. secretaries of education and housing held a news conference Thursday afternoon in Kansas City. The subject, however, wasn't education or housing.

Instead the two Cabinet members, both black, blasted a flier from a Democrat-aligned group as racist.

Cabinet secretaries always have stumped for the re-election of their boss by showing up to hand out grants, but the Bush administration has taken campaigning to a new level, experts said Thursday. A review of news reports shows that Bush Cabinet officials primarily are appearing in battleground states.

“What is unusual is the extent to which they have participated in more explicit political criticism of the challenger and groups sympathetic to that challenger. ‘All hands aboard' seems to be the order of the day,” said Thomas Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, in an e-mail. “It has certainly intensified under Bush. All part of the permanent campaign.”

The two officials visiting Kansas City, Education Secretary Rod Paige and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson, also offered a forum Thursday night to discuss the No Child Left Behind Act. The cost of their trip to Kansas City will be shared by taxpayers and the Republican National Committee.

Earlier this week, The Washington Post reported that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice has praised the Bush administration's foreign policies in speeches in battleground states. Traditionally, national security advisors keep a low profile during elections.

And the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday that Treasury Secretary John Snow has visited 25 states this year, including 15 battleground states.

Vice presidential candidate John Edwards said in a statement that Bush officials are so busy campaigning that they are ignoring serious problems ranging from the shortage of flu vaccine to the war in Iraq. Paige said his travel schedule has not changed because of the Nov. 2 election.

“My conduct is no different than before,” he said. This was Paige's first trip to the Kansas City area since August 2001. David Crockett, an assistant professor at Trinity University in San Antonio who specializes in presidential history, said he's not surprised by the frequent and seemingly overtly political appearances of Cabinet secretaries.

“High stakes are in play here and that makes them say and do things…that seem kind of quirky,” Crockett said.

The flier, distributed across Missouri by the Democratic-aligned America Coming Together, uses a Civil Rights-era photograph of a firefighter turning a hose on a black man. “This is what they used to do to keep us from voting,” it says, and accuses Republicans of conspiring to suppress black turnout in 2004.

America Coming Together won't withdraw the flier, said Ebs Burnough, spokesman for the organization.

— DeAnn Smith/The Star

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First glance

• The U.S. secretaries of education and housing and urban development held a news conference Thursday to blast a Democratic-leaning organization's flier as racist.

• Experts say that Cabinet secretaries traditionally stump for the president under the guise of official business, but that the Bush administration has more aggressively used the secretaries for frequent appearances.

[Former Military Chick]

This is where they should be.

[bushfamfan]

The Demonrat party is full of blacks who need the quotas/affirmative action and that's why they are Demonrats. The Republicans wouldn't need those programs. The Demonrats can brag about getting a high percentage of blacks voting for them but it is clearly quantity vs. quality. Demonrats are a party that continually push the hostile race rhetoric and they will continue to do it.

[bushfamfan]

Qualified in what manner? Face it, their may be a very small percentage of black Demonrats who GET IT and are only Demonrats due to tradition and stereotype that if you're black you have to be a Demonrat but those with sense become Republicans. The Demonrat party relies on ignorance, division of race, class. They lie and are vicious. There is no decency with that party as they are controlled by radicals and the rest of them refuse to confront it.

[bushfamfan]

Demonrats are corrupt. Those who align themselves with that party lack serious judgment. They condone what the Demonrat party does or they wouldn't be one.