WASHINGTON -- Early in the Bush administration, Republican National Chairman Lee Atwater unveiled an ambitious outreach program designed to smooth over the hostility of black voters toward the GOP during the Ronald Reagan years, and to welcome them into the party.
The plan openly sought to capitalize on the feelings of many black Democrats that their overwhelming majority votes for white Democratic candidates were taken for granted by the party leaders, and that blacks were not sufficiently heard in leadership councils. A flashpoint of that sentiment was the Democratic rejection of Jesse Jackson as a presidential candidate in 1984 and 1988 and specifically as a possible running mate with 1988 standard-bearer Michael Dukakis.
Absent that resentment, the Republican Party offered little to black voters to join the fold and a lot to keep them out -- the gamut of anti-civil rights positions and actions of President Reagan and his Justice Department throwbacks to the days before the civil-rights movement, from Bradford Reynolds to Ed Meese.
In George Bush, the new president, Atwater had what seemed to be an attractive lure for his targets. Bush was an early civil-rights supporter and all through the Reagan White House tenure he had managed to convey the idea that he stood apart from the Neanderthal thinking that drove administration policy in the civil-rights field in those eight years.
His 1988 presidential campaign made much of the fact that as a congressman in 1968, Bush voted for a fair-housing bill in the face of sharp conservative opposition in his Houston district. And later, as vice president, although he supported a Reagan veto of a bill outlawing discrimination in colleges receiving federal funds, he managed to convey the idea that he really was for it, but was supporting Reagan out of his customary unstinting loyalty.
Once elected, Bush was infinitely more accessible to black leaders than Reagan had been, and the GOP outreach program seemed to be striking pay dirt. Studies by the Joint Center for Political Studies, the foremost think tank on black politics, indicated that young blacks especially were growing disenchanted with the Democratic Party, and Atwater reported considerable progress in recruiting young, prosperous blacks into the GOP.
At the same time, Bush's standing among black voters in the polls reached incredible figures for a Republican president. Last January, a Washington Post/ABC News poll had black voters giving him an approval rating of 74 percent in response to a question about his job performance.
