Well, George is out stumping for black votes. Hard to tell why, it’s kind of like Lieberman appealing to KKK voters. After all, Bush got only 9% of the black vote in 2000, and that’s not including the fact that a disproportionate number of black ballots were thrown out. Bush’s allies had tens of thousands of upstanding black voters indiscriminately trashed from voting lists in Florida, identifying them as felons, and many more felt they were intimidated by police on election day. 650,000 black Americans have lost their jobs in the U.S. since Bush took office, the black unemployment rate is now nearly double the national rate (it was only about 30% higher when Bush took office), and Bush has refused to speak to the NAACP in his 2 1/2 years in office, instead trying to reach out to other black political groups which are less critical of him. Bush touted his AIDS package to Africa, though that is far slower in coming than previously indicated, is being loaded up with an extremist conservative agenda (such as pushing for abstinence over condom use), and, in the end, doesn’t really help African-Americans in the U.S. And it hardly shows that Bush is concerned about African issues, seeing as how he is wimping out of Liberia, causing untold thousands to die there who could easily have been saved had he acted when Kofi Annan asked him to.

Bush’s pitch for overcoming these problems? He “stressed his initiatives to increase minority home ownership, to create re-employment aid accounts and to provide federal support for religious charities.” Oooooo. Sweeeet. That oughta do it. And if it doesn’t, he can have another photo op with Condi and Colin. They’re some of his best friends, after all.