Bush Applauds 'A Triumph of the American Story'

In a warm statement yesterday praising the election of Democrat Barack Obama, President Bush made a point of highlighting the historic importance of the moment to African Americans and other minority groups.

Obama's victory "represents a triumph of the American story," Bush said, and illustrates the "strides we have made toward a more perfect union."

"Many of our citizens thought they would never live to see that day," Bush continued in his Rose Garden remarks. "This moment is especially uplifting for a generation of Americans who witnessed the struggle for civil rights with their own eyes, and four decades later see a dream fulfilled."

The gracious words came from a president who entered office pledging to reach out to African Americans, Latinos and other ethnic groups that had long eluded the Republican Party, even as they made up a growing portion of the electorate. Bush appointed a record number of minorities to senior posts, pushed through changes in education law aimed in large part at minority children, and unsuccessfully pushed to rewrite immigration law.

But such efforts do not appear to have had a lasting impact on the makeup of the Republican Party, whose presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, did worse among Latinos and Asian Americans than Bush did in 2004. McCain also attracted only a smattering of black support in light of Obama's historic candidacy.

"He came up woefully short," said Hilary O. Shelton, director of the NAACP Washington bureau, referring to Bush's record with African Americans and other minorities. "Even though he appointed a number of people from certain minority groups, they didn't seem to focus on the real challenges faced by those groups. If everyone looks different but has the same ideology, that's not really diversity."

The dearth of minority support is particularly challenging for Bush's party at a time of rapid demographic change. Obama trailed his opponent with 43 percent of white votes, but won 95 percent of the black vote, 67 percent of the Latino vote and 62 percent of Asian votes, according to exit polls. The end result was a comfortable six-point victory overall.

Bush did somewhat better than McCain with these groups, but not dramatically so. He won 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2004, up 13 points from his first election. Hispanic support for the GOP ticket slipped back to 2000 levels for McCain.

Minority outreach was central to Bush's message as a "compassionate conservative" in 2000, when he argued Latinos and African Americans would be better served by Republican principles than by Democratic policies that relied on big-government approaches. He famously said that low educational standards represented the "soft bigotry of low expectations," and championed his education reform package as a solution.

After he won the White House, Bush appointed a diverse group of senior advisers compared with previous administrations of either party, including Colin L. Powell as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser and later at State, and Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel and attorney general.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said Bush's approach was aimed at securing policies beneficial to all Americans, including minorities, and said initiatives including the No Child Left Behind Act and his faith-based program were well-received in minority communities.

"I consider him to be one of the first gender-blind and race-blind presidents," Perino said. "He didn't make decisions because he thought, 'This is going to help my goal to attract more Hispanics to the Republican Party.' He made them because he thought they were the right thing to do . . . He broadened the idea of what the Republican Party is for."