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GOP Convention Promises Urban Communities A Compassionate Conservative Solution
By Kevin Fobbs
August 25, 2004

Next week there will be an awful lot of protesters who believe they represent the best interest of the forgotten Americans, the "little guys". These protesters actually believe in their very misguided mangled misconceptions that their collective protests will somehow inform many of those Americans who live in urban centers around the nation that the million or so who will be settling in for a week of tirades and tempers disguised as friendly protesting will somehow make their zeal correct.

The protesters at the National Republican Convention firmly embrace their belief that with cameras zooming in and microphones thrust at them, that somehow their liberal talking point lies will defeat the truth of the President's success story.

Many of these protesters will be edged on by the likes of Move On and many liberal news organizations which engaged in deceptive pieces which in many ways had its genesis a year before in "news" pieces similar to the article which ran in the October 13th edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Why go back so far you may ask?

Well, if you want to understand when the chain of mis-truth and deception began its metastasis and why, go to the beginning of the chain. The why is simple, these writers felt it was important to leave out salient facts because it was done all in the name of helping the "little guy" or the poor forgotten urban families. Another major piece of this effort was to unseat a sitting President. By slowly building the case against President Bush in a major city and in a major swing state he will need in the coming year elections, who would've been the wiser?

What is fiction and what is fact? Let's take a look as to how the writer of the October 13, 2003 piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer felt about President Bush.

The first paragraph of his article stated the following: Washington - Barely six months after President Bush took office, his secretary of Housing and Urban Development flew to Cleveland to give a speech. But Mel Martinez did not come to talk about poor people or of bold ways to make public housing more livable. He came to praise Bush's energy plan. That, critics say, reflects White House priorities when it comes to urban poverty issues.

The newswriter began his story with a rather unclear premise. The piece was dedicated to burying fact and relying on fiction. After all, his fiction played better in the hands of the artful writer, but for the tens of thousands of Cleveland readers, and for hundreds of thousands of others in Ohio, Michigan, and the Midwest who may have read reprints of the story, this type of fiction can be fatal to the minority community and to urban residents in Midwest communities that would be taken in by that fiction.

In the thirteen months that would lead up to the election, liberal writers and the members of Michael Moore untruth squads all around the nation would magnify the fiction and repeat it enough times so that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the other self anointed liberal lite leaders would repeat it at every urban stop, and at the step of every willing church pulpit. "The President doesn't care" they would claim, and leave out the truth in order to magnify the lie.

What that writer didn't say in October, that the same month that the writer minimized HUD Secretary Mel Martinez's visit to Cleveland, the President announced, In June 2002, the goal of increasing the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million before the end of the decade.

The President's aggressive housing agenda to dismantle the barriers to homeownership includes providing down payment assistance through the American Dream Downpayment Fund; increasing the supply of affordable homes through the Single-Family Affordable Housing Tax Credit; increasing support for self-help homeownership programs like Habitat for Humanity; simplifying the home-buying process; and increasing home-buying education. Would it have hurt for the writer to mention those facts for the sake of balance?

Of course it would have affected the liberal Move On agenda to let Americans in urban cities across the nation know the truth, that tens of thousands of minorities, and low income people were becoming a part of the ownership class, and proudly becoming assimilated into the culture which is the American Dream

What are some of the facts that readers in Cleveland and the Midwest don't know about when it comes to housing opportunities?

There are 809,000 new minority homeowners in the U.S. since the President's announcement! That's the kind of news all Americans should be proud to hear!

It's incredible. It means that minority and urban families in Cleveland, Detroit, Akron, Muskegon, Flint, St. Louis, Chicago and other urban communities across the nation are new homeowners. In addition, nearly 1,500 low-income families are now using housing vouchers to pay their monthly mortgage or other costs of owning a home, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is working with public housing authorities to allow the sale of units to tenants. NuPac has traveled to urban centers, where housing and public officials felt that this type of "news" was constructive, useful, and beneficial for the residents of their communities

Last year in July, NuPac officials were in Washington for a successful briefing by members of the Bush Administration and the president himself. We were briefed for over three hours on subjects regarding housing, economic development opportunities, the global AIDS package, and the president's Faith-Based and Community initiatives.

Should have been a slam-dunk of valued information, right? It was, but the liberal press corps was missing in action.

Yes, the entire White House press corps. was there, cameras snapping, reporters writing; the whole lot. Later that day we searched the news channels in vain. We looked for coverage on the wide ranging topics discussed that day, the many programs and initiatives aimed to improved the lives and opportunities to the undeserved in this country in our urban areas as well as our rural areas. Nothing, nada, zip. That day was reduced to backdrop footage for the press to discuss something else altogether, Iraq. So the continuation of the dissembling of the truth was beginning, by simply ignoring it.

As the national republican leaders gather in New York next week to re-nominate President Bush, I hope the reporters who will be covering it and who try to ferret out stories from those of us who are delegates, will be searching for the truth. I hope they understand that we believe America does not want to hear the chanters in the streets and the misinformed opinions they have. Rather, America wants to hear how their fellow Americans will now benefit from the American Dream Downpayment Act, which will provide $200 million for 40,000 families this year.

I believe that Americans will want to hear the good news over and above the screaming sea of chanting masses outside Madison Square Garden. They want to learn about how President Bush, a conservative compassionate man initiated a Single-Family Affordable Housing Tax Credit to develop 200,000 homes and offer 2.4 billion in tax credits over 5 years. They will also want to know that he also increased homeownership counseling funding to $45 million, which empowers so many of their neighbors, family members and friends to get that fresh gleam of pride in their eye when they receive the keys to their first home.

You see, protesters and writers have the ability to exercise their Constitutional right to protest at our conventions. I saw them in 1992, 1996, and in Philadelphia in 2000. All of us will defend their right to again join our convention party, of course observed from outside of the convention hall. But I wonder if these prognosticators of hateful spite would say the same if they knew a brother or sister, or cousin or fellow co-worker who was benefiting from the President's proposal to allow Section 8 voucher holders the ability to save those vouchers for a year and use them for a downpayment on a home or to take care of closing costs?

I'm not sure. But I do know that Americans will look at conventioneers in New York next week and sincerely want to know the truth beyond the rhetoric. If you live in Chicago, or St. Louis, Houston, Los Angeles, Detroit, or New York, you will feel mighty fine knowing and appreciating the Federal Trade Commission and HUD working together to protect home buyers from predatory lenders is something prospective homeowners in urban communities might perhaps support. That again is good news.

In conclusion, there is so much news reporters can write fairly and balanced about. I know some residents in Cleveland who would like to be informed about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation implementing their Money Smart program, which is providing financial education services for potential homebuyers.

I know some leaders in Milwaukee who are keenly interested in the facts concerning President Bush's America's Homeownership Challenge to the real estate and mortgage finance industry to join the effort to take concrete steps to close the gap that exists between the homeownership rates of minorities and non-minorities.

Urban America, as you watch convention news coverage and read the stories and hear the broadcasts about the "good news" which is coming out on the President's accomplishments, I encourage you to strain real hard to hear above the shouting and protests. I guarantee you; the news generated inside will be worth the effort.

The point of all of this of course is that the President does care about his urban policy, and he has one that works. Urban America deserves to hear this fair and balanced. Remember that facts are a defense to fiction. Think about it.

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Kevin Fobbs is President of National Urban Policy Action Council (NuPac), a non-partisan civic and citizen-action organization that focuses on taking the politics out of policy to secure urban America's future one neighborhood, one city, and one person at a time. Kevin Fobbs is also Second Vice Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party and National African Americans for President Bush Steering Committee member as well as host of the weekly NuPac Urban News and Views radio show on WQBH - 1400 AM as well as co-founder of the Jackson, MI-based American Conservative Values Television Network.

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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.