Black America Isn't Buying

News Analysis: Selling Point Is a Sore One On Saturday, African-Americans will be prominent among those protesting at Mr. Bush's inauguration, even though he has chosen for his cabinet the first black secretary of state and a widely respected black educator. Ask black politicians about the appointments, and they quickly change the subject to Florida, where, they assert, antiquated voting equipment and unfriendly electoral officials in minority precincts illegitimately tipped the outcome to Mr. Bush. "A majority of African-Americans think that the election was stolen," said David Bositis, an analyst of minority voting at the Joint Center for Economic Studies, a think tank here. The bitterness that many black voters and their white allies feel toward the president-elect was on vivid display as the Senate Judiciary Committee pressed Mr. Bush's choice of former Senator John Ashcroft as attorney general. With attention centered on Judge Ronnie L. White of the Missouri Supreme Court, an African-American, and Mr. Ashcroft's success in blocking his nomination as a federal judge, the session was supercharged with racial tension. Studies by the Joint Center found that Mr. Bush's favorable rating among black voters dropped from 43 percent in May 1999, when he was pondering a run for president, to 29 percent at the end of September 2000, when the campaign was nearing a climax. The more African-Americans saw of Mr. Bush, said Mr. Bositis, who designed the polls, "the less they liked him." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/19/politics/19ASSE.html?pagewanted=all