Scoop: Berkowitz: Team Bush's African American Conundrum

Scoop: Berkowitz: Team Bush's African American Conundrum: "It took a rap star to dare speak truth to power. While the whole world was watching, shocked by the desperate plight of thousands of poor, and mostly black, folks stranded on rooftops across New Orleans and abandoned without food or water at the crumbling Superdome in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, recording artist Kanye West took an emotional swerve away from the script. On September 2, during NBC's 'A Concert for Hurricane Relief,' the first star-studded telethon to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, West plainly stated that 'George Bush doesn't care about black people.'
A few days later, Howard Dean, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told members of the National Baptist Convention of America meeting in Miami that Americans 'have to come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not.'

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Congressional Black Caucus expressed their anger about the administration's seeming disregard and insensitivity to the plight of African Americans.

New York City's Democratic Representative Charles B. Rangel took his criticism down another path, saying that, 'The president's policies in Iraq contributed to the slow response of federal troops who should have been on alert even before the hurricane struck.'"