HUNGER REPORT BITES BUSH ON BUTT

Jim Hightower

At the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta, I gave a podium-pounding speech in which I characterized George Bush the Elder as "a man who was born on third and thought he'd hit a triple."

Little did I know then that the president's namesake son, George W., would prove to be even more lost in the ether of inherited wealth. I wouldn't expect someone who prepped both at Houston's tony Kincaid Academy and at Phillips Academy in Andover, someone who summered at the family's ocean-front mansion at Kennebunkport, someone whose family money and connections have paved his way into Yale, into the oil business, into the governor's mansion and, now, into the money as Republican presidential frontrunner, to have any personal connection to the world of poverty in our country. Still, I was stunned just before Christmas to hear just how far removed Gov. Bush is from Planet Earth.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture had released a report documenting the persistent problem of hunger in America, giving a state-by-state listing of food shortages and hunger problems-a report made all the more poignant by the fact that the decade of the nineties has been widely and loudly hailed as a period of unprecedented prosperity for the U.S. In the state listings, Texas was right up there at the top, ranking Number Two in the percentage of its people experiencing food shortages, malnutrition, and hunger. The report found that 13 percent of the 20 million people in our state are not getting enough food for adequate nutrition, and that five percent (roughly a million folks) are getting so little that they suffer the pain of hunger. This doesn't mean that these Texans are starving to death, but that families are so hard hit that they're having to skip meals, water-down cereal, and cut back so severely on nourishment that they are suffering chronic malnutrition.

Such reality is no small embarrassment to Bush, who is running for president on the theme of "compassionate conservatism" and is bragging about his performance as Texas governor. He claims credit for all the economic good that has happened in our state during his tenure, so how to explain this bit of economic unpleasantness?

By denial that the problem exists. Instead of attacking hunger, he attacked the report. Speaking to the media, Prince George got that rich boy smirk he can't seem to get off his face, and said: "I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. Where?" he scoffed. "You'd think the governor would have heard if there were pockets of hunger in Texas."

Wouldn't you, though! But hungry people don't bring $1,000 checks to the governor's mansion, so they're easily overlooked by this governor. If he truly gave a damn, all he would have to do to locate hungry Texans is to visit any of the state's food pantries, both rural and urban, where there's been nearly a 40 percent increase in the number of families needing food assistance in the past year. "Where can I get hold of Mr. Bush?" asked the head of the Community Food Bank of Victoria. "I'd like him to come visit our food bank to see how empty our shelves are right now. We're scrounging for food." But the scoffing governor needn't even take a ride to find reality-there are two charitable food kitchens within walking distance of the governor's mansion. The people going to these hunger centers are not druggies and derelicts, as he might assume, but working families-food banks report that 60 percent of the people coming in have jobs in the booming economy that Bush brags about-but their pay is so low they're not able to make rent, pay for transportation and other essentials, and still afford adequate food.

But, hey, says "the Bombastic Bushkin" (as his frat pals called him in his partying days), this federal report is not about hunger, but about me! He suggested to the media in New Hampshire that USDA had released the hunger data just to embarrass him: "yeah, I was surprised that all of a sudden a report floats out of Washington, DC as I am launching my campaign for president."

What a self-centered and clueless brat! This is hardly the first time the problem has been reported-there are at least eight reports in the past four years documenting Texas hunger, including one by Texas A&M University that opens with this stark finding: "Conservatively, hundreds of thousands of people-and one out of every four children-in Texas can be classified as hungry." But Mr. Compassionate has a sorry history of avoiding this issue-in 1995, he vetoed a bill that would have created a state food security council to study hunger in Texas and to help local officials deal with the problem. Apparently, Bush doesn't want to see, hear, or speak about the ugly truth of hunger in our state-hurts his image.