Hours after Coretta Scott King died, President Bush led off the State of the Union address by praising her as “a beloved, graceful, courageous woman who called America to its founding ideals and carried on a noble dream.” For good measure, at the end of his speech, Bush reverently invoked the name of her martyred husband, Martin Luther King Jr.
The president is one of countless politicians who zealously oppose most of what King struggled for — at the same time that they laud his name with syrupy words. It wouldn’t be shrewd to openly acknowledge the basic disagreements. Instead, Bush and his allies offer up platitudes while pretending that King’s work ended with the fight against racial segregation.
Now that Dr. King’s widow is no longer alive, the smarmy process will be even easier: Just praise him as a beloved civil rights leader, as though the last few years of his life — filled with struggles for economic justice and peace — didn’t exist. Ignore King’s profound challenge to the kind of budget priorities and militarism holding sway today.
On Tuesday night, the president was eager to seem like a fervent admirer of Martin Luther King. But the next day, in the same House chamber where Bush spoke, his administration pushed through a vicious budget measure that will slash $39 billion in spending — mostly for student loans and Medicaid for the poor — over the next five years.
Nearly 38 years ago, Dr. King was killed in Memphis while leading the Poor People’s Campaign for an economic bill of rights. He’d been accusing Congress of “hostility to the poor.” The federal government, King pointed out, was appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity” — but “poverty funds with miserliness.”
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