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Only one disproportionately black government program has expanded under Bush: mass imprisonment. The black incarceration rate, already astronomical under Clinton, has reached a new pinnacle under Bush. By early 2003, 12 percent of African-American males between ages 20 and 34 were locked up in prisons. The Justice Department’s decision to increase the number of prosecutions for federal drug offenses, combined with recession and program cuts, drive this chilling expansion.

Bush’s talk of an economy that is “strong and getting stronger” is received with cynicism in numerous distressed and isolated black communities, where more than half of adults are now unattached to the labor market and as much as a third of the children live at less than half of the nation’s notoriously low and inadequate poverty level. “Bush is a spoiled rich boy,” one African-American resident of southwest Philadelphia recently told the New York Times, “I don’t see no growth. I don’t see nothing to be stimulated.”

Between January 2001 and January 2004, black unemployment rose by 28 percent. By 2002, that increase had helped push the black poverty rate to 24 percent (twice the white poverty rate) and moved the percentage of blacks without health insurance to 20 percent. In contrast, in the Clinton era, black unemployment and poverty fell.

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