First Lady's anti-gang work marks first year

The Dallas Morning News

(KRT)

DALLAS - Who would have thought it - Laura Bush taking on the Bloods and the Crips, or any of the other street gangs that prowl the country.

But she has - not in any back-alley brawl, but in her own first lady way - in speeches and round-table forums and conferences, at home and on the road.

A year after Bush embarked on the mission given her by her husband, reviews are mixed. Any talent expended on the daunting gang problem is time well spent, some say. Others wonder whether she can have any effect on the gritty world of street gangs in cities such as Dallas without surrounding herself with homeboys.

"I'm a Republican, but I still don't believe that anybody gets it in Washington," said Antonio Montanez, a minister who counsels about 60 vulnerable young people in Pleasant Grove, Texas. "They don't understand the level of chaos being created by the gangs."

The first lady's new endeavor was announced by the president during last year's State of the Union address, when he turned to her with a new mandate to "focus on giving young people, especially young men in our cities, better options than apathy, or gangs, or jail."

Her gang mission, he told the packed House chamber and television audience of millions, would be part of a "broader outreach to at-risk youth, which involves parents and pastors, coaches and community leaders, in programs ranging from literacy to sports."

It's a new venture for Bush, a former teacher and school librarian who's also raised her profile in the last year with trips to the Middle East and Africa. Her "Helping America's Youth" agenda has generated little of the flash of Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign against drugs, nor any of the roiling controversy of Hillary Clinton's health care initiative.

Still, Bush has skeptics along with her supporters.

"I'm supportive of the first lady and President Bush," said Omar Jahwar, executive director of Vision Regeneration, a nonprofit Dallas gang intervention and youth development organization. "But at the same time, it has to be more real strategy."

"It doesn't happen from operating at 30,000 feet and throwing money down," he warned, alluding to her outreach trips around the country aboard an Air Force jet. "You have to get down on the street level."

For a year now, Bush has been highlighting programs designed to bolster the nation's youth, particularly boys whom she notes get into much more trouble these days than girls and are more likely to drop out of high school, drink and use drugs.

But she's been listening, she says, and encouraging the kind of innovation she believes can make a difference.

In all, the president proposed a three-year, $150 million anti-gang initiative. But he got much less. The administration reallocated resources to set aside $30 million for the anti-gang grants now being formulated.

"This is not the federal government coming in and solving all the problems, because the federal government can't," said Bush's press secretary, Susan Whitson.

In the last year, Laura Bush has done at least a dozen-and-a-half at-risk youth events across the country, in Washington, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and California, among other states.

And in Pleasant Grove, Montanez remains skeptical.

"The majority of the money, if it actually goes out, will go to African-Americans," he suggested. "It's not racism, but the African-Americans are organized and more vocal. We're overlooked."

Alfonso Herrera, who works on gang issues with the Dallas Independent School District, is more optimistic, seeing a consensus building on how to effectively fight the gang problem: One-on-one intervention and mentoring that brings stability to youths who have little of that in their home lives.

"It's one thing to lock someone up three times," he said. "The money should be spent on prevention to keep them out of trouble."

Regardless of the effort, though, little of the first lady's good will filters down to gang members on the streets, said Antong Lucky, 29, who helped bring the Bloods to Dallas about 15 years ago.

To hard-core gangsters, the State of the Union is just a prime-time interruption, he said.

"I'm vaguely aware of (the president's initiative), and I'm paying attention," said Lucky, who's been shot, done drive-bys and seen countless friends and family die or go to jail because of gangs. He was released from prison in 2000 after four years for an array of drug and other charges and is trying to mentor gang members on ways to get out.

"It's a speech that sounds good to the public," he said, "but the message won't make it far."

Those on the front lines of law enforcement, though, see the new attention as aiding police, although not the thrust of the first lady's efforts.

"If the president is making comments about his concern about youths and gangs, I can't see how it wouldn't trickle down to people who are paying attention," said Dallas police gang Sgt. Mark Langford. "In the past year, we've had significant help and assistance from the federal agencies" including the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

"They've made a real concerted effort to provide us with manpower and equipment," he said.

In Los Angeles, the Rev. Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, which Bush visited last spring, called her "the real deal," an effective advocate eager to learn more about the complicated issues surrounding youth at risk.

But he cautions that progress on such issues occurs slowly, "inches at a time."

"It's not like, now here comes the government money," he said. "Nobody has ever suggested that. And I certainly haven't expected that."

Underscoring the difficulty in sometimes simply gaining attention for her initiative, Mrs. Bush had a tough time garnering much national press for her one-day forum in Washington, the Oct. 27 Helping America's Youth conference. White House counsel Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court that same day, overshadowing everything else.

And Fred Greenstein, the professor of politics at Princeton University who's long studied the presidency, noted that Hurricane Katrina had earlier sent the White House scrambling for weeks to refashion its agenda.

"It's something good to say in the State of the Union message," he said of the first lady's new mission. "But I think it gets pushed aside when you got Katrina."

In short, he said, looking back a year: "I don't think anyone is keeping score in Peoria."

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(c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.