 After leaving the White House, Bill Clinton moved into an office in Harlem, emblematic of his strong bond with black Americans. He was greeted on his arrival on July 30, 2001, by the Boys Choir of Harlem. (Photo by Shannon Stapleton) |
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Posted on 01/25/2008 8:51:57 AM PST by Incorrigible
By JONATHAN TILOVE
After leaving the White House, Bill Clinton moved into an office in Harlem, emblematic of his strong bond with black Americans. He was greeted on his arrival on July 30, 2001, by the Boys Choir of Harlem. (Photo by Shannon Stapleton) |
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WASHINGTON — The battle for the black vote has devolved into a contest between Sen. Barack Obama, who is seeking to become America's first black president, and Bill Clinton — chief surrogate for his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton — who has had honorary claim to that title since Chris Rock and Toni Morrison dubbed him so a decade ago.
But before Clinton forged a deep bond with black America amid the scandal that led to his impeachment, there were Rickey Ray Rector, Sister Souljah, Lani Guinier, welfare reform, "three-strikes-and-you're-out" and a calculated strategy of proving to white voters that he was not unduly beholden to black interests. Now, with black voters seeing a possibility Toni Morrison never imagined, the relationship is fraying.
South Carolina holds its Democratic primary Saturday, the first contest in which blacks will participate in decisive numbers. About half the state's Democratic Party electorate is black.
At Charleston's Morris Brown AME Church — where the 3,000 members rival the black population in four states — the Rev. Joseph Darby says sentiment has run strongly in Obama's favor ever since his victory in Iowa.
"Every four years they're accustomed to looking for the great white hope; this year a lot of folks are looking for the great black hope," said Darby, who never endorses a candidate.
And, he said, despite an "enormous store of goodwill" for the former president, some church members began to bristle when, after Iowa, Clinton began questioning Obama's substance and experience. As one put it to Darby, "It's almost like the benevolent master who's very kind until one of the slaves is trying to make a break for it."
Darby himself felt some "wait-a-minute" frustration when Bill Clinton called him the other day on Hillary's behalf. "President Clinton lectured me for about five minutes about what he and Hillary had done," Darby said. When he got a word in, he told Clinton to be more careful how he talks about Obama at a moment when every word is being heard through the "filter of race."
University of Maryland political scientist Ronald Walters, who was deputy campaign manager of Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign, has heard similar griping from blacks all over the country.
"I've been on I don't know how many radio stations listening to mad black people complaining about it," Walters said, adding that the Clintons risk dampening black turnout for Hillary in the fall if she ends up the nominee.
Of course, Hillary Clinton is the one running for president. But in the final days leading up to South Carolina, she has left most of the direct campaigning to Bill as she concentrates on the states — including New Jersey, California and her own New York — that vote Super Tuesday, Feb. 5.
For all practical purposes in South Carolina, "this is a race between Bill and Obama," said David Bositis, an expert on black politics at Washington's Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
In the 10 years since Clinton was identified as the "first black president," the catch phrase has gone from clever insight to cliche. At Monday's Martin Luther King Day debate, it became a question CNN's Joe Johns posed to Obama: "Do you think Bill Clinton was our first black president?"
After taking note of Clinton's "enormous affinity with the African- American community," the Illinois senator joked about needing to "investigate more of Bill's dancing abilities" before being able to "accurately judge whether he was in fact a brother."
Kevin Alexander Gray, a South Carolina writer and activist who has managed presidential campaigns in the South for Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, felt Obama's pain.
Gray explained that because he is running as a candidate who "transcends" race, and because of the general peril of "talking race in a white media echo chamber," Obama finds himself unable to exploit Clinton's vulnerabilities on race. (In Gray's view, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, the third candidate in the race, has proven a clearer voice on race and poverty.)
But, Gray added, "There ain't nothing funny about the way Clinton runs race."
As Gray wrote in a recent post on the online newsletter Counterpunch, "Southern politician Bill Clinton has always played race politics to perfection."
In his first campaign for the presidency, then Arkansas Gov. Clinton rebuffed entreaties from the Rev. Jackson and others to commute the death sentence of Rickey Ray Rector, a brain-damaged black man convicted of killing a white police officer.
Clinton dissed Jackson again in June 1992. Appearing with Jackson at a Rainbow Coalition summit on the riots that followed the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, he compared Sister Souljah, a provocative rapper who was on a panel the night before, to white supremacist David Duke. The rebuke, and Jackson's evident hurt, became a tableau of Clinton's willingness to take on the black leadership.
Clinton's tacking on race continued through his presidency.
He appointed Lani Guinier, a Yale Law School classmate of both Clintons, to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. But when the right caricatured Guinier's views on race as those of a "quota queen," Clinton precipitously withdrew her nomination. (Deval Patrick, now governor of Massachusetts and an Obama supporter, got the job.)
Clinton defended affirmative action ("mend it, don't end it") and created a national initiative to talk about race, but he drew much of his agenda from the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. He fulfilled a campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it." And he signed the 1994 crime bill with its "three-strikes-and-you're-out" provision, fueling the historic surge in the nation's disproportionately black prison population.
What's been remarkable about Clinton, according to historian Kenneth O'Reilly, author of "Nixon's Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics From Washington to Clinton," is how adept he is at "triangulating" race — using Jesse Jackson as a foil to gain office, then drawing Jackson close when Republicans tried to remove him from office. Said O'Reilly, "He just moved Jackson to a different point on the triangle."
It was scandal and the Republican pursuit of same that cemented Clinton's bond with blacks.
"He's the most scrutinized man in history," Chris Rock explained in the August 1998 Vanity Fair. "He spends a hundred dollar bill, they hold it up to the light."
"After all," Toni Morrison wrote in The New Yorker, "Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas." And, with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, she wrote, "his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution."
Emory University political scientist Andra Gillespie, who is editing a volume on post-civil rights black elected leadership, wishes Obama had actually talked about race when asked whether Clinton was "our first black president."
"If Obama is going to stop (Hillary) Clinton, he is going to have to get upwards of 80 to 90 percent of the black vote," Gillespie said. And black voters, she said, will want more than the symbolism of actually electing "the first black president."
(Jonathan Tilove can be contacted at jonathan.tilove(at)newhouse.com)
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Slowly the worm turns....
He'll turn on Hillary to get back in their good graces.
Change that saxophone into a flying-V guitar and Clinton displays every trope of white trashness.
I still don’t think Hillary will lose. She has the machine, she has the ambition, she has the money, and she has the FBI files.
What I’m hoping is that all this may have at least some lasting effect on the black vote. Maybe instead of 95% for any Democrat, it might drop to 90%, or even 85%. Maybe the black political machines in the inner cities with all those dead voters might be a little less fervently supportive.
We can always hope.
The Clintons like their sycophants the way they like their coffee: Black and contained and ready to throw away if they turn cold on them.
Therefore Obama has no connection with other blacks in America, like Condi Rice, whose father stood on their porch with a shotgun to ward off the KKK. Obama also has less experience than any major presidential candidate in perhaps 100 years. The ONLY reason these people are supporting him is because of how he LOOKS.
How is that not racism?
It has always struck me as funny when someone described as a writer (two paragraphs up), like Mr. Gray, whose stock in trade is the English language, speaks like that.
He is sarcastically mocking Clinton’s black stick.
Got it. For a second there I thought I had head-spinitus. Reminded me of my old fraternity days when I'd over-imbibe a little, and the room refused to stand still.
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