Topics: aol_on, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Editor's Picks, Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Race, Ricky Ray Rector, sister souljah, News, Politics News
Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton, at the 112th annual national convention U. S. R. in Atlanta, Sept. 9, 1992. (Credit: AP/Curtis Compton)It may be a generational thing—I was born in 1967—but this is what Hillary and Bill Clinton will always mean to me: Sister Souljah, Ricky Ray Rector, welfare reform, and the crime bill. And beyond—really, behind—all that, the desperate desire to win over white voters by declaring to the American electorate: We are not the Party of Jesse Jackson, we are not the Rainbow Coalition.
Many of the liberal journalists who are supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy are too young to remember what the Clintons did to American politics and the Democratic Party in the 1990s. But even journalists who are old enough seem to have forgotten just how much the Clintons’ national ascendancy was premised on the repudiation of black voters and black interests. This was a move that was both inspired and applauded by a small but influential group of Beltway journalists and party strategists, who believed making the Democrats a white middle-class party was the only path back to the White House after wandering for 12 years in the Republican wilderness.
But for me, it’s as vivid as yesterday. I still remember Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg’s American Prospect article (reposted in 2005), which claimed that the Democrats were “too identified with minorities and special interests to speak for average Americans.” Black people not being average Americans, you see. This article, American Prospect co-editor Paul Starr proudly proclaimed last year, is “widely recognized for its influence on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign” in 1992. Starr, incidentally, just penned a defense in Politico of Hillary Clinton as the only serious Democratic candidate.
Maybe I remember this all because it happened at a formative period of my life, during my first years in graduate school. My roommate and closest friend throughout those years was Paul Frymer, who’s now a political science professor at Princeton. Paul’s dissertation—which he began to write in the apartment we shared on Canner Street in New Haven, and which formed the basis for his now classic book “Uneasy Alliances,” which shows how the combination of racism and the two-party system encourages African-American voters to be “captured” (taken for granted) by one of the parties—was born out of the tremendous frustration and anger many of us felt about the wrenching transformation the Clintons imposed upon the Democratic Party.
I was recently rereading some of Paul’s book, and it brought back that whole moment in all its sordid detail. Like the fact, according to an article by Andrew Hacker, which Paul cites, that “for the first time in almost half a century, the party’s [1992] platform made no mention of redressing racial injustice.” (I reread the platform: It does mention affirmative action and civil rights in passing, but it’s cursory.)
Or the fact that in their 1992 book, “Putting People First,” Bill Clinton and Al Gore only mentioned race once. And that was to oppose the idea of racial quotas.
Or the fact that their chapter on civil rights was mostly about people with disabilities.
Or the fact that Clinton’s real target in his Sister Souljah speech was Jesse Jackson, who was blind-sided and humiliated by Clinton’s tirade as he sat next to Clinton on the dais. (So embedded in the Clinton psyche is this Jesse Jackson boogeyman that Bill couldn’t resist calling it up in 2008, when Hillary was tanking in South Carolina. And why not? It had worked in 1992.)
Or the fact, which Frymer doesn’t mention in his book, that Hillary Clinton in 1996 resorted to the worst sort of animal imagery to describe teenage criminals:
They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel.
As one wag said on Facebook the other night—in response to the question “Bring them to heel? Who says that shit out loud?”—“Dog trainers.”
What’s more, white people got the message: According to polls, white voters were more familiar with Clinton’s attack on Sister Souljah than they were with his economic plan. So did black people: Though they voted for Clinton, their share of the total voter turnout fell by 20 percent from 1988, when they cast their ballots for Michael Dukakis (and accounted for 20 percent of the vote for him and 10 percent of total turnout), and 1992, when they cast their ballots for Clinton (and accounted for 15 percent of the vote for him and 8 percent of total turnout).
