In the early stages of the most closely watched congressional race in the country, Hillary Rodham Clinton stayed meekly within the box drawn by her advisors, careful not to step out of line and inexplicably offend anyone. After last month’s acquittal in the Amadou Diallo case, her response was measured to the point of near-absurdity: “The police must strive for a better understanding of the community they serve and the community must strive for a better understanding of the incredible risk that the police face,” she said.
That all ended at roughly 6:40 p.m. Monday night. It took her a few days, but she finally attacked New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani for responding to the city’s most recent police killing of an unarmed man by releasing the victim’s arrest history, including a juvenile arrest. That’s when she took on the mayor loved by many for his successful war on crime for displaying virtually no compassion for the war’s casualties.
Clinton apparently decided she is comfortable exploiting the mayor’s dark side, a tactic that could easily spill over into even more revelations about his perpetually awkward relationship with people whose skin color happens not to be the same as his. Whether this tactic will work through a full campaign is one question. As of Tuesday evening, it looked like Giuliani was behaving just as Clinton desired: as a guy simply too mean to lead.
Speaking before a mostly African-American, standing-room-only crowd Monday, in the stuffy confines of the Bethel AME Church in Harlem, Clinton unleashed a verbal barrage against the mayor. The mayor, she charged to thunderous applause, “has hunkered down, taken sides and further divided this city.”
Reading from a prepared text, she added, “At just the moment when a real leader would have reached out and tried to heal the wounds, he has chosen to [incite] divisiveness.”
Some background: Early last Thursday, Dorismond, a Haitian-American, was shot and killed in Midtown Manhattan after an apparent struggle with undercover police who were finishing up a night of marijuana busts. One officer allegedly approached Dorismond, who worked as a security guard, and asked him if he had some marijuana. The request apparently enraged Dorismond, a scuffle ensued and in a matter of seconds he was shot and killed by one of the other officers.
Giuliani quickly ordered the police department to distribute Dorismond’s arrest history — which included convictions for disorderly conduct and a previously sealed record of an arrest when he was 13 years old. Dorismond, Giuliani explained to a Fox News Sunday audience, may not have been “an altar boy.”
The move prompted a firestorm of criticism from local African-American officials and activists (and even some normally tepid Democrats) revolted by the mayor’s latest attack. Democratic State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver yesterday announced a committee would probe the propriety of the release of the sealed juvenile-court records.
“New York,” Clinton later added, her hands glued to a podium, “has a real problem and all of us know it — everyone, it seems, except for the mayor of New York City.”
The mayor, however, remained unbowed. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, he defended the release of the dead man’s juvenile arrest record (“You cannot libel a dead person”); cast further doubt on the unarmed man’s character (“That Mr. Dorismond has spent a good deal of his life punching people is a fact”); and lit into the reporters who questioned the move (“I am just giving you facts that you resist printing”).
But perhaps most significantly, Giuliani resorted to a reliable part of his arsenal: the specter of the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Over the years, Sharpton has become to many white politicians a more perennial version of Willie Horton: a black guy with a bad history (much of it very real: He has consorted with organized crime figures, may have helped incite a fatal fire in Harlem and libeled several officials with the lies of phony rape victim Tawana Brawley), whose name gets trotted out periodically in the expectation it will energize white voters.
Indeed, as first reported by the New York Post earlier this month, Giuliani has already linked Clinton to Sharpton in campaign literature.
“Mrs. Clinton and the Rev. Al Sharpton are reading from the same script,” the mayor angrily declared Tuesday at City Hall. “The words that Mrs. Clinton used yesterday about polarizing are the same words that Al Sharpton said that she should introduce in the campaign in an interview about six or seven months ago. It’s quite clear that they’re reading from the same script. And what they’re trying to do is to take a difficult situation and try to turn it into a politically polarizing situation for her advantage … She’s reading from Al Sharpton’s script.”
He added: “When was the last time Mrs. Clinton spoke up on one of these things? When did she offer an opinion on this before? Why did she have campaign operatives around? And why did she use the script written out for her by Al Sharpton?”
Giuliani’s used the tactic before. In 1997, for example, he challenged his prospective Democratic mayoral opponent, Ruth Messinger, to say that Sharpton, her opponent in the party’s primary, was not qualified to be mayor. Messinger refused, for fear of alienating African-Americans, a bloc of voters long since written off by the mayor.
“Any time you’re in a public pissing match with Al Sharpton, you help yourself with blue-collar Catholics in the city,” said Republican strategist Roger Stone. “People outside the city think the city’s ungovernable. When the cops kill somebody with a criminal record, people don’t lose a lot of sleep in Westchester. They think the guy probably deserved it. That’s why they moved to Westchester in the first place: They were tired of having their cars broken into, tired of getting mugged, tired of getting robbed.”
Stone added: “I don’t think it’s calculated (on Giuliani’s part) but I think it has that effect.”
Others speculated that this attempt by Giuliani to smear the reputation of the victim could haunt him. “If his behavior continues in this way, it will be a referendum on his character rather than his performance,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a consultant who worked on President Clinton’s 1996 campaign. “A referendum on his character or her character is a referendum that neither wants to face, because both of them are very polarizing people.”
The specter of a spate of protests around this episode could also be disconcerting: Weeks of such civil disobedience around the Diallo shooting last year practically brought Giuliani to his knees, forcing him to meet with several African-American officials he had previously eschewed (including Harlem Rev. Calvin Butts, who had called Giuliani a “racist”).
But the issue, as played by Clinton, also served another purpose. It got under his skin. And it drove him to more of the same animated, angry distraction that had seem so unappealing for the last several days
At one point Tuesday, he launched into a pop-psychological profile of his opponent. “There’s a process called ‘projection’ in psychology,” he began “It means accusing someone of what you’re doing. That is precisely what Mrs. Clinton was doing. What I’m doing is what I’ve always done, which is try to get all the facts out to balance the situation in which there is a knee-jerk reaction to blame everything on the police. And these are facts that — and you’re not going to accept this, people rarely accept the things that are going on in their unconscious. You’re not going to accept that you block dealing with these facts, because it is so much easier to blame the police immediately. I’m not rushing to judgment. I’m not necessarily supporting the police version of it. I’m trying to get out that there’s another version to this, which very, very often you do not appropriately cover.”
But ultimately, this most recent episode involving the city’s combative chief magistrate again illustrates his stunning disconnect from the city’s minority residents. After more than six years, his administration’s upper reaches remain nearly all-white. (At his news conference, his highest-ranking African-American appointee, Deputy Mayor Rudy Washington, was absent.)
His attack on Sharpton may be blunted by the fact that he has virtually no African-American allies to rely on. (During his campaign for reelection in 1997, Giuliani enjoyed the visible support of several powerful African-American municipal union officials. But most of them have since been indicted or forced to resign in the wake of a massive corruption scandal.)
Dennis Walcott, the president of the New York Urban League has been one of the city’s few prominent African-American officials to maintain something approaching an open line of communication with the Giuliani administration. He pointedly decided not to take part in last year’s protests at police headquarters around Diallo’s shooting, preferring to wait for the grand jury to conclude its investigation.
But this latest episode has left him perplexed. “At all levels in the black community, people are very unclear as to why these aspersions are being laid at the feet of Mr. Dorismond,” said Walcott. “People are just wondering why have we had such a rapid escalation around the death of a man who is minding his own business. You can’t put a negative spin on this guy.”
Of Giuliani’s latest salvo, Walcott added: “I think this thing is really spiraling out of control and I have no idea why.”
“She’s honest? She doesn’t bake cookies. She manufactures lies.” — sign held by a St. Patrick’s Day parade-goer and Hillary Rodham Clinton critic on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 44th Street.
This St. Patrick’s Day parade began innocuously enough. Clinton attended Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, sitting a few rows behind her prospective opponent for U.S. Senate, Mayor Rudy Giuliani. She appeared at the holiday’s annual breakfast organized by long-time City Council Speaker Peter Vallone.
“It is just a great pleasure to be here as a New Yorker for St. Patrick’s Day,” she told the crowd at the Princeton Club (where she also relayed a hello from her husband, busy huddling with negotiators involved in the Northern Ireland peace process).
“I hope she knows her way,” Giuliani jabbed a little later on.
There wouldn’t be a ton of Democratic elected officials marching today. In New York City, the parade is a source of controversy. The event’s organizers do not permit the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization to take part, and as a result, numerous Democrats skip the event. U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer and former Mayor David Dinkins, for example, were both absent Friday. (Clinton apparently did not know about the contretemps back in December when she was asked whether she would march and quickly answered in the affirmative.)
She wore a black trench coat, a kelly green silk scarf, a wide-eyed grin and assembled alongside Vallone, former Mayor Ed Koch, assorted other pols and a line of school children braving bone-chilling temperatures. A light snow began to fall.
And then, after a flurry of introductions, she was off — up Fifth Avenue, waving to the onlookers, surrounded by an absolute swarm of television cameras, photographers and scribbling reporters. The pack often seemed to nearly overwhelm Clinton and her entourage, making her all but invisible at times to the parade’s onlookers. (“Back up! Back up!” shouted various Clinton and city council aides.)
But almost immediately, the catcalls and boos began.
“Go back to Arkansas!” was probably the most popular one.
“Carpetbagger!”
“Monica!”
“Rudy!”
Whenever the boos got too loud, Clinton’s volunteers would commence a chant of “Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!” They handed out green shamrock stickers emblazoned with “Hillary” to people in the crowd.
Clinton, her smile intact, marched onward, continuing to wave at the parade-watchers on the sidelines.
She approached 59th Street and Fifth Avenue.
The snow was getting heavier.
“Shame! Shame!” screamed protesters from the Cleveland Irish LesBiGay Organization. “She’s marching with bigots,” explained Florence Sullivan, a 34-year-old teacher from Manhattan. (Several dozen protesters from the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization were arrested during a demonstration earlier in the day after attempting to march.)
The crowd of onlookers got progressively thinner the farther north the marchers went, an apparent casualty of the weather. The catcalls cooled down.
Clinton and company got to 86th Street, the end of the parade route, where they turned east. She waved to a group of teenagers, who yelled out words of encouragement. “Ohmigod, there she is,” said one.
The crowd was thinner still. A pair of black vans appeared. Her aides whisked her into one of them, shut the doors. And she was done for the day.
An innocent man is killed in New York. A state jury acquits his assailant of all criminal charges, sparking public outrage. A leading New York political candidate stands on a platform with a relative of the victim, at the front of a rally of thousands in the neighborhood where the killing took place. The candidate also immediately calls for a federal civil rights investigation. The mayor, meanwhile, declares that the system has operated fairly.
If you guessed that victim was Amadou Diallo and the candidate was Hillary Clinton — or maybe even Al Sharpton — you’d be wrong: actually, that candidate was Rudy Giuliani.
In November 1992, mayoral contender Giuliani stood with former Mayor Ed Koch and then-U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato on a platform in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, before a rally of more than 4,000 people outraged over the acquittal of the alleged killer of Hasidic scholar Yankel Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum was the victim of an apparent anti-Semitic attack on the first day of riots that would engulf that neighborhood for four days during the summer of 1991.
His assailant, a young African-American named Lemrick Nelson, walked scot-free three days earlier. The day of the acquittal, Giuliani called for the Justice Department to “immediately assume jurisdiction of this case.” (Nelson was eventually tried and convicted on federal civil rights charges in early 1997 and sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison.)
Giuliani’s reaction to the Diallo verdict, of course, couldn’t be more different. After the verdicts were announced in the trial of four police officers accused of murdering the unarmed African immigrant, the mayor acknowledged the pain felt by Diallo’s family, but then confidently declared that justice had been served and no federal civil rights prosecution would be justified.
“I know those rules like the back of my hand,” he said of the Justice Department’s criteria for bringing a federal civil rights prosecution. “I administered them maybe over 1,000 times. This case doesn’t fall within those rules. The crux of those rules is a conclusion by the Justice Department that someone did not receive a fair trial. And I don’t know how any fair-minded person could look at the way this case was conducted and not come to the conclusion that it fits well within the parameters of a fair trial.”
Giuliani also decried the efforts of protesters before the trial who “tried to get this case resolved in the streets,” and dismissed the possibility of reaching out to African-Americans disappointed with the verdict. Asked if he planned to reach out to people of color, and perhaps visit Harlem in the wake of the acquittal, he responded: “No. I think the very best thing to do would be for people to reflect on the trial, take a look at the evidence and not to engage in the same sort of analysis that took place as if, before the trial, as if the trial never took place.”
The contrast between Giuliani’s behavior in 1992 and now should not suggest that there is no merit to either of his positions: Most obviously, Rosenbaum’s killing was certainly motivated by anti-Semitism (members of the crowd reportedly yelled, “Let’s get the Jew!”). And in the Diallo case, a jury that included four African-Americans found the shooting a tragic accident, not murder or manslaughter.
However, as Giuliani embarks on yet another political campaign, his different reactions raise questions about whether and how he has used both cases for political advantage. Giuliani has long counted on Jewish voters — particularly Orthodox Jews — as one of the most reliable parts of his political base, and his alliance with Jews offended by the Nelson acquittal made political sense.
His stance after the Diallo verdict, meanwhile, may be seen as trying to flee from an issue that could only help energize groups that he has long since discarded: people of color and white liberals. (But Hillary Clinton is unlikely to raise the issue of Giuliani’s potential hypocrisy; it is easy to imagine how such a contrast could quickly devolve into a war between Jews and African-Americans.)
The Crown Heights riots served as a potent symbol in Giuliani’s 1993 campaign against David Dinkins, as he successfully drove home the message that lawlessness ruled under the incumbent administration. He called the riots “a pogrom,” and appeared at a rally in City Hall Park in the middle of the campaign demanding a new investigation into the riots. “Never again!” he cried out.
Indeed, their significance continued to resonate into Giuliani’s second term. In 1998 he formally apologized for the city’s response to the 1991 riots and said the city would pay more than $1 million to settle a civil lawsuit by Hasidic residents of Crown Heights.
“In 1992, his political instincts and his legal instincts coalesced,” said one longtime observer of city politics and sometimes admirer of the mayor. “Here they also coalesce: Politically, he wants to put this behind him and legally it’s the appropriate thing to do.”
Ken Fisher, a Democratic city councilman from Brooklyn, offered two potential explanations for the change in the mayor’s behavior. “I don’t think anyone suggested that the last words the cops said was ‘Let’s kill the black guy,’” said Fisher. “So if you give the mayor the benefit of the doubt, there’s some striking differences between mob action and what happened with the police officers.
“If you want to ascribe some political motives,” Fisher continued, “I think the mayor is not going to empower people who are his political enemies, like Al Sharpton, and is trying to slam the door on the notion that the police officers or the department did anything wrong — because that would only help Sharpton and [Rev. Calvin] Butts to keep the issue alive through the fall election.”
Mayoral spokeswoman Sunny Mindel said the two cases were very different. “In the case of Yankel Rosenbaum, he was killed because he was a Jew,” said Mindel. “There was a mob mentality there, they were after a Jew. He was killed because of his religion. When you look at the situation around the Diallo incident, these guys got involved in a very unfortunate accident, but this was not racially motivated.”
Mindel also pointed out that there was widespread agreement that the state prosecution of Nelson had been mishandled.
Giuliani is only partially correct in stating that the fairness of the state proceeding in the Diallo case — and the racial motivation of the shooters — determines whether a federal prosecution is necessary. Civil rights lawyers agree that determining whether another case should be pursued is extremely complicated.
There is at least one more similarity between the aftermath of the two verdicts: In 1992, then-Mayor Dinkins reacted to the acquittal of Nelson with seeming nonchalance. “I have no reason to doubt that the criminal justice system has operated fairly and openly,” said Dinkins, who opposed a further investigation by the U.S. Justice Department.
In a typically Dinkins-esque maneuver, he soon changed his mind after searing criticism. (After Diallo, however, the former mayor had no such confidence in the state court verdict, and immediately announced that federal officials should review the case.) The chances that Giuliani will mimic his loathed predecessor — and change his mind — seem unlikely.
Former Mayor Ed Koch, who stood with Giuliani to protest the Nelson verdict in 1992, said he does not think a federal prosecution is warranted in this case, since there has been no allegation of bias by the police officers. Nevertheless, he was critical of the mayor’s reluctance to reach out to New Yorkers upset by the verdict.
“He has no credibility at this moment and he should understand that people are going to boo him,” said Koch. “But notwithstanding that he should try to reach out — because he’s the mayor. That’s his job: to reach out to people, even to those who believe you’re not fair. That’s your job and if you don’t like that job you shouldn’t be mayor.”
“The only time that he’s able to show compassion,” Koch added with a chuckle, “is when it’s directed at people who support him.”
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani looked grim, standing with Police Commissioner Howard Safir before a phalanx of reporters and assorted government aides in City Hall’s packed press conference room. The long-awaited verdict in the case of four white police officers charged with murdering unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo last year had been announced: not guilty on all counts.
But this was no ordinary chief executive commenting on a controversial jury verdict: This was the mayor credited with restoring order to the city; who has backed the police at nearly every turn; whose administration’s upper reaches have been virtually all-white for more than six years; and who once refused to meet with some of the city’s and state’s highest-ranking African-American elected officials.
And this was the city where, twice in the last 11 years, racially tinged acts of violence — the killing of a young black man in Bensonhurst in 1989 and days of riots in Crown Heights in 1991 — helped contribute to the unseating of two incumbent mayors. So commenting on this verdict might be fraught with political peril, and might require a measure of caution.
Or it might not.
The former U.S. attorney expressed his sorrow for Diallo’s family, but soon unleashed his anger at the people he has referred to in the past as the city’s “anti-police lobby.”
“Probably until the day I die, I will always give police officers the benefit of the doubt,” he said in his firm-yet-understated manner. “We have racism in New York City, unfortunately,” he added. “We also have a vicious form of anti-police bias which leads to entertaining every doubt possible against the police, and you know, police officers are human beings also.”
And the controversial decision to move the trial out of the majority black-and-Latino borough of the Bronx to upstate Albany County — a decision that angered so many — was an exercise in “courage” by the judicial system, Giuliani said, because “the carnival-like atmosphere” in the city meant it was “impossible for these defendants to receive a fair trial.”
“This jury reaffirms our confidence in the American system of justice,” he said, later adding, “Thank God for America and thank God for our court system.”
The mayor concluded with an attack on people who “protest against the police and blame them for every ill in society.” This verdict should prompt them to reexamine their mindset, he insisted. “Let’s move this out of politics.”
There’s little chance of that. Diallo’s family and supporters have asked that the case be revisited by the U.S. Justice Department — the agency controlled by the husband of Giuliani’s Senate opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Such a move would be inappropriate, the former federal prosecutor explained. “I know those rules like the back of my hand,” he said.
But down the hallway from the mayor’s press conference, just a few minutes later, several of the city’s elected Democrats disagreed. Gathered in front of a statue of George Washington in the City Hall rotunda, they declared their support for a federal civil rights investigation, and their disappointment at the verdict.
C. Virginia Fields, the African-American Manhattan borough president, criticized the mayor. “It’s always: ‘The community must do, the community must do,’” she said. “I say to the mayor, as I’ve said before, ‘Come into these communities. Listen. What are the people saying?’”
Meanwhile, up in Albany, a crowd gathered to listen to the Rev. Al Sharpton, who had organized so many demonstrations in front of the city’s police department in the wake of Diallo’s shooting, demonstrations that forced the mayor to meet with many of the black leaders who had long been objects of his scorn.
“This is not the end, this is only the beginning,” said Sharpton. “We said from the beginning that we would pursue this in the federal courts; we had to take a detour to Albany. That detour is over.”
The political consequences of the verdict remained unclear tonight. Hillary Clinton issued a cautious press release that talked of “coming together to build a stronger community,” and which stated, “The police must strive for a better understanding of the community they serve and the community must strive for a better understanding of the incredible risk that the police face in their service on behalf of all of us.”
More than 100 people gathered outside the Diallo apartment in the Bronx in a spontaneous demonstration after the verdict. But there will likely be a bigger reaction on Saturday, when a mass protest is planned at 6 p.m. at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue.
Although the performance Monday night at Harlem’s Apollo Theater was not a musical, there’s little doubt which song Al Gore and Bill Bradley were singing up there on the stage: Billy Paul’s signature ’70s tune, “Am I Black Enough for You?”
Watching the two contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination debate is usually a painful experience (one veteran journalist remarked recently that she’d “rather have a root canal than sit through another one”), but this event was perversely entertaining in that the issue being debated seemed to be which of these white Ivy League grads with kids in elite private schools can show that he feels the pain of black America the most.
It was a remarkable change of pace for a national political culture that just last week was consumed by the spectacle of the Republican candidates pandering to white people who like to fly the Confederate flag in South Carolina. This, by contrast, was a 90-minute debate driven by the concerns of minorities and poor people. All of the questions (save those by journalists) were asked by people of color, and they were different from the usual political questions — for example, the questions about crime focused on the plight of the people being arrested.
Bradley stated that he would issue an executive order to eliminate racial profiling. “White Americans can no longer deny the plight of black Americans,” he concluded, to uproarious applause. The shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York, he said, “reflects racial profiling in the sense that seeps into the mind of someone, so that he sees a wallet in the hands of a white man as a wallet but a wallet in the hands of a black man as a gun.”
Gore did him one better, saying he’d pass a law outlawing racial profiling, whose effects extend into banking, insurance, schooling and people’s hearts. He concluded with a lyrical coup de grbce, declaring with the intonation of a Southern preacher that he was going to put “as much energy in ed-u-ca-tion as we do into in-car-cer-a-tion.” (Gore may have become a bit too fond of this rhyming scheme. Later, responding to a question about whether African-Americans are owed reparations for slavery, he roared: “I believe the best rep-ar-a-tion is a good ed-u-ca-tion — and affirmative action.”)
Bradley charged back, complaining that President Clinton should have outlawed racial profiling and arguing that Gore led an effort to end affirmative action at the federal level. It’s on Page 208 of George Stephanopolous’ book, he noted, and on cue, Bradley’s aides dutifully handed out press releases to reporters to back this up. And, Bradley asserted, Gore voted to maintain the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory schools like South Carolina’s Bob Jones University, which, as every political junkie in the country now knows, bans interracial dating.
“That is a phony and scurrilous charge,” yelped Gore, who went on to accuse Bradley of voting against affirmative action for minority-owned broadcasting companies in the Senate — prompting loud hoots from the audience.
This debate was a last stand of sorts for Bradley, as even some of his supporters acknowledged Monday night. He is in serious danger of being blown away in the March 7 primaries. Here in his almost back yard of New York, two recent polls place him at least 15 percentage points behind Gore among Democratic voters around the state.
“He’s got to win New York to stay in it,” says Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who worked for the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996. But Sheinkopf sees Bradley’s prospects as weak, since most New York politicians are supporting Gore. “Who turns out on March 7? Organization Democrats. It’s not a normal election day. If Bradley gets trounced badly in New York, then there isn’t much left of Bradley. He’s pinning his hopes on getting a black vote, but I don’t see how he gets that.”
Indeed, the incumbent vice president has gotten most of the endorsements of African-American elected officials, particularly in New York City, a point he gleefully pointed out Monday night.
“Do you think that they all have such poor judgment, Sen. Bradley?” he asked.
Ooh! Low blow! Low blow!
“What I think is they don’t know your record as a conservative Democrat,” Bradley responded. More shrieks and boos. “They don’t know that you voted five times over three years for tax exemptions for schools that discriminate on the basis of race.”
Uh-oh. Bad move.
Traces of a grin — no, make that a sneer — spread across Gore’s face. A ripe opportunity had just presented itself. “Y’know what, in my experience, Black Caucus is pretty savvy,” he said. “They know a lot more than you think they know.” An explosion of yelling and applause rose from the crowd.
He wasn’t done yet.
“The Congressional Black Caucus is not out there being led around. They know what the score is, and they know their brothers and sisters in New Jersey said you were never for them walking the walk.”
Ouch.
So, despite the urgency of the occasion for Bradley, it didn’t seem as if he’d won. Near the end of the evening, he grasped for a reliable portion of his playbook: He talked of his days as a rookie for the New York Knicks, and of getting offers to do endorsements that should have gone to his black teammates.
Being a strong president who wants to deal with race means “sometimes telling white Americans what they don’t want to hear,” said Bradley, who cited what he calls “white-skin privilege” — a term that attracted much attention when Bradley used it early in his campaign. Rarely has a mainstream candidate spoken so candidly about race. Bradley, it seems, was actually going to build his campaign around race and the continuing mistreatment of people of color by white people.
But that theme, like the rest of Bradley’s campaign, just never caught fire, not even after his 90 minutes at the Apollo Theater.
It was the type of civic/political event guaranteed to draw a healthy crowd from among the Upper East Side’s moneyed classes: the dedication Wednesday of a new family center at the 92nd Street Y, a fashionable gathering place for cultural and literary events on Lexington Avenue. An added attraction was that the woman who would be the junior U.S. senator from New York was there, to be interviewed in the auditorium by Charlie Rose.
Rose spent much of the evening lobbing a combination of softballs and intriguing questions designed to get Hillary Rodham Clinton to differentiate herself from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, her likely opponent. Rose rarely followed up with questions that would have required an improvised response from Clinton — and he also avoided his peculiar “I’m so interested in you that I’m going to talk about you even more than you do” style of interviewing.
Clinton — sitting back in a comfy chair, hair flipped upward, wearing a dark, double-breasted suit that revealed the flared collar of a pink blouse — employed her patented, oh-so-patient style of listening (eyes scrunched, slowly nodding along with her questioner) and stayed on message.
She said she had never before considered running for office, had once had doubts about how good a candidate she would be and was extremely grateful for the past seven years — despite periods that she “wouldn’t wish on anybody.” Clinton refused to say whether she was a Yankees or a Mets fan and sidestepped a question about running for president someday: “I have learned that senators have a whole lot more privacy than presidents,” she explained. And she said some good had come out of her husband’s impeachment: “We protected and saved the Constitution,” Clinton declared.
After acknowledging that she and Giuliani agree on several hot-button issues — they’re both pro-gun control and pro-choice — she said that the dividing lines between the two are simple: On public education, Giuliani has supported using vouchers for private schools, and she’s against such a plan; and on the economy (this was less clear), the mayor has endorsed George W. Bush, who supports a bad federal budget plan.
And what is the one issue at the core of her candidacy? Rose asked.
“I believe every child deserves a chance to have the best life possible, and that means that their parents should have good jobs with good wages and that their schools should provide good educations and they should have the health care that they need.”
Ah.
Then, nearing the end of the evening, after roughly an hour of such responses from Clinton, Rose launched the one surprise of the evening:
“So, how come this marriage survived all this?” he asked.
The audience let out a collective groan.
But Clinton seemed only slightly taken aback. She took a breath before replying:
“You know, because we really love each other and we’re very committed to our life together. And it’s been, you know, an incredible 25 years.”
The audience offered loud applause, grateful that an embarrassment in their presence had been avoided.
Rose interjected: “Never boring.”
“Ha, ha, never boring,” Clinton said almost wistfully. “That’s true, that’s true.”
