Brother Bill

President Clinton and the Politics of Race and Class

Daryl A Carter

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781610755856
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"This book is a fascinating analysis of race and class in the age of President Bill Clinton. It provides much-needed clarity in regards to the myth of the 'First Black President.' It contributes much to our understanding of the history that informs our present moment!"
—Cornel West As President Barack Obama was sworn into office on January 20, 2009, the United States was abuzz with talk of the first African American president. At this historic moment, one man standing on the inaugural platform, seemingly a relic of the past, had actually been called by the moniker the "first black president" for years.

President William Jefferson Clinton had long enjoyed the support of African Americans during his political career, but the man from Hope also had a complex and tenuous relationship with this faction of his political base. Clinton stood at the nexus of intense political battles between conservatives' demands for a return to the past and African Americans' demands for change and fuller equality. He also struggled with the class dynamics dividing the American electorate, especially African Americans. Those with financial means seized newfound opportunities to go to college, enter the professions, pursue entrepreneurial ambitions, and engage in mainstream politics, while those without financial means were essentially left behind. The former became key to Clinton's political success as he skillfully negotiated the African American class structure while at the same time maintaining the support of white Americans. The results were tremendously positive for some African Americans. For others, the Clinton presidency was devastating.

Brother Bill examines President Clinton's political relationship with African Americans and illuminates the nuances of race and class at the end of the twentieth century, an era of technological, political, and social upheaval.

CHAPTER 1

The Democratic Leadership Council and African Americans

IT WAS NOVEMBER 6, 1984. The polls on the West Coast had just closed. CBS news anchor Dan Rather announced to the nation that Ronald Reagan had won reelection by an overwhelming landslide, an affirmation of his conservative political ideology. Back on August 23, at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, Reagan had unveiled his new campaign ad, “Morning in America.” Judith Stein has written that Reagan “managed to knot his lofty rhetoric of freedom with the mundane economics of the day. Freedom was a staple in U.S. campaign rhetoric, but Reagan’s definition harked backed to the nineteenth century.”¹ Reagan’s ability to deliver eloquent speeches that conjured up a mythical past was one of the most potent political weapons in his arsenal. Historian Gil Troy argued that Reagan’s “optimism and pro-Americanism forged a governing template useful to future presidents from both sides of the aisle.”² Republicans and Reagan Democrats around the country rejoiced in the afterglow of a historic victory. President Ronald Reagan defeated former vice president Walter Mondale in 1984 with 525 electoral votes and a plurality of 58.8 percent of the popular vote. Mondale lost every state except his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. On Capitol Hill, the mood for Democrats resembled that of a funeral. Democratic operatives, moderates, members of Congress, and their respective staffs sighed at the thought of another four years of Ronald Reagan.

Democrats’ jeers could be heard from coast to coast. Walter Mondale was the wrong candidate to take on the Gipper. The party had lost its appeal to mainstream Americans. It had grown too liberal, too soft on crime, too dovish on national defense, too enamored with minorities and special interests. They believed that the Democratic Party had swayed too far from its traditional base.

In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, using the Great Depression as a political opportunity, formed a new Democratic coalition of labor, the working class, intellectuals, progressives, and minorities into the most dominant electoral coalition in the nation. Historians have long credited his campaign as the origins of the modern Democratic Party coalition. For African Americans, as well as for millions of other Americans, FDR made the Democratic Party attractive for the first time. Steven Lawson cites that Roosevelt’s “New Deal extended economic relief to the one-third of the nation that was ill housed, ill clothed, and ill fed, which included blacks as well as poor whites.”³ President Roosevelt’s effort to stop the economic carnage of the Great Depression impressed many who were caught in its grip. African Americans benefited from much of the New Deal, but not, as Steven Lawson points out, “because of their race; in fact, many New Deal agencies, especially in the South, were administered to preserve prevailing racial practices that maintained blacks in a subordinate position.”⁴ FDR’s ability to capitalize on the ineptitude of President Hoover in 1932 and bring new factions of the American electorate into the Democratic fold resulted in twenty years of Democratic rule in the White House. Then-contemporary historians, such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., argued that the Roosevelt years were the beginning of a new political epoch similar to the years of President Andrew Jackson. Schlesinger explained in detail the transformative period of the 1930s in several works, including The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933; The Coming of the New Deal, 1922–1935; and The Politics of Upheaval, 1935–1936.⁵ The 1932 election was a realignment in the American electorate that generally held until Reagan created a new national alignment in American politics in 1980.

The 1960s, however, tore at the soul of the Democratic Party. Vietnam, civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and the Great Society produced division not only within the Democratic Party, but throughout the nation as a whole. The role of liberals in these events provoked a backlash. As Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin note, “The coalition of wage earners and intellectuals of all races and most regions that Franklin D. Roosevelt forged in the 1930s cracked apart during the late ’60s and has not been rebuilt.”⁶ For the Democratic Party, Isserman and Kazin explain, “Taking its place on the left of American politics was a mélange of social movements—feminist, gay and lesbian, black nationalist, Mexican American, environmentalist—that swelled in size and became skilled at defending the rights and cultural identities of people who, before the ’60s, had been scorned or ignored.”⁷ This new Democratic Party, so different from that of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, frustrated the moderate-to-conservative Democrats that made up the Democratic Leadership Council into looking for alternatives.

The 1970s provided the impetus for massive political and cultural change. A decade crudely thought of as a throwaway or unimportant period filled with disco balls, Afros, energy crises, and heavy metal was a period of incredible activity that led to the Reagan revolution. As historians Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer write, the 1970s was a period in which social and cultural transformations and political culture dramatically changed and, thus, shaped the rest of the century.⁸ These changes included antibusing movements, pro-business advocacy, neighborhood associations, religious zealotry, and antifeminist groups. These often disparate and disagreeable groups rallied to one another in common cause against what they perceived as the menaces of the 1960s: sexual permissiveness, alternative lifestyles, secularism, and anti-American behavior. Further, concern over the state of the American family prompted average Americans across the United States to become more civically active. This was often combined with fierce patriotism, moral themes, and propagandizing theories advocating the free market, free enterprise, and the rugged individualism of the nineteenth century. As Matthew Lassiter notes, “The ideological contradiction at the core of the conservative ‘pro-family movement’ has always resolved around the inherent tension between the enthusiastic celebration of free-market capitalism and the simultaneous defense of traditional family values.”⁹ These activists and their followers responded to calls for unity against liberalism. Moreover, their reaction toward the excesses of liberalism resonated even with those determined to hold the line, such as union workers.

If the 1950s and 1960s could be generalized as decades of successful struggles for freedom for minorities, women, gays, and the poor, then the 1970s and 1980s were the decades of backlash and revolt against those successes. Central to much of the conservative position was civil rights. During the civil rights movement evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson rejected political activism generally and civil rights specifically. Civil rights to them translated into special favors for minorities at the expense of whites. Considering themselves in favor of equal rights, conservative clergy thought that assimilation, order, and adherence to strictly pro-American behavior was the best way for African Americans to be treated as equal. They turned a deaf ear to the pleas of Dr. Martin Luther King and liberal clergy to push for full equality for all Americans. In addition, many portrayed the civil rights movement as a conspiracy by communists to create upheaval in the United States. However, by the beginning of the 1970s, clergy from the Sunbelt and South, along with other areas around the country, alleged that the 1960s contributed to the declining morals of the country.

The most sensitive area of interest was the schools. After Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, white southerners began creating private schools.¹⁰ Some of those schools were funded with taxpayer money. Often they were called day schools or Christian academies. By the 1970s it was clear that whites were using these schools to evade integration. As a result, the federal government began targeting these schools for denial of tax-exempt status. While the Internal Revenue Service was right in denying privilege status to such schools, the IRS contributed to the conservative movement’s feelings of being under siege. Historian Joseph Crespino argued, “Republican Party operatives would continue to invoke this populist framework to position themselves as the chief defenders of conservative religious principles against a modern secularist enemy that was hostile to the interests of Christian Americans.”¹¹ This combination of cultural politics, religious activism, family concerns, and fears of racial amalgamation propelled a massive conservative movement called the New Right to victory in 1980, with Ronald Reagan as its standard bearer.

The modern conservative movement began in the wake of World War II. Conservatives such as Robert “Mr. Republican” Taft, William F. Buckley Jr., and Senator Barry Goldwater began to vigorously oppose the New Deal, fair deal, and big government as threats to American freedom. The 1944 publication of The Road to Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, greatly influenced intellectuals and conservatives about the inherent dangers of federal intervention in the economy.¹² Hayek’s work, with its discussions of the threat of central planning to individual freedom and liberty, helped to motivate other conservative writers to warn against the expansion of the government. By 1963, economist Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz had published A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960.¹³ Friedman argued that the Federal Reserve should keep tight control over inflation and promote free enterprise. Esoteric debates over monetary policy were a veneer for frustration over the growing involvement of the federal government in the lives and pocketbooks of millions of Americans. Focus on “the invisible hand” of the market to control itself, along with market-based solutions to America’s domestic problems, was central to conservatives’ political persona. By the 1980s, deficit spending to boost the American economy fell by the wayside as the works and ideas of Hayek, Friedman, and Arthur Laffer—the economic theorist who convinced Ronald Reagan of the wisdom of supply-side economics—grew acceptable among much of the American public.¹⁴ In addition, the liberalization of America’s racial politics rankled conservatives supportive of equal rights for African Americans but not when equal rights came from the federal government. By the 1960s, social transformation brought on by the rights revolution of the 1960s gave conservatives new arrows to put in their quivers.

Social agitation for civil rights by African Americans, women, homosexuals, criminal defendants, Native Americans, Hispanics, and welfare recipients provoked a serious backlash among conservatives. In 1945, as the United States forced Japan to surrender with the atomic bomb, conservatives grew worried about communist infiltration of the United States. As Donald Critchlow has noted, no other force galvanized conservatives in the immediate aftermath of World War II more than anti-Communism.¹⁵ In fact, the civil rights movement was dogged by allegations of disloyalty and communist ties throughout its history. Conservatives’ distaste for growing secularization and revision of the meaning of America meant that a backlash was brewing against the forces of progressive change. Furthermore, violence in the cities, disrespect toward authority and tradition, and sexual permissiveness disturbed millions of Americans who felt excluded by the upheaval of the 1960s. By the end of the 1970s, numerous conservative groups sprouted up to oppose busing, liberalism, the peace movement, and the alleged decay of American society.

As conservatives changed the political and cultural environment, Democrats rethought the party’s core positions. Historian Robert M. Collins has written that “the effects of Reagan’s powerful gravitational pull could also be seen in the emergence within the opposition party of the so-called New Democrats.”¹⁶ “Reagan’s success in dominating the national agenda, his early steamroller legislative victories, and especially his overwhelming victory in the 1984 election,” explains Collins, “lent increasing urgency to the task of formulating a credible response to his leadership.”¹⁷

Al From and Bill Clinton were among those who believed that the party’s growing alignment with special interests was disastrous for the electoral fortunes of the party. In the wake of the greatest electoral humiliation for a major party since Lyndon B. Johnson devoured Barry Goldwater with 486 electoral votes and 61.1 percent of the vote, From, Clinton, and like-minded politicos formed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The purpose of the nascent DLC was simple: recapture the center in American politics. As From and Will Marshall, the intellectual arm of the DLC, argued, “They are inventing a new politics that transcends the exhausted Left-Right debate that has immobilized our nation for too long.”¹⁸ Compromise and conciliation were the hallmarks of these New Democrats. At the center of the DLC’s platform were strength abroad, economic prosperity at home, and the ideals of community, responsibility, and accountability. In order to understand the 1990s, President Clinton, and his legacy regarding African Americans, one must discover why these New Democrats saw an overt commitment to minorities as troublesome. By examining the DLC, its platform, and its membership, we can better understand not only why it was so popular, but also how it impacted political and policy choices.

In the popular conception of the Democratic Leadership Council, Reagan whipped Mondale, and then Al From and Bill Clinton jumped in to resurrect the Democratic Party. This conception, though exaggerated, was partially true. In fact, as early as President Jimmy Carter’s defeat at the hands of Reagan in 1980, young, relatively new Democrats were opining that the party needed to change. Many of these Democrats were Watergate babies. They were elected to office in the years between 1974 and 1980, in part, because of the real and alleged criminal activity of the Nixon White House and their own commitment to political reform. The Watergate generation included officials that figured prominently in the New Democratic movement over the course of the next three decades, such as Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Chuck Robb of Virginia, Sam Nunn of Georgia, Dick Gephardt of Missouri, Al Gore of Tennessee, Tim Wirth of Colorado, and Bill Gray of Pennsylvania. The leader of the young, centrist Democrats was part of one of the most colorful families in twentieth-century American politics: Gillis Long of the Long family of Louisiana. A cousin of Senator Huey Long, Senator Russell Long, and Congressman Speedy Long, Gillis Long was himself a member of the US House of Representatives. By 1980 Long had become chair of the House Democratic Caucus. Among his chief lieutenants was the future founder of the DLC, Al From. In the aftermath of Carter’s loss, the Committee on Party Effectiveness (CPE) was born. The CPE, Kenneth Baer discovered, was “the first organization embodiment of the New Democrats.”¹⁹ It had thirty-seven members and met regularly to discuss the problems of the party, legislatively and politically. As Baer has also written, this group should not be considered New Democrats, as they did not see themselves in such a light and did not separate themselves from the mainstream party in any significant way.²⁰

According to Bill Clinton, the Democratic Leadership Council held key values. In his 2004 autobiography, Clinton wrote:

I had helped to write, and deeply believed in, the DLC’s five core beliefs: Andrew Jackson’s credo of opportunity for all and special privileges for none; the basic American values of work and family, freedom and responsibility, faith, tolerance, and inclusion; John Kennedy’s ethic of mutual responsibility, asking citizens to give something back to their country; the advancement of democratic and humanitarian values around the world, and prosperity and upward mobility at home; and Franklin Roosevelt’s commitment to innovation, to modernizing government for the information age and encouraging people by giving them the tools to make the most of their own lives.²¹

While there would be much debate about what these five “core beliefs” meant, President Clinton used them to accomplish a variety of triumphs, such as crime legislation, welfare reform, education initiatives, and balancing the budget. Furthermore, the New Democratic rhetoric as spoken by Clinton drew a much larger cross-section into the Democratic Party, at least at voting time, than any Democratic Party agenda since the Great Society.

There were significant differences between these more pragmatic politicos and the older Democrats in office. These New Democrats criticized welfare programs, which they considered negative because they inspired dependency. Policies that neglected to promote economic growth were hallmarks of a bygone era that needed to be jettisoned. New Democrats distanced themselves from objects of taxpayer resentment. Thus, by embracing the New Left, with its cadre of minority racial extremists and militants, feminists, environmentalists, defendant and prisoner rights advocates, welfare rights activists, and proponents of sexual rights—including abortion and the right to engage in sex outside of marriage or with same-sex partners—Democrats had ceded cultural authority to the Republican Party. Reagan’s victories symbolized that the Republican Party—with its enthusiastic support toward and from Evangelicals, traditionalists, gun rights advocates, anti-communists, classical liberal governance proponents, and working-class whites—had seized much of the old New Deal coalition. The Democrats had become associated with minorities, women, and coastal elites.

The New Democrats saw no path to electoral success in the party’s current formation against a unified, disciplined, rhetorically resonant Republican Party. Northeastern liberals, such as House Speaker Tip O’Neill, represented a dying past. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson were long gone. Many within the old Democratic coalition—labor, conservatives, women, minorities, anti-c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction - “The First Black President?”
• Chapter 1 - The Democratic Leadership Council and African Americans
• Chapter 2 - Race and Class in the 1990s
• Chapter 3 - The Politics of Racial Appointments
• Chapter 4 - Responsibility and Accountability
• Chapter 5 - “Mend It, Don’t End It”
• Chapter 6 - Welfare Reform
• Chapter 7 - A Missed Opportunity
• Chapter 8 - The Clinton Legacy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author