by Joy-Ann Reid
The decision outraged the Black Caucus, which collectively refused a White House invitation to discuss the canceled nomination. New York congressman Charlie Rangel, a member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, began telling reporters that the caucus was considering partnering with Republicans to block Clinton’s economic agenda in the House in retaliation. The decision put Clinton at particular odds with southern members like Jim Clyburn, who knew well what “full slate” voting had done to black voters for generations.
“[Clinton] not pursuing the nomination of Lani Guinier was one of the low points of his presidency,” Ogletree said.
The wounds with the Black Caucus would heal, and there were significant successes, including the signing of a National Voter Registration Act in 1993, which eased the registration process for millions of Americans. A landmark budget bill was signed that had received no Republican support but would begin to close the yawning, Reagan-era budget deficits and ignite the lagging economy. But the Omnibus Crime Bill, which pledged to put a hundred thousand police officers on the streets and created a federal “three-strikes” provision that opened the door to lengthy prison terms for repeat offenders, ignited fresh criticism from civil rights leaders, including Sharpton, who accused the administration of failing to address racial profiling or the dramatic racial disparities in drug sentencing; of “federalizing capital punishment” by expanding the number of eligible crimes, and of unleashing what the National Action Network leader warned would be a new ground war between police and black and poor communities in cities like New York.
The crime bill came under attack from the Right, too, for its inclusion of “midnight basketball” to keep young men off urban streets, for its ban on the manufacture and sale of assault weapons, and for the inclusion of a Violence Against Women Act, which some conservative activists decried as “anti-men.” Meanwhile, activists from groups like the NAACP, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the American Civil Liberties Union worried that Clinton and the New Democrats were playing the Nixonian crime card for political gain.
When the crime bill passed with the support of two-thirds of the Democratic caucus, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell declared that “on crime, the time is over when in fact or perception the Republican Party is seen as the party tough on crime. . . . [Now] it’s the Democrats.” Mitchell seemed to confirm suspicions that the party was turning on the most vulnerable in order to co-opt a powerful Republican theme. The bill split the Black Caucus. Key members, including Dellums, Waters, Rangel, John Conyers, and John Lewis, were among the sixty-four Democrats who voted no, while some of Clinton’s staunchest allies, such as Bobby Rush, Alcee Hastings, Carrie Meek, Jim Clyburn, Kweisi Mfume, and Harold Ford Jr., voted in favor. For some members, the chance to advance a bill that might remove the scourge of guns and drugs from the streets of Chicago or Miami, and the promise of federal programs that might aid young, unemployed black men in Allendale County, South Carolina, or in Memphis, Tennessee, proved a more powerful argument than forestalling the Republican narrative of rampant, race-based criminality.
Crime would indeed begin to fall nationwide, driven downward by a strengthening economy, but the specter of the “Black Criminal Menace” would not be so easily dispelled. Nor would it remain any less politically potent for the opposition party.
During the summer of 1994, the nation was gripped by the June 13 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman on a quiet, tree-lined block in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. The slow-speed chase, the sensational, twenty-four-hour cable news coverage, and the coming double-murder trial of football legend O. J. Simpson for the killings would tear open the age-old, unhealed wounds of race and sex—interracial marriage, interracial and domestic violence, and the policing of black men—that are the country’s inescapable legacy. Simpson’s innocence or guilt split Americans along racial lines, turning on questions of DNA, a “dream team” of legal stars, and a lead detective, Mark Fuhrman, who was said to have openly mused that he’d like to see the lot of blacks and Hispanics tossed onto a pile and burned.
The “O.J. jury”—nine black, one Hispanic, and two white—was selected for the “trial of the century” on November 3, five days before the midterms, which ended in a rout of the Democrats, causing them to lose the House for the first time since 1952.
Even the House leader succumbed to the tide of voter retribution, with Thomas Foley becoming the first Speaker to lose his seat since before the Civil War. With him went embattled House Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, and three prized chairmanships held by members of the Black Caucus, who, since the organization’s founding, had never served in the minority. For the first time since the nineteenth century, Republicans swept House races across the once solidly Democratic South.
In the Senate, Republicans picked up both seats in Tennessee and added members in Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania, where voters elevated evangelical congressman Rick Santorum to the upper chamber. On the day after the election, Alabama Democrat Richard Shelby switched parties, capping the Republicans’ 53 to 47 majority.
The incoming class was the most conservative in a generation. The new House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, declared a “Republican Revolution.” Just 45 percent of eligible voters had gone to the polls, and they were heavily seeded with conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork brigades, called to arms during the 1992 campaign to ride into Washington and drive liberalism out of town. Media headlines announced the revenge of the Angry White Male.
It wasn’t that simple.
Midterm elections typically see lower turnout than a presidential race, but 1994 marked an inflection point in the political divergence between the old and the young, and between black and white voters, the latter of whom favored congressional Republicans by an unprecedented 12 points. Even in the 1980s, as Reagan Democrats leaned Republican in the presidential races, congressional Democrats had managed to split or even win majorities of senior citizens. Now, for the first time, those voters delivered a solid rebuke to the party of the New Deal, while exit polls showed white men favoring Republicans by a 60 to 40 margin. Among white men and women without a college degree, the decline for Democrats was stunning: 20 percent among the men and 10 percent among the women.
Just 37 percent of black voters went to the polls, along with only 20 percent of Hispanics. A New York Times article summarizing the election’s aftermath pointed to signs that the black electorate had stayed away in revolt.
“Race was at the heart of this election,” said Roger Wilkins, a professor of history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “There is a fierce anti-black and anti-immigrant undertone to this switch to the Republican Party. The message was, ‘Let us take this country back and make it a white country—a white male country—again.’ ”
The Times pointed to black voters declaring their frustration not just with Republicans, but with Democrats, who, while desiring black votes, rarely articulated a defense of black personhood in the face of conservative attacks. No longer was there a JFK willing to publicly challenge the country, or an LBJ to push his coregionalists on matters of civic fairness or even simple interracial civility. The Democrats had become the “tough on crime” party, the “hundred thousand cops” party, and the party that tossed Lani Guinier overboard.
It all left many wondering why they should come to such a party’s defense in an off-year election.
“It was absolute disgust,” said Robert Smith, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “Everyone from Ph.D.s to garbage workers were saying, ‘This was white folks’ business. They’re going to make their decisions and make it among themselves.’ ”
CHAPTER 4
The “First Black President”
When Bill Clinton got elected, everybody started relaxing, and we started seeing an almost antithesis to activism. . . . Our political consciousness took a reverse. We went from Professor Griff to Lil Wayne.
—Rev. Al Sharpton, 2013
FOR THIRTY YEARS, THE STATE LEGISLATURES OF THE SOUTHEAST had resisted the generational tide that Lyndon Johnson grimly predicted as he signed the Voting Rights Act in 1964. Yet they had stayed nominally in Democratic hands, even while their constituents increasingly began to send Republican congressmen to Washington and to vote for Republican candidates for president.
Going into the 1994 midterms, nearly all of the black state legislators in the South were Democrats, and 99.5 percent of them were serving in the majority, and 91 percent remained in the majority afterward. Despite the Republicans’ rollicking success in the election, only one-half of three southern legislatures flipped from Democratic to Republican control in 1994: the Florida Senate, and the North and South Carolina Houses of Representatives. This as Democrats went from twenty-one governorships to eleven, in defeats that stretched from Democratic strongholds like New York, where Mario Cuomo was defeated for a fourth term, to Alabama, the onetime fiefdom of George Wallace.
In a great bit of irony, the more white southerners voted Republican in federal elections, the more white southern Democratic politicians relied on black voters to stay in power in the states. And because they drew the maps, Democratic state legislators, including after the 1990 census, were able to gerrymander a small number of “black” congressional districts to satisfy the Voting Rights Act, surrounded by districts cleansed of black voters and increasingly Republican, but which didn’t interfere with their own races. The remaining “mixed race” state legislative districts had just enough blacks to keep them Democratic, but not enough that a black candidate could win outright.
The “bleaching” of southern districts helped Republicans in Washington and kept Dixie Democrats in power at home. Republicans would need another sixteen years to complete Kevin Phillips’s vision of a solid Republican South, but it would slowly happen as local Democrats were challenged by Republicans—or as many simply changed sides. In 1996 Republicans would take over the state legislature in Florida; in 1999 they would take Virginia; in 2000, South Carolina; in 2002, Texas; and finally, in 2010, North Carolina. But 1994 was a start.
In Washington, Republicans wasted no time putting their agenda forward. Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” included “take back our streets” provisions to strip the social spending out of President Clinton’s crime bill and redirect the funds toward building more prisons; it would also end welfare assistance to teenage mothers, put time limits on federal assistance, and add work requirements; caps would be placed on the number of children for whom an indigent woman could claim subsistence aid. There was a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, a provision for congressional term limits, and of course, mandates for steep tax cuts: on business earnings, capital gains, and the incomes of the wealthiest Americans.
Gingrich vowed to pass it all and dared the president not to sign it.
By January, as Clinton delivered his State of the Union address, he was under attack by those in the Center-Right of his party who believed he had spent too much time on liberal obsessions like gays in the military and health-care reform. Of the latter effort, California Senator Diane Feinstein said the Clintons had been “listening to the 15 percent who don’t have insurance, while Republicans listened to the 85 percent who do.” She and the other New Democrats wanted the president to return to the moderate agenda he’d promised.
A chastened Clinton delivered. He adopted Vice President Al Gore’s plan taking a stand against affirmative action; an effort to appease white working-class voters by proposing race-neutral solutions to poverty and infusing the party’s rhetoric with the language of personal responsibility.
The president’s January address went even further and denounced a “failed welfare system” that “rewards welfare over work . . . undermines family values . . . lets millions of parents get away without paying their child support . . . [and] keeps a minority but a significant minority of the people on welfare trapped on it for a very long time.” And he boasted about having sent “the most sweeping welfare reform plan ever presented by an administration” to Congress and vowed to “make welfare what it was meant to be, a second chance, not a way of life,” by offering federally subsidized child care and job training for a maximum of two years.
Clinton had co-opted the grace notes of the Republican message. And he never looked back.
Civil rights leaders were alarmed. Clinton wasn’t just distancing himself from LBJ-style reform; he was plowing the late president’s legacy underground. Jesse Jackson even threatened to enter the 1996 Democratic primary if Clinton didn’t relent. The Clinton cabinet was split, too, with Gore at odds with Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Alexis Herman, and Mike Espy over the shift toward more conservative social and economic policy.
But Bill Clinton knew the Republicans were rushing a welfare reform bill to the House floor, and he was determined to do an end run around Gingrich by proposing his own bill. His deputy chief of staff, Harold Ickes, began scheduling meetings for the president with constituent groups, and Clinton dispatched HUD secretary Henry Cisneros to Chicago to meet with a small group of mayors, hosted by Richard M. Daley, who’d been elected after Harold Washington’s sudden death from a heart attack, not long after the latter was reelected to a second term. The mayors asked what would happen once scores of their citizens were kicked off public assistance with no jobs and no skills.
Cisneros’s message was blunt: The president was going to sign welfare reform (though he would ultimately veto two Republican versions before reaching a compromise bill) but he would make sure the bill included job training, with the federal funding flowing to the cities.
Clinton’s talent for wooing his opponents with careful compromise that left every side feeling like a winner would serve him well.
Around this time, the Clinton team also retreated from their vow to kill affirmative action, instead saying, “mend it, don’t end it.” And Clinton cheered up his disgruntled supporters by calling for a hike in the federal minimum wage. He was steering a careful middle path, touting “step by step” health-care reform and calling on the entertainment industry to police its moral practices (a priority of Gore’s wife, Tipper), while also championing a national push to curb teen pregnancy. The package was served up as the “New Covenant.”
Clinton’s pivot toward a personal responsibility crusade came as organizers were preparing a Million Man March on Washington, D.C., on October 16, 1995. The massive gathering, conceived by Minister Louis Farrakhan and Ben Chavis, an ordained minister and former youth coordinator for Dr. King, attracted nearly half a million men to the National Mall to promote positive affirmations of black manhood, and to dramatize the ongoing need to address the crises in America’s inner cities. It was as if even those elements considered the most radical in the African American community were triangulating along with Clinton. Both Jackson and Sharpton addressed the massive gathering, estimated at more than 830,000 people.
For the president’s 1996 State of the Union address, delivered during his reelection campaign, he—not the Republicans—declared, “the era of big government is over.” He followed that in August by signing a welfare reform bill called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. The bill handed federal welfare funds to the states, added work requirements and a five-year lifetime benefit cap, barred illegal immigrants from working in licensed professions, and slashed overall social needs funding by $54 billion over a decade.
It could easily have been presented by the Nixon or Reagan administrations.
Civil rights leaders again objected, and two officials from the Department of Health and Human Services resigned in protest, including Peter Edelman, husband of Marian Wright Edelman, Hillary Clinton’s longtime mentor at the Children’s Defense Fund, for whom the First Lady worked in the early 1970s and on whose board she had served. Hillary Clinton viewed Marian Wright Edelman with a deference that made Edelman a near-matriarchal figure to the First Lady.
“His signa
ture on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children,” Edelman stated in a terse public statement. Privately, she had lobbied Hillary hard, pressing her to prevail upon the president to simply veto the Gingrich bill rather than present a welfare reform plan of his own, but it was to no avail. An aide to Hillary Clinton said the wedge driven between the two women over the bill was deep, and it hit Mrs. Clinton hard.
The president followed this in September by proposing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. This further discouraged his supporters from the gay and lesbian community.
“I didn’t think Bill Clinton was insincere in his message,” said one former White House aide. “I just felt like he’d given up. The whole thing: ‘the era of big government is over,’ the welfare reform, DOMA, it just became a capitulation to the interests of the Right, and an unwillingness to fight. Because they’d lost on those two big issues—gays in the military and health care—they just kind of gave in and started fighting on small-bore issues instead, and triangulating, and trying to redefine him as a new kind of Democrat again.”
And it worked—Clinton soundly defeated Senator Robert Dole in November 1996 and won a second term in the White House.
Clinton’s victory was buoyed by a growing economy and accelerating job growth. The Democrats had put together an economic plan that was rocket fuel for the economy. As a result, the federal coffers were filling up, further boosted by George H. W. Bush’s tax hike, which had doomed him with his own party. But now Clinton’s approval ratings soared.
The president’s policies were finally being materially felt in the cities, where Democratic power resided; in expanded federal hiring, with a 20 percent hike in the minimum wage; and in rural towns, where Head Start, a children’s health insurance program, and expanded child tax credits began to lift the veil of economic calamity for millions of Americans, brown, black, and white.
