Fracture

by Joy-Ann Reid

  In the lead-up to the 2000 election, Meek and a group of legislators and civil rights leaders had mounted a massive voter registration drive modeled on Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 campaigns. Driven by lingering anger over Clinton’s impeachment, black voters responded to entreaties to “arrive with five” family members or friends at the polls, and to sardonic warnings from Jackson, to “stay out of the Bushes.”

  After the U.S. Supreme Court rebuffed Gore’s challenge of the Florida vote, he gave in. His concession on December 13 called for national unity and quoted his father in saying, “No matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shape the soul and let the glory out.”

  For many Democrats, there was no glory in concession. The election had borne out their deepest suspicions that those who long opposed the full enfranchisement of Americans living on the margins and who fought to impeach Bill Clinton—a president who succeeded in investing in the nation’s urban core, fought the worst and deepest Republican cuts to the federal programs that gave the economically disadvantaged a fighting chance, and dared to speak out loud about America’s historic faults—would certainly reverse it all if they assumed the power of the White House. Back would come the deep cuts to the social safety net and the steep upper-income tax cuts of the Reagan era. And gone would be the chance to entrench and extend the Johnsonian policies that gave life to inner-city and rural economies. Considering how much was on the line, Democrats had trouble understanding why their party and its leaders had no fight left in them.

  On January 6, 2001, in the joint session of Congress, a group of House members, drawn mostly from the Congressional Black Caucus, decided it was time they insisted on being heard. One by one, the thirteen members rose on the House floor and walked to the podium to voice their objections. Vice President Gore stood on the dais, wielding the gavel in his final act as Senate president, presiding over the joint session that would make George W. Bush the president of the United States.

  The protest began with an objection from Palm Beach, Florida, congressman Peter Deutsch, whose own district had seen scores of seniors confused by the poorly constructed ballot. Deutsch objected to the lack of a quorum as the senators filed into the chamber. He was gaveled down.

  Gore began to certify the states and their electors one by one, tallying which electors had voted for him and which had voted for Bush. When Florida’s time came, Congressman Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania, who had been tasked with reading the state tally, began by saying, “This is the one we’ve all been waiting for.”

  “Is there objection?” Gore asked, after the totals, eked out by recounts that dragged on into mid-December before the Supreme Court put a stop to them, were read.

  “Mr. President, I object to the certificate from Florida,” said Alcee Hastings, a former county judge appointed to the federal bench by President Jimmy Carter, and who represented a deep blue district spanning Palm Beach and Broward counties.

  Hastings, like his colleagues, knew that according to the rules, members were required to submit their challenges in writing, cosigned by a member of the Senate.

  “Is the gentleman’s objection in writing and signed by a member of the House of Representatives and by a senator?” asked Gore.

  “Mr. President, and I take great pride in calling you that,” Hastings said, pointedly referring to Gore’s honorific in his final day, “I must object because of the overwhelming evidence of official misconduct, deliberate fraud, and an attempt to suppress voter turnout.”

  The chamber reverberated with disapproval, and Gore gaveled Hastings down. He reminded Hastings that no debate was allowed.

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” said Hastings.

  It was if the two southern men were simply exchanging pleasantries, rather than engaging in a tug-of-war over history and, in the hearts of many dispirited Democrats, the very meaning of the right to vote. Many in the caucus were unclear precisely what the rather opaque Gore believed, beyond his passion for issues relating to the environment. He had, after all, been the architect of some of Bill Clinton’s most onerous and conservative ideas. But Gore was viewed as a good man. And he was losing as a good man.

  “To answer your question, Mr. President, the objection is in writing; signed by a number of members of the House of Representatives, but not by a member of the Senate.”

  Hastings was again gaveled down. Twelve more would follow.

  “Mr. President, it is in writing and signed by several House colleagues on behalf, and myself, of the 27,000 voters of Duval County in which 16,000 of them are African Americans that was disenfranchised in this last election,” said Corinne Brown of Jacksonville.

  “Is the objection signed by a member of the Senate?”

  “Not signed by a member of the Senate,” Brown responded. “The Senate is missing.”

  “Mr. President, it is in writing and signed by myself and several of my constituents from Florida,” said Carrie Meek. “A senator is needed, but missing.”

  To scattered boos in the chamber, Barbara Lee of California rose to speak “on behalf of many of the diverse constituents in our country . . . and all American voters who recognize that the Supreme Court, not the people of the United States, decided this election.”

  Patsy Mink, of Hawaii, who in 1990 had become the first Asian American woman elected to Congress, regretted that she possessed “no authority over the United States Senate,” and that “no senator has signed.”

  “Is your objection signed by a senator?”

  Maxine Waters of California was a firebrand, a vehement ally of Jesse Jackson who became first a friend, and then a staunch supporter of the Clintons. Waters had seen firsthand the devastation of the Rodney King riots in South Central Los Angeles, and the rebuilding made possible by the Clinton federal outlays. According to associates, Waters delivered the blunt message to Democratic senators during the impeachment saga that a vote to convict Bill Clinton meant “you’re dead to black people.” Now she was watching the Clinton-Gore era end with a whimper.

  “The objection is in writing,” Waters shot back at the chair. “And I don’t care that it is not signed by a senator.”

  “The chair would advise that the rules do care,” Gore replied with a weary smile, as the Republicans in the chamber erupted in applause.

  And so it went. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas cited the “hundreds of thousands of telegrams and e-mails and telephone calls” her office had received, and was gaveled down. Elijah Cummings of Maryland stated his objections, and was gaveled down, as was Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, Eva M. Clayton of North Carolina, and Bob Filner of California, who had no written objection and was not a member of the Black Caucus, but rose to speak “in solidarity” with his colleagues.

  “It’s a sad day in America, Mr. President, when we can’t find a senator to sign the objections,” Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. said as he was ordered to suspend.

  The protest lasted eighteen minutes.

  As Vice President Gore prepared to resume certifying the states, the objectors walked out.

  They had learned, in stark fashion, what their party was willing to fight to the end for, and what it was not.

  The 2000 election had not been a total loss. Democrats had grown their Senate ranks from forty-six seats to fifty, tying the Senate. In New York, the seat of the legendary Daniel Patrick Moynihan had gone quite decisively to former First Lady Hillary Clinton.

  Replacing Moynihan, a key architect of the “War on Poverty,” was an important undertaking. His 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” commonly called “The Moynihan Report,” had helped to define the country’s, and his party’s, approach to the nagging issues of poverty and urban decay. Moynihan, the erudite Horatio Alger figure who in the lore of Washington rose from Hell’s Kitchen to Harvard, and whose own father’s abandonment of the family led to childhood encounters with want, had done more than almost any single political figure to populari
ze the belief that the primary cause of black suffering was the proliferation of unwed mothers and fatherless children.

  Moynihan’s detractors saw him as a victim-blaming enabler of those who substituted racial stereotypes and moral shaming for a frank examination of the country’s racial hierarchism, and the matrix of governmental policies, federal, state, and local, that had systematically kept black families in poverty. To his supporters, he was a good man willing to tell the truth, even at the expense of political correctness. For millions, he had helped erect the intricate web of social services, social workers, and federal aid programs that for decades defined what it meant to be poor in America.

  He had been a key ally of both Democrats and Republicans on the subject of welfare reform, supporting efforts by Ronald Reagan in 1984, and Bill Clinton in 1994, to cull the aid rolls and hold absent fathers to account, earning him both praise and scorn from those in the thick of the battle for social uplift.

  When Moynihan announced his plans to retire two years before the 2000 election, several names had popped up, including those of Andrew Cuomo, son of the former three-term governor, and Robert Kennedy Jr., son of the late senator and nephew of Camelot. But senior pols in New York State and Democrats in Washington, D.C., had someone else in mind: Hillary Clinton.

  The First Lady had weathered the public humiliation of her husband’s infidelity, and she was emerging as a genuine political star, whose poise under the media glare had cast her in the unexpected role of national heroine. A Gallup survey at the close of 1998 found her favorability rating peaking at 67 percent. When Moynihan announced his retirement, her phone started ringing.

  The First Lady spent considerable time ingratiating herself with Senator Moynihan—and attempting to do so with his considerably more skeptical wife—even traveling to the couple’s five-hundred-acre farm in Pindars Corners, a rural hamlet outside Albany, in the summer of 1999, to launch her “listening tour” of the Empire State, trailed by a roving pack of media.

  The campaign quickly became a national sensation, as the First Lady launched her historic run, rebranded simply as “Hillary”—with enough of the Clinton brand to gain from the booming economy, but just the right amount of distance to make her intriguing in her own right. The campaign assembled a team of experienced locals, including Rangel’s former campaign manager, Bill de Blasio, who worked to get around the caricature of a celebrity carpetbagger who couldn’t decide whether she was a Cubs or a Yankee fan that was almost inevitable in the brutal New York City tabloids.

  Hillary faced Rudy Giuliani, the hard-charging New York City mayor, who was deeply unpopular among black New Yorkers, but whom many white residents credited with turning the city around.

  African Americans made up nearly 16 percent of the state’s massive population, with more than 2 million of the state’s 3 million black citizens living in New York City, where a third of the statewide vote resided. And while upstate voters tended to lean conservative, the Clinton campaign had every incentive to maximize turnout among black, Hispanic, and white liberal voters in New York City, where they made up more than a quarter of the vote. But Hillary also had to keep her eye on the “law and order suburbs”—a quarter of the state’s electorate—and on the rural swaths upstate where agricultural prices counted more than anxiety about overzealous cops.

  It was a balancing act that saw the candidate ping-ponging across the state, talking “dairy price supports” in Utica and policing in the Bronx. With a thriving economy and plunging crime rates across the city (and nationwide) shifting public attention away from “owning the night” and taking back the streets from real and imagined bogeymen, Mrs. Clinton had considerable space to give ear to black New Yorkers’ laments without alienating Osceola County.

  Soon, however, Hillary’s campaign was seized by a trio of police-related incidents. First was the trial of four police officers in the February 4, 1999, killing of Amadou Diallo, a West African street vendor gunned down by plainclothes officers from Giuliani’s Street Crimes Unit. During a hunt for a serial rapist, the officers fired forty-one shots at a bewildered Diallo, ninteen of which struck the twenty-three-year-old as he fumbled for his keys in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment. Second were the trials, starting in December 1999, of police officers who beat and assaulted a Haitian American man, Abner Louima. He was sodomized with a broom handle inside a holding cell following his arrest outside a Brooklyn nightclub. There was also the March 16 fatal shooting of an unarmed man, Patrick Dorismond, by an undercover narcotics officer. Witnesses said Dorismond was killed after insisting he had no drugs to sell, and got into a shoving match with the man he didn’t realize was a policeman. The public outrage was compounded when, in the immediate aftermath of the Dorismond killing, Giuliani released the dead man’s sealed juvenile arrest record to the media, as he defended the officer’s actions. It was just two weeks after the officers in the Diallo shooting were acquitted by a jury in upstate New York.

  In response to all three of these incidents, Rev. Al Sharpton was leading daily marches to City Hall and to police precincts in Brooklyn and the Bronx, resulting in hundreds of arrests. It wasn’t long before they were joined by the Service Employees International Union’s massive New York local, 1199, New York City led by Patrick Gaspard, a former organizer in Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign and the successful effort to elect former mayor David Dinkins, and a mentee of Bill Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes.

  Gaspard and Sharpton were longtime allies, and de Blasio was Gaspard’s closest friend. Giuliani’s campaign seized on the connections to try to tie the Clinton Senate campaign to “Reverend Al,” whom Giuliani campaign manager Bruce Teitelbaum derisively called “Hillary Clinton’s key advisor.” Sharpton’s name remained a potent deterrent to white voters in the suburbs and upstate, where polls found Giuliani struggling to overtake the First Lady, while she was beating the Republican candidate in New York City by a margin of 3 to 1.

  The Clintons had had a long and complicated relationship with Sharpton, who had been a persistent critic of the president’s urban policies, including welfare reform and the 1994 crime bill, which helped stock New York’s police force with fresh personnel. Sharpton had been among the New Yorkers who denounced Clinton’s treatment of Sister Souljah in 1992, and he was privately disdainful of what he viewed as the capitulation of black elites, and even of some of his mentors in the civil rights movement like Jesse Jackson, to a Clinton presidential agenda characterized by “Sister Souljah moments” of triangulation.

  The Clinton campaign had been careful not to embrace Sharpton, but they didn’t want to alienate him, either. Hillary had accepted a January invitation to Sharpton’s annual Martin Luther King Day celebration, in which she described Diallo’s killing as a “murder,” drawing the ire of New York police unions. But Hillary had since been careful to avoid a direct confrontation with police or, by extension, their supporters.

  Sharpton, who in 1996 had himself entered the mayoral primary, spoiling for the chance to take on Giuliani, was now teaming up with Charlie Rangel to demand federal oversight of the New York City Police Department. The two accompanied Diallo’s family and Dinkins to a March 2 meeting with Clinton deputy attorney general Eric Holder, to press for a federal civil rights indictment of the acquitted officers.

  Next came a meeting with Hillary Clinton—an awkward confab to which her campaign invited Sharpton’s nemesis, former mayor Ed Koch. The Giuliani team fired off a letter that seized on the Holder meeting, the Justice Department review of the Diallo shooting, and President Clinton’s first remarks on the case. At a March 3 fund-raiser Clinton had stated that while he was loathe to second-guess the jury, “I know most people in America of all races believe that if it had been a young white man in an all-white neighborhood, it probably wouldn’t have happened.”

  The Giuliani letter was quickly circulated to the New York media. It pronounced: “Even President Clinton, following in the footsteps of Al Gore, Bill Bradley and
Hillary Rodham Clinton, has now started to read aloud from the Al Sharpton playbook, parroting Sharpton’s description of the Diallo case as being based primarily on race.”

  Hillary’s campaign spokesman, Howard Wolfson, replied with a terse non sequitur: “The mayor knows that Hillary Clinton is a New Democrat who supports a balanced budget, targeted tax cuts, and welfare reform. All the mayor can do is keep tearing New Yorkers apart.”

  Despite the reticence of her spokesman, and with even Giuliani’s traditional supporters in the New York tabloids accusing him of “vilifying the corpse” of Dorismond, Hillary dove in, telling nearly a thousand parishioners at Harlem’s Bethel AME Church in late March that the mayor “has led the rush to judgment” against the dead man, adding, “that is not real leadership.”

  By April, polls showed voters overwhelmingly sour on Mayor Giuliani’s handling of the police incidents, with many even believing his actions had contributed to a rise in police brutality. And Hillary had solidified the support and the enthusiasm of black New Yorkers, who were already poised to go to the polls in large numbers to support Al Gore for president, but who now had a down-ticket race to drive up their numbers in a nonswing state. Giuliani seemed well on his way to a humiliating defeat, delivered mainly at the hands of his own city.

  One month later, Giuliani threw in the towel, shocking the local and national media in a May 19 news conference that included the announcements that he was suffering from prostate cancer and that he was leaving his wife, TV newswoman Donna Hanover, to be with his “very good friend,” socialite Judith Nathan. It was a bizarre segue with shades of Nelson and Happy Rockefeller’s unhappy jaunt through the New York gossip pages in 1964.