by Keith Boykin
Buchanan ended his speech that night with a stern condemnation of the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles. He did not condemn the police brutality that had led to that rebellion, which took place after the acquittal of four white police officers who had been caught on videotape beating Black motorist Rodney King for at least nine minutes on a Los Angeles street. Instead, Buchanan seemed far more troubled by the violent protests that disturbed the peace than the actual racial injustice that provoked the outburst. He was not alone. As had happened repeatedly throughout history, many in white America once again prioritized peace over justice, provoking protesters in Los Angeles to respond with the chant, “No justice, no peace!”
Buchanan’s speech recentered white victimhood by characterizing Black people, who were angry at and tired of years of police brutality, as a cursing mob that had senselessly burned and looted buildings, and he told a story of how “troopers came up the street, M-16s at the ready,” and “the mob retreated because it had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, and backed by moral courage.” In Buchanan’s worldview, white Americans could lay claim to the mantle of justice by standing up against Black Americans who dared to demand justice in a way that made white people uncomfortable. This would become Buchanan’s metaphor for how white Christian conservative America must take back the nation and reclaim white innocence. “As those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country,” he said.
Buchanan’s speech alarmed many of us who were not a part of his cramped vision of America. Political columnist Molly Ivins famously quipped that the speech probably sounded better in its original German. So toxic was his language and legacy that even Donald Trump demurred when asked about Buchanan years later during an appearance on Meet the Press in 1999. “He’s a Hitler lover,” Trump said. “I guess he’s an anti-Semite. He doesn’t like the Blacks. He doesn’t like the gays. It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy,” said Trump. But it was Pat Buchanan who paved the way for the Republican Party to embrace Donald Trump. When Trump ran for president in 2016, he no longer condemned Buchanan’s bigotry but instead praised the man he had once called a “Hitler lover.” “Way to go Pat, way ahead of your time!” Trump tweeted in January 2016.
Even in 1992, it was not difficult to see the direction in which the Grand Old Party was headed. Thousands of white Republicans in Houston’s Astrodome cheered Buchanan, interrupting him with repeated applause and chants of “Go, Pat, Go!” and “U-S-A.” George Bush’s own vice president, Dan Quayle, while sitting in the audience, gave Buchanan a thumbs-up as he left the stage. Bush did not openly identify with the growing Buchanan wing of the party, but this was the trend that he and Reagan had helped to create. Buchanan represented the firebrand conservative future of the GOP, and once the party’s base finally recognized the power of this brand, they could never again be fully satisfied with a mainstream Republican.
Looking back on George Herbert Walker Bush’s accomplishments in office from the present, his record on race issues seems particularly unimpressive. The man who began his political career by opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would end his career by vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1990 and forcing Congress to adopt a much more modest bill the following year to rectify recent Supreme Court decisions that made it harder for plaintiffs to sue for racial discrimination.
Although he spoke of a kinder, gentler nation, he was all too willing to forsake those values when it came to racial issues in order to win an election in 1988 or to frame a young Black man for a drug crime in 1989. As a result of the nation’s “tough on crime” policies he supported, the number of Blacks in state and federal prisons increased from 274,300 at the end of 1988 to 401,700 at the end of 1992, a shocking 46 percent increase in just four years.
He did make some significant African American appointments by selecting Louis Sullivan as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, General Colin Powell to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court, but Black America actually took several steps backward when Thomas replaced the legendary Thurgood Marshall on the nation’s highest court.
On the world stage, Bush met with African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela at the White House in 1990, but before that time he had long refused to condemn the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. And despite Bush’s responsible decision to reverse his “no new taxes” pledge, Black Americans saw their unemployment rate climb from an already elevated 11.8 percent when Bush took office to 14.1 percent when he left.
At the end of Bush’s four years in office, Black Americans were clearly no better off than they had been before. One man’s kinder, gentler rhetoric and occasional strokes of inclusion were not nearly enough to compensate for his party’s embrace of white identity politics or to reverse a nation’s long history of racism, white supremacy, and anti-blackness.
5
BILL CLINTON’S CALCULATED TRIANGULATION
On the day I filed my papers to run for vice president of the student government at Countryside High School in Clearwater, Florida, the faculty adviser, Linda Denny, pulled me aside for a talk. “You know we already have a Black candidate running for this seat,” she told me with a look of concern. “You may want to run for something else so you two don’t split the vote.”
It was my first introduction to racial politics.
I had never heard of vote splitting, and it never occurred to me that two Black candidates might cancel each other out on a ballot in which all the other candidates were white. I assumed Mrs. Denny meant well, but I disregarded her advice. She was a middle-aged white woman with liberal proclivities, and she had probably determined that it would be difficult for a Black candidate to win a student government election in a school that was almost entirely white. I ran anyway and won. After spending my junior year as vice president, I ran for president and won again. As I entered my senior year, I was on a lucky streak.
That all changed the day I heard about a local candidate for Congress who piqued my interest. His name was George Sheldon, a thirty-five-year-old state representative from Tampa, who was running in the newly created Ninth Congressional District. It was a bit quixotic for a liberal Democrat to try to win a seat in this increasingly conservative part of central Florida in the Reagan era, but I believed he had a chance. With America’s unemployment rate hovering above a record-breaking 10 percent and President Reagan’s Gallup approval rating slumping down to 42 percent, the national momentum in 1982 clearly favored Democrats. So I walked into the George Sheldon for Congress office and volunteered. It hadn’t required much thought at the time, but it turned out to be one of the most consequential decisions of my life.
As a young Black kid with a big greasy Jheri curl, I stood out from the rest of the team of mostly white volunteers, and the candidate and his campaign staff took an early interest in me. I licked envelopes and made phone calls like everyone else, but because I clearly enjoyed the retail politics of canvassing in the district, I was assigned an exciting new task in the campaign’s final days. I found myself in what I considered to be the extraordinary position of actually speaking for the candidate in public. It wasn’t exactly Lincolnesque oratory that was required of me, but the opportunity was thrilling for a high school senior. I screamed self-created campaign slogans through a bullhorn in a pickup truck that drove across the district. “If you make more than $100,000 a year, then don’t vote for George Sheldon,” I yelled. “But if you make less than that, Sheldon is your man for Congress.” I was articulating what I thought was the principal difference between Democrats and Republicans—that Democrats cared more about the poor and the middle class. And, since there were far more low- and middle-income Americans than rich ones, I assumed that message would resonate with voters. What I did not fully grasp at the time was that Republican messaging around tax cuts was never completely an argument about mon
ey; it was also about race.
Reagan was in the middle of a dramatic tax-cutting initiative that reflected changes taking place in his party. In the four Republican presidencies since the Great Depression, the top rate for the superrich dropped from 92 percent under Eisenhower to 77 percent under Nixon to 70 percent under Ford and 28 percent under Reagan. I didn’t buy the Reagan administration’s argument that the tax cuts would “trickle down” to ordinary workers and pay for themselves by stimulating growth, and I was right. But what I did not realize was that the huge deficits created from the enormous drop in federal revenue would actually help Republicans achieve their goals. It was like an evil-genius strategy that I was too young to understand—cut taxes, raise the deficit, and use the very deficit that your own tax cuts created as a justification to further reduce government services.
The strategy did not pay off immediately. In the midst of a deep recession, Democrats performed quite well in the 1982 midterm elections. They retained control of Congress and picked up twenty-six seats in the House of Representatives. In Florida, Democratic senator Lawton Chiles and Democratic governor Bob Graham were both easily reelected. But in the first election for the member of Congress of the Ninth Congressional District, newly created by congressional reapportionment, things turned out differently. Republican Michael Bilirakis beat Democrat George Sheldon by 4,312 votes out of 185,742 votes cast. My candidate lost.
I was painfully disappointed by the defeat, but the political bug stayed with me and inspired a lifelong career with campaigns, elections, and government. Electoral politics was the one place where I—as a seventeen-year-old who was not yet eligible to vote—could still help to change the world, I thought. Even as Republicans were slowly gaining ground across Florida and the South, I knew there was hope for the future, and I knew I would one day work on yet another election for another Democrat.
I did not have to wait long. By 1984, I was a college student in New Hampshire with front-row seats to the Democratic primary process as a reporter for The Dartmouth newspaper, the student daily at Dartmouth College. As a young journalist, I met or interviewed nearly all the presidential candidates, from Alan Cranston of California to Walter Mondale of Minnesota. I identified most with Jesse Jackson as a candidate, but I harbored doubts as to whether white America would vote for a Black civil rights leader to become president. I also appreciated the liberal views of George McGovern, but I wondered if he should be running again after losing in a landslide in 1972. The candidate I thought had the best chance of winning was Mondale, who had served for four years as vice president under Jimmy Carter. After considering the choices, I volunteered for his campaign months after the primary ended and I no longer had to cover him. But, in November of 1984, Walter Mondale lost.
Two years later, while spending the summer in Atlanta, I decided to volunteer for another campaign. Two civil rights legends were facing off in an epic Democratic congressional primary race. The first was Julian Bond, who had notoriously been denied a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives in 1966 because he spoke out against the Vietnam War. The other was John Lewis, who had been beaten by police at the infamous 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Lewis lacked Bond’s polish and legislative experience, and Bond was the clear favorite to win. I volunteered for Bond’s campaign, thinking he would be easily elected. But in September 1986, Julian Bond lost.
The following year, I tried my luck in politics once again. In June 1987, I drove down to Boston to meet with Governor Michael Dukakis in his office at the Massachusetts State House for my interview. “Don’t ever write down anything on paper you don’t want to see in the New York Times or Boston Globe,” he told me. It’s the only thing I remember from that meeting. His campaign hired me as a press aide and paid me $250 a week to work twelve-hour days in his Boston headquarters, located near the old “Combat Zone” (the so-called adult-entertainment district in the 1960s) by Downtown Crossing. I had no idea how I would repay my college loans on a $1,000/monthly salary when the six-month grace period would end that winter, but I happily accepted the offer. I worked in Boston, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Georgia during the primaries, and after Dukakis won the Democratic presidential nomination, I was promoted to a new job traveling on the governor’s campaign plane for the general election. Three months after the August convention, Mike Dukakis lost. My losing streak had notched another disappointment, though I was far from ready to give up politics.
The next year in St. Louis, Missouri, my grandmother recommended that I do some work for a friend of hers who was running for local office, so I volunteered on the campaign of a candidate for license collector. To this day, I am still not sure what a license collector actually does, or why this is an elected position, but I had nothing to lose by supporting her. Not surprisingly, after working on the front lines of a national campaign, the local election didn’t excite me. It was also not surprising, given my past experience, that my candidate met the same fate as the other candidates for whom I had worked. She, too, lost her election.
But the politics bug wouldn’t quit. A few months after graduating from law school, while I was studying for the bar exam in California, I received a phone call from a press secretary named Dee Dee Myers. We had worked together in the 1988 Dukakis campaign, but we had not spoken since that time. She called with an offer I could not refuse. Would I be interested in working for the campaign of a Democrat named Bill Clinton? I accepted immediately.
Although I had not started my new job in San Francisco, I told the hiring partner at the McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen law firm that I would be taking a leave of absence through the election, and he supported my decision. My family, on the other hand, was not as accepting. They could not understand why I would abandon a high-paying legal job for another low-wage political campaign position. After all, Harvard Law School graduates were expected to become successful lawyers, not failed political activists. They had waited three years to see me graduate from law school, and they expected I would reap the benefits afforded to those in the exclusive club I had just joined. Besides, after five consecutive losses, no one thought it was a good idea for me to join another campaign.
Outside of my family, even one of my political heroes had discouraged me. During a clerkship the previous summer at Patton, Boggs and Blow law firm in Washington, DC, I had a meeting with Ron Brown, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, who was a partner at the firm. Maybe he was just doing his job to recruit Black lawyers for the firm, but he discouraged me from pursuing politics after law school. He told me to make some money instead. I did not care for his advice, and as I watched the Democratic National Convention on television that summer, I felt left out of the excitement. Sitting in my apartment in Oakland, I wanted desperately to be in the convention hall in New York City. It reminded me of the energy I felt when I walked around the convention floor in Atlanta in 1988, and I could not resist the urge to be involved once again.
I felt a glimmer of hope as I arrived at the Clinton headquarters, housed in an old newspaper building once owned by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper. Maybe Clinton knew the way Democrats could win again. I certainly did not know. I had survived eight years of Ronald Reagan and nearly four years of George Bush, and I was desperate for change. But none of the candidates I supported for public office ever won. Clearly, I was doing something wrong, I figured.
My early personal political failures mirrored those of the Democratic Party of my youth. Neither of us had been very successful. By 1992, I was twenty-seven years old, and Democrats had lost all but one of the presidential elections in my lifetime. They lost to Nixon in 1968. They lost again to Nixon in a landslide in 1972. They barely won in 1976, but only with the weight of the Watergate scandal burdening Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford. They lost to Reagan in 1980. They lost to Reagan again—this time in a landslide—in 1984. They even lost to Reagan’s weaker vice president, George Bush, in 1988. After losing five of the six
last presidential elections, Democrats were desperate to find their way back to the White House. The most recent Democrats to win the presidency were both Southerners—Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson—so Democrats found another Southerner named Bill Clinton to be their nominee. It was worth a shot. And when Election Day finally arrived on the first Tuesday of November in 1992, no one was more surprised than I was that my candidate actually prevailed. After years of dashed hopes, finally, it seemed, there was a way forward, though victory came with compromises and problems of its own.
Bill Clinton would come to personify the cautious politics of incrementalism and triangulation that defined the Democratic Party over the course of four consecutive presidential elections. He began his first term with a bold Keynesian economic relief package, a progressive push for health care reform, and a promise to lift the ban on gays in the military. He ended his administration with a crime bill that promoted mass incarceration, a welfare reform bill that parroted Republican talking points about dependency, a financial deregulation law that repealed New Deal–era protections for consumers, and a Defense of Marriage Act that federalized state-sanctioned homophobia. Despite these disappointments and the embarrassment of a politically charged impeachment, Clinton emerged from his presidency with the highest end-of-career poll ratings of any president since World War II. His approval with African Americans was even more impressive, soaring to 90 percent in a January 2001 ABC News/Washington Post poll. But how did he do it? How did Clinton’s calculated triangulation strategy fail so badly at advancing his party’s policy agenda and succeed so dramatically in public approval at the same time? To answer this question, you have to understand the man and the times, and examining the shifting racial and political trends from the 1990s helps us understand how we got to where we are now. Bill Clinton’s story provides the perfect vantage point.