by Keith Boykin
I was troubled by the outcome of the gays in the military controversy, but as time passed, I realized that the deeper problem was what the experience said about me. How did I allow myself to rationalize a broken promise as the best we could do? Yes, the odds were stacked against us from the beginning, but we never really fought for the cause in which we believed. We never tried to explain to the public why it was important to treat all service members with equal dignity and respect. Instead, we fought to avoid the controversy that Clinton’s promise had brought to the administration. I found there was something about the culture of the White House that encouraged a troubling groupthink among political appointees in service of the president. The question I found myself answering, directly or indirectly, whenever I raised a controversial issue, was the same: “Does this serve the president’s agenda?” But the question we all should have been asking ourselves was different: “Is this the right thing to do?” Often, the president’s agenda aligned perfectly with what I considered the right thing to do. But other times, I felt as though we sacrificed our own identity and political values because we convinced ourselves that the larger cause of the administration was just. Like a platoon of soldiers fighting in the trenches in a pitched battle, we dutifully executed our objectives without the luxury of reflection to consider the wisdom of our mission. Only when I was able to step off the battlefield years later and walk away from the adrenalinefueled rush of daily political combat was I able to fairly assess if it was worth it.
So disastrous was the gays in the military policy rollout that the White House seemed determined to avoid LGBTQ issues in the near future. A year later, when the Senate held hearings on a bill that would outlaw sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace, White House officials held an unusual meeting to determine whether to allow the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Deval Patrick, to testify in favor of the bill. We debated the issue in the White House Roosevelt Room with George Stephanopoulos of the communications office, Alexis Herman of the public liaison office, Joel Klein of the White House counsel’s office, and several other top White House officials I admired and respected. Despite the fact that President Clinton was already on record supporting the legislation, virtually no one in the room thought the assistant attorney general for civil rights should testify. Only Deval Patrick and I argued in favor of it. No one else did. It was a midterm election year, and the White House had been so shell-shocked from the gays in the military experience that no one wanted to touch another hot gay topic. And, thus, it was decided that Patrick would submit written testimony instead of appearing before the congressional committee. A cop-out.
It was a troubling pattern, repeated time and time again. When Clinton drew fire from conservatives for nominating the brilliant critical race theorist Lani Guinier to be his first assistant attorney general for civil rights, he pulled her nomination. “I would gladly fight this nomination to the last moment if nobody wanted to vote for her if it were on grounds I could defend,” Clinton explained to the media. “The problem is that this battle will be waged based on her academic writings, and I cannot fight a battle that I know is divisive, that is uphill that is distracting to the country if I do not believe in the ground of the battle.” This prompted a sharp rebuke from Reverend Jackson. “If President Clinton and Senate Democrats had stood by Lani as President Bush and the Republicans stood by Clarence Thomas, she would be confirmed,” he told the Associated Press.
The next year, when US Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders came under fire, Clinton faltered again. While answering a question from a psychologist at a World AIDS Day conference, Dr. Elders was asked whether there should be “more explicit discussion and promotion of masturbation” to slow the spread of the epidemic. “I think that is something that is a part of human sexuality, and it’s a part of something that perhaps should be taught,” she said. But, she added, “we’ve not even taught our children the very basics.” Critics pounced, arguing that the Clinton administration wanted to teach schoolkids how to masturbate, when that was clearly not the point she was making. Yes, there would be a price to pay if the administration defended her. It would require time and energy in an already heated political environment to explain the actual context of her words. But there was also a price to pay in the failure to defend her. It would send a signal that Clinton was unwilling to fight for yet another Black woman.
With both Guinier and Elders, Clinton claimed ignorance that each woman might prove controversial. I found these excuses implausible. He had known Guinier since their Yale Law School days, and he had known Elders since he appointed her director of the Arkansas Department of Health. He must have known that political and social conservatives would balk at their nominations, and that their willingness to speak truth to power is exactly what made them heroes to progressives. But in December of 1994, Clinton fired his surgeon general. “Dr. Elders’s public statements reflecting differences with administration policy and my own convictions have made it necessary for her to tender her resignation,” he said in a statement. The announcement, coming just months after the collapse of Hillary Clinton’s health care reform plan and only weeks after Republicans won control of the House of Representatives, signaled a tragic turning point for Clinton’s presidency. The window of opportunity for progressive change in the Clinton administration was now all but closed.
These experiences left me with unanswered questions. What was the point of assembling this diverse new coalition of African Americans, Hispanics, women, and LGBTQ people if the president wasn’t willing to fight for them in difficult circumstances? Had we gotten so caught up in the symbolism of diversity in allocating appointments that we had lost sight of the substantive policies that would most help the people in the various communities we represented? And what was the value in electing a president who could speak to both Southern moderates and Northern liberals if he could not use those talents to promote a Democratic agenda? The preelection promise of Bill Clinton was that the man from Hope could convince other Southerners to accept progressive change. But the postelection Clinton took over a country that was becoming increasingly divided, that would put up bitter resistance against even his modest ideas, that would actively discourage Republicans from compromise, and that would cause him to learn the wrong lesson from his failures.
The remainder of the Clinton administration would be characterized by the mercurial vicissitudes of political reality. Clinton’s accomplishments would come from appointments, compromise legislation, a robust economy, and small-bore policy changes, while his failures would come from his inability or unwillingness to advance a progressive agenda. The paradox of the Clinton presidency is that his most enduring progressive legacy is not connected to any piece of legislation that passed during his administration. Ironically, it was his historic appointments of women and Blacks that may have made the most impact. He appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, Madeleine Albright as secretary of state, Janet Reno as attorney general, Ron Brown as commerce secretary, and Mike Espy as agriculture secretary. And he appointed Justice Department officials like Eric Holder and Deval Patrick, who would later go on to become the first Black attorney general and the first Black governor of Massachusetts, respectively.
But for every step forward, it seemed there was a step backward. Clinton would go on to sign the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages in other states. He signed a bill the same year to “end welfare as we know it” that reduced the number of people who qualified for benefits and created limits on how long someone could receive assistance, even in a deep recession. And he signed a crime bill in 1994 that contributed to the philosophy of mass incarceration, even though it had a negligible impact on actual incarceration rates.
It would not be accurate to say that the Black community was united on the crime bill in the 1990s. In the House of Representatives, twenty-six of the thirty-eight voting members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) supported th
e bill, but only after Congress rejected the CBC’s much more progressive proposal for a Racial Justice Act. The politics of the crime bill were also complicated by the inclusion of an assault weapons ban, funding for community policing in underserved neighborhoods, and the passage of the Violence Against Women Act. However, even among the Congressional Black Caucus members who supported the bill, I don’t recall any advocating the “tough on crime” approach that conservatives endorsed to lock up criminals “and throw away the key.” Almost everyone in the Democratic Party knew the crime bill was an imperfect compromise, but I think many of us mistakenly convinced ourselves that the good would somehow outweigh the bad. As time passed, however, and the legislation was reexamined in the light of new circumstances, we would all regret that calculation.
The question of marriage equality was also complicated. The issue divided the Black community, but many Black elected officials supported LGBTQ causes even as Black ministers took the opposite position. While the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act passed the House by an overwhelming 342–67 margin, leading CBC members like John Conyers, Ron Dellums, John Lewis, Charles Rangel, Maxine Waters, and others all voted against it.
Clinton’s welfare bill was different. “Today, we are ending welfare as we know it,” the president announced at the 1996 bill-signing ceremony for the law that ended the federal government’s six-decade-long guarantee of cash assistance to the poor. It passed almost exclusively with Republican votes. Democrats voted against it, 165–30. But on the day of the bill signing, Clinton sat at a desk in the White House Rose Garden surrounded by a sea of white men and two young Black women on each side of him—Lillie Harden and Penelope Howard. Harden had participated in one of the welfare-to-work programs Clinton had initiated as governor of Arkansas, and she explained how the transition helped her. “Going to work gave me independence to take care of my children and to make sure there was always food on the table and a roof over their heads,” Harden said at the ceremony. It was an attempt to use a Black woman who had benefitted from a completely different state law as a spokesperson for a federal law that would end up hurting other Black women. Liberal Democrats quickly condemned the new law. Children’s Defense Fund president Marian Wright Edelman, a longtime friend and ally of the president, released a statement calling the bill “pernicious” and warning that it “makes a mockery” of Clinton’s pledge not to hurt children.
Eight years after the 1994 ceremony, long after the spotlight had moved away from her, Lillie Harden suffered a stroke. It left her unable to qualify for Medicaid and unable to pay her $450 monthly prescriptions, according to a report from The Nation. In March 2014, she passed away at age fifty-nine. And that job that she was so proud to hold in 1994? “It didn’t pay off in the end,” Harden told a journalist.
At the end of eight years, Clinton’s legacy was a booming economy, historic appointments, and a series of measures that made things just a little less bad than what they would have been if Republicans had held the reins of power. The results were often more symbolic than substantive. Clinton appointed legendary Black historian John Hope Franklin to chair a presidential initiative on race, for example, but the project produced unimaginative boilerplate recommendations like “anti-discrimination measures must be strongly enforced.” The administration did manage to reframe some of the most divisive social issues of the day by splitting the difference. When conservatives wanted to kill affirmative action, Clinton’s response was “mend it, don’t end it.” When they wanted to restrict women’s reproductive rights, Clinton argued that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” And, when it came to gays in the military, he tried to appease everyone with a message of “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue.” It was hardly the message of hope that had lifted him into office.
The coup de grâce for 1990s liberalism came when Clinton announced a new approach to government in his 1996 State of the Union address. He warned that “big government does not have all the answers,” and that “there’s not a program for every problem” and repeated lines that could have been credibly delivered by any Republican at the time. To hear them from a Democratic president was concerning, but one of the next lines was most troubling of all. “The era of big government is over,” he declared.
Big government had bankrolled America’s westward expansion, fought the Civil War, preserved the union, educated our children, legislated the forty-hour workweek, built the highways, subsidized suburban housing, created the safety net, enforced the minimum wage, integrated public schools, protected the right to vote, and provided financial assistance and health care to seniors and medical care for low-income Americans. Suddenly, at the very moment when America was becoming more complex and diverse, the very tools needed to manage that complexity and diversity were being abandoned. Clinton’s declaration would turn out to be a premature capitulation to the loud and mostly white voices of American conservatism that were unrepresentative of his party or the future of the nation. Decades later, President Joe Biden would sign a $1.9 trillion federal stimulus bill in his first two months in office, and up to 75 percent of the American public would support it, according to opinion polls.
Many establishment Democrats of the 1990s were not as bold, and they did not believe they could win on the strength of their own ideas. Clinton offered a “third way” that did not fit neatly into left and right boxes, and he followed the calculated strategy of “triangulation” to bypass the liberal-conservative divide. As he was constantly oscillating between left and right, Black and white, he was harder to define. So, why did Black Americans stand by him so consistently?
At the height of the 1992 presidential primary, Governor Clinton signed a death warrant for a convicted felon named Ricky Ray Rector, an African American with a mental capacity so impaired that he chose not to eat the dessert in his last meal because he was saving it for later. A few months later, he denounced Black rap artist Sister Souljah at Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition convention, after she had been quoted as saying, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” No one took her comments seriously as a threat to white people, but Clinton compared her to America’s most famous racist. “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘Black,’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech,” he said. It was another calculated move designed to position Clinton as a heroic politician who could stand up to his own base, but if he was unwilling to fight for that base, how did it serve the community to start a beef with a twenty-eight-year-old rapper?
What saved Bill Clinton was not his politics, but his enemies. He became a hero to Democrats in the 1990s, in large part, because he and his wife were the targets of the slings and arrows of outrageous conservative attacks. Hillary Clinton was vilified for refusing to abide by the conservative norms of political wifedom. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession,” she responded to critics.
And as for Bill Clinton, despite his efforts to distance himself from unpopular liberal causes, Republicans continued to blame him for every controversial liberal personality, idea, or failure. As Toni Morrison explained in her 1998 essay for The New Yorker, Clinton’s affiliation with African Americans was born of a shared and symbolic sense of persecution. It was, after all, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation when “one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first Black President,” Morrison wrote. Clinton was described as “Blacker than any actual Black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.” Yet another Black author, Ishmael Reed, described Clinton as “a white soul brother.” It was a late 1990s consensus of reality among African Americans that reflected an understandable but profoundly distorted view of the country. White conservatives had convinced us that America was a fundamentally right-of-center nation that would never fully accept us and that the best we could hope for was to blunt the damage from time t
o time with small, incremental steps forward. Republicans convinced Democrats of this messaging, even as the slowly changing demographics of the country foreshadowed an inevitable political and cultural shift on the horizon. It is much easier to recognize this today in a way that was not apparent in the 1990s, but our greatest failure of that era may have been our inability to believe in and articulate our own vision for America.
Only when Republicans overplayed their hands and impeached President Clinton over an admittedly inappropriate consensual adult affair did our power become apparent. Clinton was not the bold reformer that many wanted him to be, but he was the public face of the Democratic Party. An attack on Clinton, led by a group of white Southern Republicans, felt like an attack on women and minorities.
At the end of Clinton’s two terms in office, his presidency did not lend itself to an easy verdict for Black America. From a purely economic perspective, many Blacks were better off after Clinton. The booming economy helped to cut the Black unemployment rate from 14.1 percent to a record low of 7.0 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage rose by 21.0 percent during his two terms. And despite his spectacular perfidy in abandoning Guinier and Elders, Clinton deserved credit for the numerous other political appointees and judicial nominees he did hire. But for the people who were left behind because of the politics of mass incarceration and welfare reform, it’s hard to balance their deprivation of basic liberty or resources against the economic advancements for middle-class and upper-income African Americans. For the vast majority of Black people at the time, Clinton was neither transitional nor transformative, but he was the best we thought we could do under the circumstances. It was an argument that seemed to make perfect sense in the 1990s. Reexamining the Clinton administration some decades later, it seems we were wrong.