by Joy-Ann Reid
Bill Clinton had other ideas. He walked onto the podium at the Omni hotel in downtown Washington, before a hall packed with more than three hundred attendees and throngs of media. After a warm introduction from Jackson, Clinton delivered a rousing speech attacking President Bush’s economic policies, drawing cheers from the almost entirely African American crowd. And then, in a moment that sliced across the warm crowd like a cold blade, Clinton delivered a broadside against both Sister Souljah and the man who had invited her, as Jackson sat grim-faced and captive onstage just behind him. Clinton’s topical shift had the elegant feel of spontaneity, and the crispness of calculation. He said he “felt compelled to discuss racism with the audience,” because “all Americans must speak out against it.”
Addressing Souljah’s remarks to the Washington Post, after pointedly noting her presence at the conference the day before, Clinton proposed that “if you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.” His words drew gasps from the audience.
Jackson was visibly shaken, later telling reporter Sam Fulwood III of the Los Angeles Times: “I do not know why he used this platform to address those issues. It was unnecessary. It was a diversion. . . . Perhaps he was aiming for an audience that was not here.”
Fulwood and other journalists rushed to get comments from two black members of Congress who were there as Clinton’s surrogates. He later wrote that when he and New York Times reporter Gwen Ifill compared notes, they found that California congresswoman Maxine Waters and John Lewis of Georgia had made virtually identical statements in support of Clinton. “Clinton had given them his talking points in advance, covering himself beautifully,” Fulwood would later write.
Jackson’s staff realized they’d been used. Some blamed Clinton’s strategists, wry Texas transplant Paul Begala in particular; or the candidate’s media team, George Stephanopoulos and Mandy Grunwald, who were waiting in the “spin room” to take questions from an eager press corps. Jackson’s senior aides believed Clinton had acted without consulting his campaign manager, David Wilhelm, who was sympathetic to Jackson’s liberal politics and dealt with the reverend day to day.
Privately, friends said, Wilhelm feared Clinton had taken too great a risk, of alienating Jackson, and black voters, for little reward. But as the pragmatists on the Jackson team saw it, this was Bill Clinton working the southern strategy from the Democratic playbook, and doing so brilliantly.
Or, as one leading civil rights leader stated more bluntly, by “pimp slapping Jesse Jackson in his own house.”
Sister Souljah quickly called a press conference and blasted Clinton as a Vietnam draft dodger and philanderer who “could never quite get his own personal and social behavior together” and who “says he is not a racist but he tries to distance himself from Jesse Jackson—a candidate who has registered more voters, served the interest of poor blacks, poor whites, poor Latinos, unions, laborers, and farmers and by experience, intellect, and charisma, is far more qualified for the job.” But the damage was done.
Three days later Jackson was still fuming when he appeared on CNN’s Crossfire and said his demands for an apology had not been met.
“First of all, to imply, on a platform where the governor was my guest, that I condone violence . . .” Jackson trailed off. “I have reached out to Governor Clinton at his lowest moment, when he needed redemption, and a hand out, and a bridge. I ask him to be as sensitive to people in their low moments as he wants people to be to him in his low moments.”
A group of New York pastors, led by Calvin Butts, denounced Clinton’s use of a black organization to launch a play for the white suburbs. Butts, pastor of the storied Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, made a point of inviting Williamson to speak at the church the next month.
In July, at a Rainbow Coalition retreat in Orlando, Florida, just before the Democratic National Convention was set to open in Souljah’s hometown of New York City, Jackson huddled with top aides, and his assessment was succinct.
“Fuck Clinton,” he told a senior aide. “I ain’t campaigning for him.”
Jackson’s top strategists urged him not to risk all-out war with the Democratic nominee. If Clinton went down, Jackson didn’t want to be seen holding the anvil—and anything less than full support during the campaign could jettison Jackson’s ability to influence a Clinton administration.
“We have to elect the most liberal candidate who’s electable and that happens to be Bill Clinton,” the senior adviser told Jackson. “Which seems to be the position that progressives are always in.” Indeed, Clinton was promising to restore targeted federal spending to rebuild infrastructure, boost resources for community policing, improve health care, and provide job training and business development if he won the White House, reasons enough for progressives to give the New Democrat a fair hearing.
Clinton had been laying down markers with young and black voters before Jackson’s conference that mitigated any damage from his “Sister Souljah” moment. On June 3, Clinton had appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show, a nightly variety show hosted by the eponymous comedian. Clinton had gamely played the saxophone and chatted about Hall’s pastor, and about being in South Central L.A. three years before the riots, meeting with community organizations and talking urban policy at a meeting at Congresswoman Waters’s home. Just afterward he turned up on MTV, reinforcing his status as the candidate of the young, and of “tomorrow.”
Even Clinton’s membership in the segregated Country Club of Little Rock, which membership he had acknowledged on the dais at Rainbow Coalition in Washington to make the point that he, too, had made mistakes, but unlike Souljah, was owning up to them, couldn’t derail his quest for the nomination or his solid support from black political leaders. The revelation drew protests from Sharpton, and the famous quip from California governor Jerry Brown that “even George Bush wouldn’t dare play golf at an all-white golf club.”
Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee, and his new style of politics, which simultaneously pulled black voters in and pushed them away, was the party’s path out of the political wilderness. Black voters, liberals, labor unions—and Jackson—had little choice but to get on board.
BILL CLINTON DEFEATED INCUMBENT PRESIDENT GEORGE H. W. Bush in November 1992 and carried with him to Washington the pent-up hopes and dreams of a party exhausted by decades of political despair.
Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore, whose father and Senate forebear had been one of just three Democrats from the South to refuse to sign the Southern Manifesto in 1956, had struck a generational blow, beating back the long shadow of Vietnam and the Democratic malaise that followed in Lyndon Johnson’s wake.
And while he failed to win a bare majority of the popular vote, with third-party candidate Ross Perot taking 19 percent, Clinton held Bush to just 37.5 percent of the vote to his 43, securing an Electoral College landslide: 370 to 168. Victories in a handful of southern states—Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Louisiana, and his native Arkansas—represented the best showing for a Democrat in the region since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Clinton carried the Rust Belt, with the exception of Indiana. He picked up the western states of Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada, while sweeping the traditional Democratic strongholds in the Northeast and on the West Coast.
The election attracted the highest voter turnout since 1972, and the strongest showing among women, young voters, and African Americans since 1984. As a result, the incoming congressional class would be the largest since 1948, and the most diverse in American history, including the first Korean-American member (Republican Jay Kim of California) and the first Native American House member in sixty years (Democrat Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado).
The number of Hispanics in Congress grew from ten to seventeen, bolstered by newly created seats that sent candidates like Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois to Washington. And the Congressional Black Caucus swelled from twenty-five members to thirty-eight, as post-cens
us redistricting—and Jesse Jackson’s voter registration campaigns in 1984 and 1988—created more than a dozen enclaves where black voters were registered in sufficient numbers to swing a Democratic primary.
Of the thirteen black candidates who entered those contests, all would enter the House of Representatives, including Cynthia McKinney in Georgia, Eddie Bernice Johnson in Texas, Carrie Meek, Alcee Hastings and Corinne Brown in Florida, Cleo Fields in Louisiana, Albert Wynn in Maryland, Bobby Scott in Virginia, and Mel Watt in North Carolina. Black candidates were elected for the first time since Reconstruction in North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Alabama, and South Carolina, where a former high school teacher and human affairs commissioner named James Clyburn won a newly created seat.
The election brought six new women senators to the Capitol, including Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, the first black woman ever elected to the United States Senate. Her campaign had been organized by the Hyde Park coalition that backed Harold Washington in 1983 and 1987 and Jesse Jackson in 1988. Her run was fueled by a core group of female attorneys in Chicago, who joined the outrage among national feminist, civil rights, and black legal organizations over President Bush’s nomination of a black archconservative, Clarence Thomas, to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the great Thurgood Marshall. Thomas had triumphed with the help of a stone wall of white male senators who dismissed the sexual harassment allegations leveled by a black woman, Anita Hill, who had worked with Thomas in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. He also had the overwhelming support of African Americans, whose zeal to see Thomas confirmed reached 70 percent by mid-October 1991, higher even than that of Thomas’s other core admirers: Republicans and men.
Moseley Braun joined fellow Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California, Patty Murray of Washington State, and a reelected Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, plus one Republican, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, to form the largest female contingent ever in the upper chamber. The forty-seven women entering the House represented an increase of ninteen and consisted of thirty-five Democrats and twelve Republicans. The unprecedented election results led newspaper headline writers across the country to declare 1992 “the year of the woman.”
Despite President Clinton’s New Democrat pedigree, liberal activists hoped that backed by a Democratic-controlled Congress that better reflected the country’s diversity, he would press for a bold, progressive agenda to turn the economy around and strike a blow for economic and civic fairness in the wake of the Reagan-Bush era, with its emphasis on tax cuts and determination to undo the Great Society.
Clinton’s political confidants had deep roots in the civil rights movement: fellow southerners like Vernon Jordan, Andrew Young, John Lewis, and even Jesse Jackson, who during the general election had worked hard for the campaign, traveling the country as a surrogate and even telling Clinton’s campaign manager at one point, “Wilhelm, you want me to go to a Klan rally? You just tell me what the reason is and I’ll go.”
Clinton had acted quickly and built a diverse cabinet.
With Vernon Jordan leading the transition team, a first for an African American, Clinton chose Ron Brown, the DNC chairman, as secretary of commerce. He tapped his friend Mike Espy of Mississippi as secretary of agriculture, Alexis Herman to head the White House Office of Public Liaison, and a fellow Arkansan, Rodney Slater, as secretary of transportation.
“He ends up with prominent African Americans, credible African Americans that we knew, that we had worked with, that we were comfortable with,” said Marc Morial, then a Louisiana state legislator, and whose father, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, had been mayor of New Orleans (a post Morial himself would attain in 1994). “We could pick up the phone. You had Henry Cisneros at HUD; you had Hazel O’Leary at the Department of Energy. Crucially, Clinton’s director of personnel was an African American by the name of Bob Nash. So the guy vetting the team was himself a person of color.”
Ron Brown was the best-known cabinet member on a national level, as a former deputy director of the National Urban League, a deputy manager of Ted Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1980, the head of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 convention team, and the party’s lead man in Washington as the DNC chair during the Bush years. He would be Clinton’s key emissary to black business and political leaders around the country as they sought access to economic opportunities for their struggling communities.
Brown presented the incoming president with an ambitious agenda; he wanted to use the power of his office to inject real economic progress into the urban centers that had foundered in the decades since Lyndon Johnson’s final act of civic stewardship: the signing of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. Decades of neglect, the crack epidemic, and generational despair continued to eat away at the heart of black America in big cities and small, rural towns. In the minds of black leaders, bringing these places back meant injecting federal dollars to rebuild businesses in communities that in some cases were torn apart by riots or abandoned by “white flight.” Creating tax havens for investment—“enterprise zones”—and making loans available for small businesses could help bring commerce and jobs back to the urban centers where African Americans had, at various times, been steered and abandoned. It was an idea Jimmy Carter had championed, including in Miami after the 1980 riots, but Ronald Reagan had rolled such programs back, cutting urban investment to the bone. Brown and the president shared a belief with local black leaders that commerce was the lifeblood that could bring the urban core back from the dead. Black mayors and state representatives and business leaders were eager to get on the phone with Brown to pitch their vision for how to get the investments under way.
It was a promising start that was soon followed by a series of setbacks.
Within weeks of taking office, Clinton’s campaign promise to gay and lesbian activists to end the military’s ban on open service triggered a ferocious backlash from conservatives and from the military brass, and the administration quickly backed down, accepting a compromise excoriated publicly by gay rights groups, and privately by gay members of his own staff who viewed the rapid retreat to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” as a cowardly and premature capitulation.
Next came the public outrage over a months-long armed standoff with a religious cult in Waco, Texas, that took the lives of nearly ninety people and ended with the Branch Davidian compound in flames. First Lady Hillary Clinton led an abortive effort to pass a national health-care bill; her secretive task force outraged even Democrats on Capitol Hill. The administration also faced a host of media scandals, including an alleged two-hundred-dollar haircut for the president that snarled traffic at Los Angeles International Airport and the firing of a handful of employees at the White House travel office. No story seemed too minor or too outrageous to captivate the Beltway press.
In April, the president nominated Lani Guinier to be assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s storied Civil Rights Division. She was the biracial daughter of the first chairman of Harvard’s Afro-American Studies Department, Ewart Guinier, a Jamaican-Panamanian immigrant who had been denied the opportunity to live in Harvard dormitories when he was a student there in 1929.
Guinier had known the Clintons since they were Yale Law School classmates; Bill and Hillary attended her wedding. The nomination was both an act of friendship and a demonstration of the president’s commitment to restore the Civil Rights Division to the standard of aggressive pursuit of desegregation and voting access set during the Kennedy and Johnson eras and the Carter administration. Civil rights groups believed the division had waned in the intervening years.
But by June, Guinier had come under withering attack from the Right, including by conservative columnist George Will, who accused her of supporting both quotas (rather than affirmative action) and the creation of “race conscious” districts where only African Americans could be elected. Neither of those claims happened to be true. The attacks on Guinier as “Clinton’s quota queen” on the editorial pages of the Wa
ll Street Journal marked the inelegant reentry of the racial semiotics that had sidelined the Democratic Party since the waning days of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the busing wars of the 1970s, and the welfare politics of the Reagan era.
The attacks built to such a fury that on June 3 Clinton called a news conference and withdrew Guinier’s nomination, saying, improbably, that he hadn’t read her academic tracts before naming her, and that having done so, he felt “they clearly lend themselves to interpretations that do not represent the views that I expressed on civil rights during my campaign and views that I hold very dearly, even though there is much in them with which I agree.”
Black leaders in Washington and Guinier’s longtime colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania were incensed, both with the decision and with Clinton’s apparent cosigning of the Right’s mangled take on her scholarship. To black members of Congress and to civil rights leaders, the dismissal of Guinier, who in her writing advocated doing away with the kind of “full slate” voting that Jimmy Carter had fought against as governor of Georgia, where black voters were forced to vote in an entire slate of often hostile white politicians in order to elect a single African American, felt like a betrayal, delivered by a president who professed to have a strong alliance with African Americans. More than nearly any other episode in Clinton’s first term, the Guinier decision remained seared in the minds of even Clinton’s strongest black supporters and of some of his friends and former aides. It was seen as a test of personal loyalty, and of fealty to the legacy of the civil rights era, that Clinton resoundingly failed.
“I could not believe that he mischaracterized her,” Harvard professor Charles Ogletree, a future colleague of Guinier at Harvard Law School said, voicing alarm that Clinton would state “[that] after reading Lani’s work that [he’d discovered] she was some sort of radical or ‘race woman’ in terms of law.” That Clinton would accept that characterization of her, when her colleagues knew her to be a mainstream, even “middle of the road” scholar, struck some black Clinton supporters as a revival of his Sister Souljah strategy: an act of racial triangulation at the expense of a friend.