For women, in particular, the Hill-Thomas hearings represented the public emergence of an issue all too many had lived with in private. Sexual harassment, a term that had only arisen in 1975 during a claim filed against Cornell University, had become a central issue for women’s rights organizations by the time of Hill’s revelations.28 Polls showed that significant portions of the female workforce had encountered sexual harassment on the job. The hit comedy 9 to 5 (starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton) had brought the problem to film audiences—ironically coming from an industry that was notorious for the very behavior the film decried. The movie came out in 1980, the same year that the EEOC released new guidelines stating that sexual harassment was unlawful under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The courts began to tackle the problem during the 1980s, while parts of the private sector issued stronger rules about acceptable behavior on the job. But Hill’s testimony offered a dramatic reminder that progress had been halting and incomplete.
The response of the Senate Judiciary Committee underscored this disconnect. White male senators, from both parties, spent most of their time questioning the character of the African American woman before them, rather than taking her accusations seriously. Utah Republican Orrin Hatch alleged that Hill was working with “slick lawyers” who wanted to destroy Thomas’s candidacy. Wyoming Republican Alan Simpson doubted her claims. “If what you say this man said to you occurred, why in God’s name when he left his position of power or status or authority over you, and you left it in 1983,” he asked in disbelief, “why in God’s name would you ever speak to a man like that for the rest of your life?” Democrats joined in. Biden, for instance, asked Thomas if he thought Hill had made the entire story up. For many, this line of questioning from an all-male committee confirmed the dire need for more female legislators in Washington. Organizations like NOW mobilized, reporting swelling membership rolls and contributions as a result of the outrage. The Bush administration and movement conservatives conducted a fierce campaign to discredit Hill, raising questions about her character and claims.29 Finally, in October 1991, the Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52–48, the narrowest margin for a successful confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee in the twentieth century.30
The confluence of race, courts, and the culture wars in the Thomas hearings found a disturbing echo six months later on the other side of the country. In early 1992, four members of the LAPD were tried on charges of using excessive force to restrain Rodney King, an African American man in their custody. While charges of police brutality had been a perennial complaint, this particular incident stood out because it had been captured on videotape. George Holliday, a thirty-one-year-old Argentinian immigrant, witnessed the attack from the balcony of his apartment. He filmed the confrontation on his Sony Handycam and then submitted the tape to a local television station, reportedly for $500. The station aired about eighty-one seconds of the film the following night; then, cable news channels picked it up and broadcast it repeatedly, with grainy images of four policemen beating a prone and passive King with their nightsticks playing on a seemingly endless loop.
As the nation watched and rewatched the videotaped images of the Rodney King beating, most Americans assumed the four policemen depicted on it would easily be found guilty. Indeed, in many ways, the single bit of videotape eclipsed the trial, showing the limitations of an old system of justice in a new world of telecommunications. “The jury system was conceived so that citizens could act as surrogates for the public, to sit in judgment of crime,” noted a columnist in the Los Angeles Times. “But with cameras increasingly trained wherever news is expected—from police cars, by citizen photographers and by free-lance camera crews who prowl the streets looking for footage to sell to TV stations—in a growing number of cases the public is beginning to believe that it can see and judge the crime for itself.” And indeed, those who watched the trial at home actually saw something quite different than the jury in the courtroom did. Television stations, always looking for gripping visuals, replayed the most dramatic bits of the videotape throughout the trial rather than presenting the more ordinary evidence or routine bits of testimony. As a result, the tape loomed much larger for those watching the trial at home than for those in the courtroom, where the full recording was considered, and as one piece of evidence among many. When the jury returned with not-guilty verdicts for all four policemen, the sudden disconnect was shocking. For many African Americans and Latinos in South Central Los Angeles, that shock turned to anger, and anger turned to violence.31
The night of the verdict, South Central erupted in a five-day uprising marked by arson and looting: the Los Angeles riots of 1992. In echoes of the Gulf War, Americans watched the chaos unfold in real time on cable and the network news. Cameras situated on helicopters broadcast disturbing images of entire blocks of buildings on fire and charcoal smoke filling the skies over the already smoggy city. Conservative critics charged that the live coverage of the initial stages of the riot only encouraged more to take part. “Helicopter one-upmanship on Wednesday night led to a two-hour invitation, delivered via an airborne minicam, to riot,” asserted Hugh Hewitt. “The pictures from South Central conveyed a single, powerful image—the police are not responding and probably can’t respond. Those inclined to loot or set fires got the message: ‘Nothing will stop you tonight, so go ahead, make your day.’ ” In one particularly tense moment, viewers watched as a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, was dragged from his vehicle before being savagely beaten. As he lay bloodied in the street, helicopters circled overhead sending images live across the country. The images, naturally, were endlessly replayed on cable and network news, much as the original videotape of Rodney King’s beating had been. “The Holliday video of the black King being beaten by white police officers immediately became a symbol of racism in America,” noted television critic Howard Rosenberg. “And by continually rerunning footage of Denny being brutalized, television has affixed to the Los Angeles riots a symbol every bit as powerful. This image—of blacks victimizing a white—is infinitely more potent and lasting than words describing Denny’s rescue by four good Samaritans, also black.” 32
The rioting did not stop until the California National Guard and US Marines intervened. In the end, fifty-one people were killed and several thousand more injured; property damage was estimated at over $700 million. When the smoke cleared, the nation surveyed the damages, which offered a stark reminder that the economic policies of the 1980s had not brought universal rewards to the nation and that racial and ethnic divisions remained deep in American society. Throughout the 1980s, roughly a fifth of the African Americans living in South Central Los Angeles had been unemployed, with many homes led by single mothers who depended on government support to survive. Gang violence was rampant, but efforts to solve it merely made things worse. Incidents of police brutality had sharply increased over the decade. When Los Angeles hosted the Olympics in 1984, Mayor Tom Bradley had authorized Police Commissioner Daryl Gates to crack down on criminality in order to improve the city’s image. Thousands of men were imprisoned, sometimes on the thinnest evidence. But Gates didn’t stop when the Olympics did. He had responded to the cocaine and crack epidemic of the late 1980s, and the related gang violence, through “Operation Hammer,” which continued the forceful police response to crime. The purpose of the program was to “make life miserable” for the gangs of the city, with constant police sweeps that resulted in over 20,000 arrests.
As Republicans and Democrats traded barbs about which party was responsible for the riots, the former Nixon analyst and Reagan critic Kevin Phillips cast blame on both. In the 1960s, he noted, “liberals were widely seen as having failed to deal with major questions of law enforcement, taxation, fiscal management, and the role of government as well as race.” When they were “repudiated,” Republicans took over, but with little results. “Twelve years of Reagan and Bush has not cured the problems,” Phillips noted. “It hasn’t given us morning in America. It
’s produced more columns of smoke rising from our inner cities.” 33
The Election of 1992
At the 1992 Republican National Convention, firebrand Pat Buchanan, a pugnacious conservative who entered politics in the Nixon White House, electrified delegates with an address that has been known, ever since, as “the culture wars speech.” Buchanan had waged a strong challenge to President Bush in the Republican primaries that year, and his address to the convention was an attempt to bring the disaffected cultural conservatives who had followed him back into the fold of the GOP. He was one of the many Republicans who believed that Reagan and Bush had abandoned the social conservatives who had driven the conservative revolution. Angrily giving voice to a host of conservative grievances about American cultural and social life, Buchanan at once looked back over the struggle for social conservatism in the 1980s and forward to a new round of warfare in the 1990s. “My friends,” Buchanan announced in the critical passage of the address, “this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” 34
The enemies in this domestic war were the Democrats. In his address, Buchanan directed his red-meat remarks to not just Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president, but also his wife Hillary, a woman the Republican decried as a champion of a “radical feminism” that would destroy America. Buchanan warned that the candidate and his wife would bring radical values of the 1960s to the White House, and then to the rest of the nation. “The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units—that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants.” Buchanan declared that there was “a war for the soul of America” under way, and in that war, “Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.” 35 Some GOP officials suggested Democrats weren’t even on America’s side. “These other people are not America,” Republican National Chairman Richard N. Bond told NBC’s Maria Shriver.36 Partisans inside the Houston Astrodome cheered Buchanan’s combative comments, while many outside recoiled in horror. Liberal columnist Molly Ivins joked that the speech “probably sounded better in the original German.” 37
By the time the 1992 presidential campaign began in earnest, President Bush’s approval rating had fallen sharply from its Gulf War highs. Between the sluggish economy, the L.A. riots, and the resurgent culture war criticisms leveled by Buchanan in the primaries, the president had taken a thorough beating. Moreover, the rift among Republicans over Bush’s decision to raise taxes had never healed. In early June, the ABC News-Washington Post poll showed his approval rating at 35 percent, a new low for his presidency. But ultimately, his aides believed, Bush’s positive numbers didn’t matter; as in 1988, the negative numbers of his opponent did. And as luck had it, his opponent, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, seemed to be the ideal target for a negative campaign. He had avoided serving in the war in Vietnam, smoked marijuana, and all but admitted to having an extramarital affair. For GOP strategists, he seemed like a target too good to be true.38 In many respects, Bill Clinton embodied the worst aspects of the cultural changes that Republicans had been warning about for over a decade. Persistent rumors about Clinton’s sexual affairs likewise offered Republicans more than enough ammunition to bring down this Democrat, connecting his personal problems with a larger narrative about his party.
But Clinton was determined to avoid the culture wars charges that had effectively destroyed Dukakis four years before. He tried to steal the issue away from Republicans by moving to the middle on repeated occasions, often shifting to the right. For instance, while Dukakis had been tarred as “soft on crime,” Clinton made a show of his support for the death penalty. He even interrupted his campaign so he could fly back to Arkansas and oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man who was so mentally impaired he told prison guards to save the dessert from his last meal so he could eat it later. Meanwhile, in his own contribution to the culture wars, Clinton condemned a fairly obscure rapper named Sister Souljah who had said, in reaction to the L.A. riots, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Pointedly, Clinton used an appearance before Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition to denounce Sister Souljah, who was a member of the organization, and thereby signaled that he was not beholden to “special interests” as Republicans often alleged.39 Many liberals complained about these kinds of tactics, seeing them as cheap efforts by a slick, centrist Democrat to win over moderate voters. But they proved effective at dampening the conservative efforts to paint Clinton as a very left-of-center Democrat.
As Clinton defended himself on these social issues, he counterattacked strongly on economic themes. This was an area where he felt more comfortable tapping directly into traditional Democratic values and embracing his party’s philosophy. Pointing to lingering unemployment, a steadily growing divide between the rich and the rest of America, and the unprecedented growth of the federal debt and deficit over the previous twelve years, Clinton forced the 1992 campaign back from the culture wars issues that Bush favored and instead made it a referendum on the economic consequences of the Reagan Revolution. The twelve years of Reagan and Bush had amounted, in Clinton’s words, to “the worst economic record since the Great Depression.” He and other Democrats argued that the president had been so focused on military issues and international affairs that he had neglected middle-class Americans who were suffering from the economic downturn at home. The president’s wealthy and elitist pedigree, Clinton argued, made it more difficult for him to understand the kinds of struggles that average Americans were facing in their jobs and homes. A sign in the Democratic campaign’s “War Room” captured the Clinton team’s singular focus on this issue: “THE ECONOMY, STUPID.” 40
Bill Clinton’s effort to emphasize economic issues was helped considerably by the campaign of a third-party candidate that year: Ross Perot. The Texas billionaire bypassed traditional party structures and self-financed an eccentric campaign. The changes that had taken place in the news media allowed a candidate to make his case directly to the voters, as long as he or she had the money to support the effort. Relying on cable television to spread his message, Perot announced his candidacy on CNN’s talk show Larry King Live, and then saturated the airwaves with TV ads blasting Republicans’ economic policies. “The total national debt was only $1 trillion in 1980 when President Reagan took office. It is now $4 trillion,” he noted. “Maybe it was ‘voodoo economics.’ Whatever it was, we now are in deep voodoo.” That summer, as Bush tried to build up his economic credentials by supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, Perot worked tirelessly to discredit the idea. Perot appealed to populist strains in the electorate that increasingly believed corporate America—supported by the government—was moving its factories to low-wage parts of the world without any sense of remorse. If NAFTA were passed, he warned, the only thing it would create in America was a “giant sucking sound” as even more American jobs were swept across the border to cheaper Mexican markets.41
Though they went about it in kinder, gentler ways than the Bush campaign of 1988, the Clinton and Perot campaigns of 1992 combined to forge a common attack on President Bush. Just as important, Perot’s emphasis on deficit reduction took votes away from Bush, while also giving Clinton more room to depict himself as a champion of fiscal conservatism despite the president’s support for tax hikes. Negative campaigning had effectively come home to roost. In the end, the emphasis on the economy worked and Clinton won. He took 43 percent of the popular vote, to Bush’s 38 percent and Perot’s 19 percent. In the Electoral College, Clinton’s
margin was even wider, as he won 370 electoral votes to Bush’s 168.42
In some ways, Bill Clinton’s victory seemed to turn the page from the politics of the previous twelve years. He had managed to sidestep the fault lines of the culture wars and, at the same time, win a referendum on the economic merits of the Reagan Revolution. But as it turned out, both those debates were far from over.
CHAPTER 10
The Roaring 1990s
BILL CLINTON HAD PROMISED TO SWEEP AWAY THE Reagan Revolution, but once in office he quickly discovered—much as his predecessors had—that the opposition party had entrenched itself firmly in the halls of power. Unlike the postwar decades, when near-constant Democratic control of Congress meant that Democratic presidents routinely enjoyed the benefits of single-party government, the final decades of the twentieth century were ones in which divided government had become the norm. For much of Reagan’s two terms, the Republican Party at least had control of the Senate, but once that chamber switched hands in 1986, the remainder of his term—and all of George H. W. Bush’s—saw Democrats control both houses of Congress once more. Clinton’s first two years in office would see a rare moment of return to single-party rule, but it ultimately did him little good. In 1994, both chambers would flip back to Republicans, placing him in the same position as his predecessors.
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