Bill Clinton is quite plainly going claustrophobic inside the dollhouse presidency he has constructed. As “time runs out of my hourglass,” he says with characteristic smarm, “I get more impatient to do everything I think I have to do to prepare this country for a new century.” So five years into his search for immortality, the president announces a startling discovery, in a college commencement address the White House is unashamed to pimp as ” historic.” Almost by his lonesome, we are given to understand, Clinton has pinpointed the “most perplexing” question in contemporary life, the “greatest challenge we face” as a people. The matter is fraught with risk. But fear not; Bill Clinton is brave and true: “Emotions may be rubbed raw, but we must begin.” He promises to lead us in a “great” conversation. An “unprecedented” conversation, even. About race.
The mind reels. And, if it is working as it should, the mind comes close to panic that an American president could so casually and selfishly manipulate so serious and universal a concern of our politics.
In 1861, in his First Inaugural, an earlier, more modest president labeled Southern enslavement of the black race the “only substantial dispute” in the United States. Where race was involved, Lincoln famously proclaimed a ” patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people” and advised his countrymen to “think calmly and well, upon this whole subject.” By 1863, at Gettysburg, Lincoln knew that pure reason would not be enough, that our liberty would be refreshed only with Union and rebel blood.
And by 1865, in his awesome Second Inaugural, Lincoln had fully reconceived the question of race — and the entire meaning of America — in quasi- religious terms. Racism was the country’s original sin. The Civil War was God’s punishment, the “woe due to those by whom the offense came.” And “if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”
Our presidency once walked upright. Today, its knuckles scrape the dirt. Bill Clinton, for purposes of his own vanity, proposes to associate himself with the still-central, unresolved question of American justice. He will do it the only way he knows how: crudely, crassly. There will be an endless round of “town-hall meetings.” There will be consultations with a seven- member blue-ribbon panel of advisers, all of whom already agree with him on moost of the particulars. There will be an anniversary photo-op at Little Rock Central High School in September. There will be a — yet again, ” historic” — White House conference on hate crimes in November. Led by this most voluble and least eloquent of presidents, they will talk race to death, slice it and dice it ever finer, until it is neutralized of its power, drained of its principle, reduced to just another narrowly calculated “issue.”
Bill Clinton is well known for narrow calculation, of course, so there is ready-made suspicion about the methods he will employ in “One America: The President’s Initiative on Race.” At a June 12 press briefing on the initiative, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Sylvia Mathews, was asked, “How much of this has been polled by the White House or by DNC pollsters for the White House?” The exchange went as follows:
MATHEWS: That’s a question I’ll have to defer.
QUESTIONER: I mean, you don’t know?
MATHEWS: In terms of how much — I think, understanding some of the issues that in terms of do people think [race] is a problem and that son of thing. . . .
QUESTIONER: No, did you poll? Did you do polling? Or did Penn and Schoen or Greenberg do polling? Anyone?
MATHEWS: The issue in question of do people consider this a problem . . .
QUESTIONER: No, the question is polling — just did you . . .
MATHEWS: Yes.
Sure, they did polling. Sure, also, that they will not invite us to think calmly and well about this initiative’s “five central goals” and subsidiary ” five central elements.” We will be invited instead to contemplate our navels. President Clinton calls special attention to Gallup poll results indicating that Americans believe more than 20 percent of us are black when the true figure is only 12 percent. What does this mean? It doesn’t matter; Clinton is “stunned” by data like this, and we should be, too. In his June 14 speech at the University of California, San Diego, the president urged us not to forget persistent inner-city friction with “Korean and Arab grocers,” “resurgent anti-Semitism” on college campuses, and hostility to immigrants from “the former Communist countries.” If we take such problems “out of our insides and discuss them,” Clinton argued in a series of intervews surrounding his speech, “I think we’ll have more fun. I think we’ll feel better about ourselves.”
Stirring, isn’t it? The president is already being banged around, from left and right, for the apparent empty symbolism of his race initiative. For two days following his San Diego address, Clinton publicly flirted with the idea of a formal national apology to the black descendants of American slavery. People went nuts. How would this work, and what sense would it make? Northern soldiers, 360,000 of them, roughly one in five of all who fought, were martyred in the war to end slavery. Do the descendants of Northern loyalists owe anyone an apology? What of the majority of current Americans whose ancestors didn’t arrive in the United States until after the Civil War? What, even, of the slavemasters’ descendants, those who can be identified? Blood guilt is supposed to be an alien, unAmerican idea. We are all in this together, aren’t we? And what use would “sorry” be, in any case, as comfort for the wound of human bondage?
Good questions, all of them. And all of them ultimately beside the point. Empty symbolism is not what’s wrong with Bill Clinton’s race initiative, as his critics contend. Democratic activists want him to do something, to spend money on the poverty that still follows blackness like a plague. Republicans, many of them, want to do something, too. Newt Gingrich, for instance, now advances a 10-point plan “to heal America’s racial divide,” 10 “practical, down-to-earth, problem-solving efforts which will improve the lives of all Americans.” “Perspiration and teamwork,” the speaker says, “will dissolve racism faster than therapy and dialogue.”
But perspiration and teamwork, sadly, aren’t the answer either. This do- something fixation is a trap. And it is precisely the trap Bill Clinton is eager to spring. In San Diego he said his life had been “immeasurably enriched” by the Torah, by the Koran, by Buddhism and Hinduism, by Hispanic reverence for “la familia,” by the “food, the music and the art and the culture” of American Indians — and everyone else, collectively. It was marvelous self-parody. But he didn’t mean it that way. He meant it as a model. The president genuinely intends for America to sew itself into an immeasurably enriched quilt of groupthink diversity. If this warm, smothering blanket can be made large enough, he hopes, the discrete problem of race will seem smaller.
But it will not go away. He doesn’t want it to go away; he wants only to disguise it. The politics of race in America, for all the president’s gush, are not about the “experience” of Korean grocers or resurgent antiSemitism or the Koran. Race politics are about an especially invidious discrimination. They are today about affrmative action — about whether the government will classify its citizens as black and white, or instead simply as individuals. This is, indissolubly, a sharp question of right and wrong, just as it was in 1865.
In his glancing reference to affirmative action in San Diego, President Clinton demanded that its opponents “come up with an alternative.” But the moral response to the sin of racialism, Lincoln taught us, is repentance. It does not involve “doing something”; it involves not doing something. Like some latter-day Stephen Douglas, Bill Clinton would deny and evade the moral weight of our racial conundrum. And he would now enlist the entire nation in the denial and evasion. The president has done some dishonorable things since he took office in 1993. This is one of the worst.
David Tell, for the Editors
