AT HIS PRESS CONFERENCE LAST WEEK, Bill Clinton received one question he clearly relished: Would his current troubles harm his cherished race initiative? No, Clinton answered — especially given “the response you’ve seen from some sectors of the American community,” which has “reinforced and acknowledged the centrality of this issue to the work of the last six years.”
Clinton’s words were typically dense, but his meaning, for once, was unmistakable: Black Americans support him strongly. And he is clinging to them as never before.
It is Clinton’s most predictable move, really: When he finds himself in a jam, he makes a beeline for his black supporters. They, in turn, provide him the absolution and comfort he seeks. Many black Americans regard him as one of their own, a southern liberal who is steeped in their history. They are skeptical of a legal system that has frequently been unjust to them. They stress the theme of redemption in broken lives. And they suspect that Clinton’s predicament is somehow related to his sympathy for them, a sympathy disdained by the white majority.
Says Roger Wilkins, the civil-rights veteran and scholar, “Clinton is a very shrewd character. He knows that his rapport with black people is terrific. He sees how black people react to him — at church and so forth — and so he knows that if he goes to see black people, he’s going to get a warm bath.” Besides which, Clinton has “a habit of using black people as props.”
Back in January, only days after Monica Lewinsky was made known to the world, Clinton phoned Jesse Jackson, someone with whom his relations had been testy. Would the reverend come to the White House to watch the Super Bowl? He would. The White House had another problem then, too: No one there could find Betty Currie, the president’s secretary and a key participant in the Lewinsky affair. Would Jackson help out? Yes again. He managed to reach Currie and counseled her to adopt a “storm-survival strategy.” “Choose prayer over panic,” he urged. Small wonder that Clinton adviser Paul Begala would say later, “Jesse Jackson has been as good a friend as we’ve had in this. Oh, he’s been good.”
Meanwhile, in those critical first days, black members of Congress were mounting a defense of Clinton, lashing out at his accusers and stiffening the resolve of nervous fellow Democrats. John Lewis — reminding the country that he had devoted his life to “the principles of justice” — complained of a “five-year campaign” waged by a Clinton-hating “juggernaut.” He dared the president’s enemies to defy “the Great Teacher” (Jesus) and “cast the first stone.” At Clinton’s State of the Union address, black congressmen took care to occupy the aisle seats, the better to cheer the president, embrace him, and pour encouragement into his ear.
And so it went. In March, Clinton journeyed to Africa, taking with him Jackson and Currie. In mid-August, shortly before Clinton faced the grand jury, Jackson made a return visit to the White House, where he huddled with all three Clintons. A week and a half later — when the public was jeering at the president’s disastrous Map Room speech — Clinton spoke at a black church in Oaks Bluff, Mass., “trying out his lines of contrition,” as Wilkins puts it. “The people here understand and feel your pain,” Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree assured Clinton. “We’re going to the wall with this president,” vowed the writer Henry Louis Gates. “We believe in forgiveness and we believe in redemption,” said Anita Hill. Afterward, Clinton joined in the singing of “We Shall Overcome.”
When independent counsel Kenneth Starr at last submitted his report to Congress, 63 Democrats voted against releasing it before the White House had had a chance to review it. Nearly half of those Democrats were black, acting, Maxine Waters contended, as “fairness cops.” (Six members of the black caucus voted in favor of immediate release.) Lewis argued that black congressmen recognized “more than others how this system can discriminate.” William J. Jefferson admitted that “we start out discrediting the Starr report and looking at it with a jaundiced eye.” Charles Rangel declared that “black communities across the country want us to protect this president.” Rangel and his colleague Elijah Cummings were invited to flank Clinton at the president’s next Saturday radio address.
How united is this front? Polls indicate that black Americans approve of Clinton’s performance in office by about 90 percent. In a New York Times survey taken last week, the number of black respondents saying that Clinton should be impeached was negligible. Says Julianne Malveaux, a columnist and television pundit who describes herself as “left of liberal,” Clinton “has been friendly to our community: This is part of the payback for that.”
Wilkins states that he knows one thing “to a moral certainty”: “Clinton is more at ease physically and psychically with black people than any other president we’ve had.” John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were good — “particularly Johnson” — but “nothing like this.” Wilkins remembers Clinton at Lani Guinier’s wedding, “happy as he could be, rubbing shoulders, politicking: There wasn’t a false note in anything he said or did.” Congressman Donald Payne agrees that Clinton is “a completely different type of politician for us,” consistently alive to black traditions and black concerns.
The perception that Clinton is being persecuted by a wrathful mob is widespread. Black-oriented talk shows are now dominated by the subject. One congressional staffer says that Clinton’s problems stem from the conservative fear that the president is “too friendly to blacks”: “A lot of black people feel that way, from my mother on down.” Maxine Waters proclaims in interview after interview that “this president will not be railroaded, if the Congressional Black Caucus has anything to do with it.” Says Payne, “We’ve seen lynchings — lynchings of all types — and we’re determined to have a semblance of fairness here.”
Wilkins relates the experience of attending a party soon after the Starr report reached Congress. He approached one of the most prominent black leaders in the country and asked him what he thought of it. “It’s just what Hoover did to Martin,” the man said. Come again? Starr, the man insisted, is doing to Clinton exactly what FBI director J. Edgar Hoover did to Martin Luther King in the 1960s. Charlie Rangel had made the same charge as early as February 1, on Jesse Jackson’s television show: “Didn’t they really do the same thing to [King]? Didn’t the FBI try to tape and get people to make accusations against him and destroy him?” Malveaux, too, makes the identical point, unprompted: Hoover, she says, “would attempt to manipulate Dr. King’s life through illegal tapes. So for our community, it’s kind of like, ‘Been there, done that.”
Clinton, observes Wilkins with wonderment and irritation, “plays black people in a very sophisticated and very cynical way. He uses black people to talk to white people.” Wilkins cites several instances from the 1992 campaign, and also from Clinton’s one and a half terms. He recalls particularly Clinton’s speech at the Memphis church where King delivered his final sermon. Clinton “stood up there in the pulpit, working his cadence — really moving it. Then he said what Martin would say if only he could be there. Now, understand: I knew Martin King very well. I worked for him. And it would never, ever occur to me to think that I knew what Martin would say, especially 30 years after his death.” Says Wilkins, “The fact that this personally irresponsible human being has been going around lecturing black people about behavior drives me nuts.”
Clinton wears his esteem among black Americans with obvious pride. It is likely that nothing in his political life is more important to him. He counts on black heroes like John Lewis to validate him as a moral figure, a politician worthy of the liberal pantheon — the Kennedys, Johnson, even King. His support in the Congressional Black Caucus is perhaps the brightest ray for him in an exceptionally dark autumn.
Still, black opinion about Clinton is not unanimous — even in Congress. Few statements on the scandal have been so bracing as that of Cynthia McKinney, representative from Georgia. She said that Clinton’s “reckless behavior” had “brought us to the brink of a constitutional crisis. His lost credibility means he is no help to me raising my son. His leadership is missing in action on Capitol Hill. He has shattered the confidence of too many people in my district. We are all poorer because of the mistakes of a man who has squandered a historic opportunity, disgracing himself in the eyes of the world and his family.” His punishment, McKinney concluded, “will be that he has to face that reality every morning for the rest of his life.”
For Bill Clinton — who may legitimately be said to have replaced Jesse Jackson as “the president of black America” — there could hardly have been a more wounding rebuke.
Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
