Remember the magnum opus that Bill Clinton was going to pen about race relations, the greatest domestic policy question of them all? Even though it isn’t really part of the president’s “day job,” a White House spokesman recently explained, the book nevertheless remains every bit as super important to him as it was when he started “writing” it more than three years ago. He still plans to “finish” it. Sooner or later.
But, let’s face it, probably never. Which is rather odd. Clinton, a man to whom getting and holding public attention has been the paramount concern since before he began wearing long pants, has less than half a year’s claim left on the most attention-grabbing office in the universe. The nation’s color divide is far from healed. Intelligent and sensitive engagement with that problem has always been advertised as Clinton’s signal qualification for leadership. So you would think the president would be desperately eager to take one last, legacy-burnishing stab at the issue of race.
Except it seems he isn’t. Here, as about so many other areas of our public life, this most frenetic of presidents has lately developed an eerie, contented, almost lazy calm. Why is that?
Perhaps it is that he believes there’s no real hurry. Perhaps he believes that his pending retirement might ultimately prove a mere technicality — that for all practical purposes most folks won’t hardly even notice he’s gone.
Thursday morning last week, the president took a breather from the Israeli-Palestinian final-settlement negotiations he is nominally hosting at Camp David to fly up to Baltimore for an appearance at this year’s NAACP national convention. His speech was an echt Clinton moment, all at once unctuous, dishonest, and brutally partisan. And altogether — sickeningly — masterful.
It “happens every day” in this country that someone dies because he is refused admission to the nearest emergency room, Clinton claimed, and the congressional GOP opposes the legislation that would redress this travesty. But hey, he went on, there are “big and honest differences” between the parties, and Republicans “really do believe” what they say — like that hospitals should be allowed to turn away the mortally wounded, presumably. Both sides in such a disagreement can be “honorable and good,” the president advised, always the phony gentleman.
Clinton never once blushed. Nor did he feel the need to offer the NAACP a valedictory statement about race, or anything else. Bill Clinton’s long, enthusiastic speech was about . . . Bill Clinton. He has brought us unparalleled prosperity, he noted. And more such prosperity is what “we” — or “I”; the president’s pronouns melted tellingly into each other throughout his talk — want to secure in the next few years. How is it that “we” can do that? We can elect Al Gore to succeed Bill Clinton. And then, “for the rest of the time the good Lord gives me on this Earth, I’ll be with you. I’ll work with you.”
Al Gore’s first administration would be Bill Clinton’s third. Nothing more, nothing less. So Clinton clearly thinks. And where race is concerned, at least, he’s probably right. No wonder he’s so relaxed.
Gore, too, spoke to the NAACP last week, the day before Clinton did. On the surface, the two men were easily distinguishable. Gore’s speech, as a speech, was horrible. As a speech to a group of black people, it was horribler. The vice president now does a great lot of hollering on the campaign trail, which is apparently intended to suggest that he is a man of intense conviction, and a manly man to boot. Gore seems to holler all the more when he is standing before an audience of minorities, maybe — who knows? — on the assumption that “they” respond best to exaggerated emotionalism. In any case, to the NAACP Gore hollered like a madman, almost start to finish.
But what he said was even worse than how he said it. Unlike the president, the vice president did attempt directly to address what he took to be the central challenges “diversity” still poses to America. Properly understood, he suggested, diversity is about group entitlement and advancement, one group at the expense of another. Gore made this point a dozen different ways. It would be great if the Democratic party retook control of the House of Representatives, he explained . . . because then Charlie Rangel and John Conyers — the vice president mentioned no lighter-skinned congressmen — would become committee chairmen.
The measure of a political party’s commitment to racial justice, Gore went on, is numbers. Numbers of black people appointed to the courts and cabinet. Numbers, even, of airplane flights taken: “I have made more trips to Africa than I’ve made to Asia.” And numbers, above all, written into law. Gore hollered his loudest in Baltimore when he promised to defend to the death the ethnic and gender spoils system that is federal affirmative action.
This is the solution to our racial woes, the vice president announced. He promised to provide it. And yet isn’t this “solution” actually the problem? And hasn’t it remained the problem since before Bill Clinton took office? And hasn’t Clinton done nothing to ameliorate this problem; hasn’t he instead cultivated it, for personal and partisan advantage? And isn’t Al Gore obviously intent to follow his patron’s lead? We are now a nation not of joined-together individual citizens, but of blocs, black and white — blocs that almost always approach each other in the public square, when they approach each other at all, the one with collective complaints and demands, the other with either paternalistic munificence or embarrassment or irritation. There is almost never an intelligent, candid, adult conversation.
And if Gore is elected — if that is, this kind of Clintonism is reelected — there will not soon be such a conversation. For the vice president is of the paternalistic, munificent party. And the paternalistic, munificent party gets the black vote. Automatically. That is enough, so far as Al Gore is concerned.
Before he said his goodbyes on Wednesday, Gore reminded the NAACP that George W. Bush, who had preceded him on the same podium two days earlier, not long ago rebuffed a nephew of the late James Byrd, victim of the notorious Jasper, Texas, truck-dragging murder. The young man had asked Bush to lend his support to a proposed federal hate-crimes bill. And Bush told the man “no,” right to his face. To the vice president, this incident was evidence of an almost satanic racial insensitivity — or so Gore was more than pleased to pretend.
But as it happens, Bush’s other-than-reflexive reaction to the Byrd tragedy spoke volumes about him, and spoke quite well. Not so much because of the narrow legislative question then at issue (though this magazine, too, believes the hate-crimes bill is ill-advised and likely counterproductive). Rather, Bush’s “no” response to James Byrd’s nephew was impressive simply because he was able to say the word at all in such a fraught situation — firmly, finally, coolly, and with neither defensiveness nor rancor. As if it were the most natural thing in the world for a white man to disagree (or agree) with a black man about politics. As if, in other words, there actually might not be different “black” and “white” answers to our national race conundrum. As if our habit of expecting such answers were half the problem to begin with.
How refreshing. Governor Bush’s speech to the NAACP last Monday was very much in this spirit. He was not patronizing in the slightest. He was confident, friendly, “proud to be here.” Bush did not paper over differences he and his party have had — and continue to have — with the NAACP as an organization. Indeed, Bush seemed to go out of his way to advocate education and federal housing-reform proposals that both include vouchers. And still, the governor felt able explicitly to ask for support from some in his audience. And bold enough to expect it.
It was a remarkable performance, like none we can remember from a presidential candidate in either party. We would like to hear more from Bush about race and justice and law, especially about what future he intends for affirmative action. But we like what we have heard already, for the most part. And we have no question but that it is vastly preferable to Al Gore’s third Clinton administration.
David Tell, for the Editors
