What the Clintons Mean to Me

Maybe this is a generational thing, but this is what the Clintons will always mean to me: Sister Souljah, Ricky Ray Rector, welfare reform, and the crime bill. And beyond—really, behind—all that, the desperate affirmation to win over white voters by declaring: We are not the Party of Jesse Jackson, We are not the Rainbow Coalition.

People don’t seem to remember just how much the Clintons’ national ascendancy was premised upon the repudiation of black voters and black interests—a move that was both inspired and applauded by a small but influential group of Beltway journalists and party strategists, who believed this was the only path to taking back the White House from the Republicans—but for me, it’s vivid as yesterday. Maybe it’s because it happened at a formative period of my life, during my first years in graduate school. My roommate and closest friend throughout those years was Paul Frymer, who’s now a professor of politics at Princeton University. Paul’s dissertation—which he began to write in the apartment we shared on Canner Street in New Haven, and which formed the basis for the now classic Uneasy Alliances—was born in part out of the tremendous frustration and anger many of us felt about the wrenching transformation the Clintons imposed upon the Democratic Party.

I was recently re-reading some of Paul’s book, and it brought that whole sordid moment back in painful detail. Like the fact, according to an article by Andrew Hacker, which Paul cites, that “for the first time in almost half a century, the party’s [1992] platform made no mention of redressing racial injustice.” (I re-read the platform: it does mention affirmative action and civil rights in passing, but it’s cursory.) Or the fact that in their 1992 book, Putting People First, Bill Clinton and Al Gore only mentioned race once. And that was to oppose the idea of racial quotas. Or the fact that their chapter on civil rights was mostly about people with disabilities.

What’s more, white people got the message: according to polls, white voters were more familiar with Clinton’s attack on Sister Souljah than they were with his economic plan. So did black people: though they voted for Clinton, their share of the total voter turnout fell by 20% from 1988, when they cast their ballots for Michael Dukakis (and accounted for 20% of the vote for him and 10% of total turnout), and 1992, when they cast their ballots for Clinton (and accounted for 15% of the vote for him and 8% of total turnout).

Stanley Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster, celebrated all these changes in an influential book, arguing that this recalibrated attention to black voters “allowed for a Democratic Party that could once again represent people in the broadest sense.” It doesn’t take a close reader to know what that “people in the broadest sense” looked like.

This is what the Clintons were to millions of voters. This is what they will always be to me.

Update (10 pm)

Tim Barker just reminded me on Twitter, that the Jesse Jackson bogeyman was part of the Clintons’ playbook as late as 2008. A fact I should have remembered, since I just mentioned it the other day!