Baffled by black America's love affair with Bill Clinton

By PHILIP GAILEY

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 25, 2001

African-American voters are the Democratic Party's most loyal constituency -- and for good reason. Black Americans have made their greatest gains under Democratic presidents, from Harry Truman, who integrated the U.S. military, to Lyndon B. Johnson, who, with the support of key Republican congressional leaders, enacted landmark civil rights legislation that outlawed the Jim Crow system of segregation in the South. Besides, how often have Republicans given them a better alternative?

What I do have trouble understanding, however, is black America's love affair with Bill Clinton. They speak of him as being their first black president, a soul brother who can do no wrong. His popularity among black voters is as overwhelming as it is mystifying to me. After he left office in a cloud of scandal, Clinton first tried to stick taxpayers with the cost of leasing expensive office space in a Manhattan high-rise. Then to quiet that controversy, he fell back to a penthouse in an office building in the middle of Harlem, where the news was wildly cheered by local residents. I know, it's not every day a former president opens an office in Harlem.

Clinton used the bully pulpit of his presidency to speak eloquently on civil rights. He mended -- instead of ending -- federal affirmative action programs. His Cabinet was a portrait of diversity (but George W. Bush's is at least as diverse). Most Americans, including minorities, shared in the economic good times of the Clinton years. But what about the flip side of his record? It was Bill Clinton -- not Ronald Reagan -- who yanked the welfare safety net out from under poor Americans, a disproportionate number of whom are black. And, as a report by the Justice Policy Institute pointed out this month, more inmates were added to the jail and prison populations under Clinton than any other president in American history. Again, a disproportionate number of them are African-Americans.

"President Clinton stole the show from the tough-on-crime Republicans," Vincent Schiraldi, the JPI president, said in releasing the report, and African-Americans paid a high price for his political posturing on the crime issue.

After filling our prisons with young black men convicted on drug charges -- many of them addicts and small-time dealers -- Clinton spent his final days and hours in office handing out pardons and commutations to an assortment of convicted big-time swindlers and crooks, including one major cocaine trafficker, who could afford to enlist Clinton's campaign donors, friends and relatives to plead their case directly to the man in the Oval Office. Shouldn't someone -- perhaps Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton -- be asking the obvious question?

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine near the end of his term, Clinton denounced the disparate sentences for crack and powder cocaine as racially discriminatory and called for relaxing some of the harsh anti-crime measures he signed into law. Is it not a fair question for black Americans to ask why Clinton didn't act on his views during the eight years he served as president? So far, there hasn't been a peep out of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders. They are too busy accusing the Bush brothers of stealing the last presidential election from Al Gore.

As governor of Florida, Jeb Bush has done nothing nearly as detrimental to the welfare of African-Americans, but, according to a recent statewide poll of black voters conducted by this newspaper, an overwhelming majority is firmly convinced that he was part of a conspiracy to disenfranchise black voters last November and steal the election from Gore. Bush's problems with Florida's black voters started before the presidential election when he abruptly replaced affirmative action in state contracting and university admissions with his One Florida plan, which he predicts will yield even greater diversity in these areas. The election dispute only intensified the hard feelings.

There is probably not much Jeb Bush can do to repair his relationship with black voters. Even if he were to fully embrace the agenda of the Legislature's black caucus, impose racial quotas in state contracting and college admissions, and announce that Al Gore was the rightful winner of the Florida presidential vote, it wouldn't do much good. Blacks have marked both Bushes -- the governor and the president -- as enemies of their people. It seems to have little to do with a broad assessment of the governor's record, which is mixed at best on issues that should concern all Floridians. Their dislike of the Bushes seems visceral, almost personal. Bush says he understands their anger and bitterness but hopes they will ultimately judge him on his record, especially on diversity.

I can understand why black voters don't trust a Republican governor who ended affirmative action or a president who would appoint John Ashcroft as attorney general. But what I can't understand is why they adore Bill Clinton -- no matter how sleazy and scandalous his conduct. It can't be his record. As president, he was better at talking the talk than walking the walk. It must be his Republican enemies.

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