Wrong for All the Right Reasons

How White Liberals Have Been Undone by Race

Gordon Macinnes

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780814796382
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

There was a time, in this century, when liberals championed the working class, when Democrats were indisputably the party of those who worked rather than invested for a living. Today, however, most Americans have come to see liberals as drifting and aimless, somehow lacking in backbone and moral fiber, beholden to radical ideologies that have little to do with the average American's life. Few incidents cast this phenomenon into greater relief than George Bush's successful tarring of Michael Dukakis as a liberal in 1988--and, tellingly, Dukakis's subsequent flight from the liberal tradition.

How has it come to this? Why have liberals allowed themselves to be so portrayed? In this book, Gordon MacInnes--state senator, fiscal conservative, frustrated Democrat, and a man who believes deeply in America's civic culture--reveals how progressive forces have retreated from the battle of ideas, at great cost. Squarely at the nexus of race, poverty, and politics, Wrong for All the Right Reasons charts the sources of liberal decline and the high costs of conservative rule.

Tracing the origins of the liberal retreat to the fall-out over Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family in the 1960s, MacInnes claims that white liberals have somewhere along the way stopped taking black people seriously enough to argue with them. Continuously put on the desfensive, liberals have been unable to forge an aggressive, proactive agenda of that addresses the needs of working-class and poor Americans. This has led to a breakdown of honest dialogue which to this day continues to plague liberal Democrats, as evidenced by Bill Bradley's withdrawal from active party politics last fall.

Finding room for optimism in the groundswell of grass-roots progressivism, Wrong for All the Right Reasons is a timely, necessary call to arms for liberal, progressive Democrats, outlining ways in which they can reverse their party's dangerous decline.

1»

THE POLITICS OF RACE: CONSERVATIVE INDIFFERENCE MEETS LIBERAL TIMIDITY

CLINTON RECLAIMS THE CENTER

In June 1992, Bill Clinton’s presidential candidacy was in deep trouble. True, he had just scored big primary victories in New Jersey and California on June 2. The nomination was beginning to look more like a sentence than a prize, however. The mid-June Gallup presidential preference poll showed Clinton a distant third, with only 24 percent support against 32 percent for Republican President George Bush, and 34 percent for independent candidate Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire. Surveys suggested that voters neither trusted Bill Clinton nor showed much interest in his campaign. Clinton was better known as a draft-dodger and womanizer than for any public accomplishment or serious proposals about America’s future. Some Democrats whispered that there was still time for the party to come up with a stronger candidate.

That was the situation on Saturday, June 13, when Clinton appeared before the Rainbow Coalition meeting in Washington for what looked to be a routine effort to generate some enthusiasm in the party’s left wing. The coalition had always belonged to the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson: he convened it, chaired it, and set its agenda. Jackson described the June meeting as an “emergency” gathering “between [riots in] Los Angeles and the [Democratic convention in] New York.” The agenda included a gathering of black ministers to talk about crime, a breakfast with labor leaders, a symposium on Jackson’s proposal to invest $500 billion in infrastructure projects, and a panel of rap and hip-hop artists.

Jackson’s political agenda was clear: to move Clinton leftward, closer to the Democratic party’s base among unions, urbanites, and minorities. Although Perot was likely to split the anti-Bush vote, Jackson argued that the Democrats’ only chance was to mobilize the liberal-left side of the party: “Those who cannot touch the rim when it’s 51 inches high, can slam dunk when its lowered to 34 inches,” was Jackson’s basketball analogy for the 1992 political math.¹

One of the rap artists featured at Jackson’s “youth summit” on June 12 was Sister Souljah, a self-described “rapactivist.” The rapper, whose real name was Lisa Williamson, had previously appeared as a warm-up act for Public Enemy, one of the better-known rap groups, and had issued her debut album just six months earlier. After the Los Angeles riots, she had gained some prominence as a spokesperson for young black Americans, an interpreter of their “rage and frustration.” Bill Clinton’s candidacy was about to turn a corner on Sister Souljah’s words.

Some advisers pressed Clinton to use the Rainbow speech to solidify his base of support, to rally the Democratic party’s left flank and Jackson himself to Clinton’s candidacy, and to repair the earlier damage in their relations.² Indeed, that is how Clinton started his remarks. He praised the coalition and Jackson for honoring blacks and whites who had reached across racial lines at personal risk before and during the riots in Los Angeles. He outlined his proposals to invest in infrastructure improvements, a subject dear to Jackson. It was, in short, a routine campaign speech—until he turned to the remarks of Sister Souljah. Jackson had singled her out for prideful attention, but Bill Clinton said:

You had a rap singer here last night named Sister Souljah…. Her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor today and tonight. Just listen to this, what she said. She told The Washington Post about a month ago, and I quote, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? … So if you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?”… Last year she said, “If there are any good white people, I haven’t met them. Where are they?” Right here in this room. That’s where they are…. If you took the words black and white and reversed them, you might think that David Duke was giving that speech.³

Clinton had not only criticized Sister Souljah, he had criticized Jesse Jackson’s judgment in front of Jackson’s most loyal supporters. Jackson, usually confident and aggressive, was taken aback. After the speech, he said: “I don’t know what [Clinton’s] intention was, I was totally surprised.” Two hours later he called a press conference to say that Clinton had used “very bad judgment.” About Sister Souljah, Jackson opined: “She represents the feelings and hopes of a whole generation of people. She should receive an apology.”⁴

Clinton’s political prospects were significantly altered by these brief words about an obscure rapper. Most voters never heard about the confrontation at the Rainbow Coalition, but the fallout with Jackson opened the way for Clinton to appeal to white working- and middle-class voters. Many of these voters had come to equate Jackson with the Democratic party’s policies that offended their work ethic and with crime policies that seemed to favor the criminal over the victim. To be sure, economic stagnation and George Bush’s miscalculations were influencing voters, but Clinton resuscitated his campaign with the Rainbow confrontation. By early July Clinton led Bush in the two-way polls by a few points, and in the week after the mid-July national Democratic convention, his lead grew from nineteen to twenty-seven points. Perot announced his (temporary) withdrawal from the race during the Democratic convention citing the “revitalization” of the party.⁵

It is a measure of how far liberal Democrats had fallen in their standards of intellectual integrity and common sense that a candidate’s criticism of someone for advocating racial violence would seem noteworthy. Typically, white liberals had taken to standing in quiet acquiescence in the presence of statements by black Americans, however outrageous they might be. And when these liberals were criticized by a black American, their response was to retreat, explain, apologize, or overreact. This pattern was so well established by 1992—particularly after the presidential candidacies of Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis—that Clinton’s criticism stunned Jackson, the Rainbow Coalition audience, and the press.⁶

The confrontation over Sister Souljah was the result of increasing political friction between Clinton and Jackson. When Clinton had chaired the Democratic Leadership Council (the group he helped establish to push the party back to the political center), he had excluded Jackson from a speaking role at the council’s 1991 conference in Cleveland, and he had fought successfully for a resolution opposing racial “discrimination of any kind—including quotas.” Jackson had accused Clinton of practicing “exclusion,” appealing to “white suburbanites,” and using “ugly, suggestive, and race-based” statements on equal opportunity.⁷ When Jackson told the New York Daily News in April 1992 that he thought he should be the vice presidential nominee and that he might not support the Democratic ticket if he were not given serious consideration, Clinton had expressed “surprise” that Jackson had not talked to him about his interest. He said it was premature to even talk about the number two spot before the nomination was won (Jackson backed off, claiming “misunderstanding”).

After the Sister Souljah speech, Jackson led the counterattack (presumably just as Clinton hoped he would).⁸ Jackson said Clinton’s words were part of “a consistent attempt to provoke me” and that Clinton “was invited as a guest and he used the platform … to embarrass us.”⁹ In an interview on June 18 with the chief political correspondent of the New York Times, the surest route to national coverage, Jackson accused Clinton of staging “a very well-planned sneak attack without the courage to confront but with the calculation to embarrass” him. Clinton had “exposed a character flaw” with his criticism of Souljah “purely to appeal to conservative whites by … isolating Jackson.” Jackson went on to praise Ross Perot, implying that his defection to the Perot camp would take away millions of votes that Clinton had taken for granted.¹⁰

For speaking out against violence, Clinton was attacked by a chorus of professional blacks, the white Left, and white liberals. Jackson received immediate support from black journalists and scholars. His chief academic advisor, Ronald Walters of Howard University, weighed in:

I would be the first to condemn anyone who said and meant that “blacks should kill whites,” but I believe that was beside the point of Bill Clinton’s attack. The point was that by attacking Sister Souljah, Bill Clinton’s strategists intended to accomplish the objective of having him appear strong and independent by standing up to a “special interest” of the party, putting blacks “in their place” and in the process, appealing to the white middle class…. Bill Clinton’s foray into the cultural politics of the black community was as offensive as it was crassly opportunistic, making his calls for racial harmony ring hollow.¹¹

Walters’s criticism was classic. First, he said the content of Souljah’s remarks was unimportant, but if it were important, he claimed he would be even stronger than Clinton in his criticism. Second, what counted was Clinton’s intent, which, according to Walters, was to appeal to a group that would cast most of the votes in the November election. Third, Walters asserted that Clinton had no right (presumably because he was white) to comment on something that Walters considered the exclusive domain of the black community.

Other prominent blacks were quick to jump in. Roger Wilkins, professor and columnist, said of Clinton’s criticism, “it was a message to white people that Bill Clinton is a big, strong man who can protect them and is strong enough … to stand up for them to black people.”¹² Derrick Jackson, a columnist for the Boston Globe, wrote:

For white Democrats, Clinton hands out free Bubbagum. Like all nominees before him, he will go to church and expect the African-American vote to go to him in November, because he is the lesser of two evils…. It may seem like political suicide, but there is a feeling, far from the unity of convention halls, that not voting the top of the ticket is preferable to bootlicking a boot that has kicked you.¹³

The Boston Globe, a good place to find contemporary examples of classic liberalism as practiced in the 1970s, also ran an editorial that called Clinton’s criticism of Sister Souljah “a cheap shot.” “For a candidate desperately seeking to come from behind in the polls,” opined the Globe, “the Rainbow meeting, and Souljah’s participation, provided a perfect opportunity—not for courting members of the party’s core constituency, but for kicking them to the curb.”¹⁴ Anna Quindlen of the New York Times added:

Bill Clinton generated considerable heat, but no light, when he … decried [Souljah’s] anti-white comments … sounding the white-guy clarion call, that hatred is as bad when it goes black to white as when it goes white to black. All things being equal this is true. Only all things are not equal…. Mr. Clinton got to shout across from the white side of the racial divide that black folks can be racist.¹⁵

Left-liberal journalists Alexander Cockburn and Andrew Kopkind concluded from Clinton’s Souljah criticism, “if racism is not in Clinton’s heart, as he blandly insists, it is evident in his behavior, which is after all what counts.” They went on to surmise that the “Clinton culture” is “suffused with a gestural sentimentality about racial harmony, but its commitment is to white power and privilege.”¹⁶ Cockburn and Kopkind hoped to weaken Clinton sufficiently to induce Jesse Jackson to initiate a fourth-party candidacy.

SILENCE MATTERS

In the past, an attack of this seriousness instigated by Jackson against the Democratic nominee would have produced immediate signs of surrender: Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale had each responded to Jackson with alacrity, and reassurances of “respect.” Each piously said Jackson would be considered a serious candidate for the ticket (when both men knew that such a choice would be disastrous). In each case, after entreaties from the designated Jackson intermediary—Bob Beckel in Mondale’s campaign, Paul Brountas in Dukakis’s—a well-publicized peace meeting was organized at which the Democratic nominee gave way on the nomination rules, a prime-time speech slot, and a symbolic platform issue or two. Jackson invariably wound up looking stronger than the candidates who had beaten him in primary after primary.

Reversing the trend of liberal timidity, however, Clinton held firm against Jackson’s onslaught. Perhaps some of this confidence came from the fact that Clinton had already shown himself to be very effective at attracting the support of black politicians. Even when Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder was still a presidential candidate and had some presumptive hold on politicians of color, Clinton received substantial support from blacks, particularly from black southerners like Representatives Mike Espy (later named secretary of agriculture) and John Lewis. At no time did Clinton act on the view common to liberal candidates that the only road to the hearts and votes of black America was through Jesse Jackson.

Not all black politicians and commentators were put off by Clinton’s statement. Clarence Page, a respected Chicago columnist, wrote:

We [black Americans] are notsaposta hang our dirty laundry in public, we are told, because it might weaken the movement’s ability to resist attacks by political enemies. But what actually happens is almost the opposite. We end up making the enemy look better. Bill Clinton has courageously admonished whites in the blue-collar North and the deep South to reach out to blacks. Now he’s gambling that we African-Americans, after centuries of abuse, will embrace graciously a similar appeal for harmony with whites. I know I’m notsaposta think he’s right. But I hope he is.¹⁷

Carl Rowan, the Washington Post columnist, exclaimed:

Underdog Democrat Bill Clinton moved a badly needed step toward the presidency last Saturday by angering Jesse Jackson…. Jackson acted as though he thought Clinton was on his turf, and had no right to say anything about Sister Souljah or anyone or anything else that he thought Jackson would object to. Sycophants are telling Jackson, “Clinton insulted you; don’t give him your blessing!” Jackson must realize that his “blessing” becomes a curse if it requires Clinton to endorse even by silence an outrageous advocacy of murder.¹⁸

Clinton did not back down in the face of the counterattack by Jackson and his chorus. Criticized for his “rudeness” and his failure to warn Jackson of his remarks, Clinton said: “[I didn’t] say anything that I hadn’t been saying since I first started running…. I called for an end to division.”¹⁹ Pressed to retract his criticisms, Clinton responded, “I grew up in a segregated society, and I have devoted my public life to trying to overcome feelings of prejudice. That is what I have worked for.”²⁰

Clinton did something no Democratic nominee had done for twenty-five years: he demonstrated enough public respect for a black leader’s ideas to argue with him in public. Bill Clinton ended the silence in the presence of alien ideas, and this simple, otherwise unremarkable action was essential to his election.

It is diff...