If you convince them I don’t have any conviction, that’s fine, but it’s a damn lie. It’s a lie.
—President Bill Clinton to Rolling Stone’s William Greider, November 1993
Losing my father, I lost my liberal optimism for a while. I wound up internalizing Reaganism, at least a little, asking, What if we were wrong? What if our side helped trigger the Reagan backlash—not just the left’s violent dead-enders, but also good liberals, with our zeal for government programs and our inattention to their unintended consequences? If poverty programs hadn’t made poverty worse, in many communities, especially isolated urban neighborhoods, they hadn’t made things all that much better. In fact, parts of inner-city America looked worse than in the 1960s, a result not of poverty programs but of the profound changes transforming the economy and politics that the left hardly talked about.
Unionized jobs for people with a high school diploma or less were disappearing. Wages had flattened for all but the highest earners. Families made do by sending a second earner into the workforce, but they were running out of folks to send to work. Now they had begun the process of borrowing the money they would have been earning, had wages continued to rise the way they did from 1947 to 1972. That rising household debt, encouraged by the way government kept interest rates low and bank regulations flimsy, would culminate in the financial sector meltdown of 2008. Yet very few of us were paying attention back then.
Two things saved me from political nihilism: a new generation of civil rights activists working pragmatically but passionately on urban poverty and, later, the presidency of Bill Clinton. A scrappy kid from Hope, Arkansas, who had never known his father, Clinton was a kind of working-class hero. Although he, too, would cozy up to Wall Street and court business, Clinton tilted the balance of power at least a little bit back toward the besieged middle and working classes. He determined to use government to make people’s lives better—if he could do it in stealthy ways, people wouldn’t recognize it as a Big Government move, so he could get away with it. Yet even the pragmatic centrist met a new kind of radical Republican opposition determined to protect what they’d accomplished on behalf of plutocracy in the seventies and the eighties.
• • •
If Reagan’s “We fought a war on poverty and poverty won” formulation was the single most influential Republican lie of the 1980s, the work of scholar William Julius Wilson provided the most effective and influential pushback. The University of Chicago labor-market expert catalyzed a new wave of activism with a series of books showing how the decline of work in black communities—particularly, decent-paying jobs for those with only a high school education—was the real reason poverty was winning again.
Wilson’s first book, The Declining Significance of Race, made the provocative case that the troubles of the black urban poor deepened after integration opened new doors for the black middle class. He called Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s work on the Negro family “important and prophetic”; he even used the term pathology that got Moynihan in so much trouble. Trying to bring a class focus back to discussions about race and poverty, he labeled the black urban poor an “underclass.” Those rhetorical decisions would get Wilson thrown in with the “blaming the victim” crowd for a while.
Some leading black academics attacked the book, partly because Wilson seemed to suggest that those achievers had won their battle against racism—of course, they hadn’t—without helping the black poor. Part of Wilson’s argument was that black middle-class success—his own success; Wilson’s family had relied on welfare—unintentionally hurt the poor, because when middle-class African Americans left the inner city, they took a lot of social, political, and economic capital with them. He wasn’t attacking those professionals for moving up; that was the American way. He was calling attention to the world they left behind, which was many times more isolated and disabled by the effects of poverty than when Moynihan sounded the alarm in 1965. The Association of Black Sociologists tried to block Wilson from receiving the American Sociological Association’s top honor because of the book’s “misrepresentation of the black experience.”
Wilson put his analysis more carefully in his 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged, and backed it up with meticulous research on the disappearance of work in the inner city; it was transformational. The scholar also came out of the closet as a social Democrat, calling for new investment in job training and public works programs, which he hadn’t been willing to do when The Declining Significance of Race came out. Blurbs on the back of The Truly Disadvantaged included those of socialist Michael Harrington, as well as Moynihan, two influential Irish Americans whose call for jobs programs for the urban poor had been ignored by Lyndon Johnson and Sargent Shriver more than twenty years earlier.
The Truly Disadvantaged used data to move the debate back to larger structural changes in the economy, particularly the loss of manufacturing jobs for workers who didn’t go to college, a trend that was also hurting the white working class. He exposed the way a decline in black male employment tracked with rising rates of single parenthood, teen pregnancy, youth unemployment, and violent crime, with a particular focus on his city of Chicago, which had coincidentally just become Barack Obama’s hometown. He didn’t win everyone over with his new work; Obama’s own pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, would call Wilson another of those “miseducated black brothers” who blamed the victim and let whites off the hook for their racism.
Despite the carping of critics such as Wright, Wilson’s work inspired a new generation of African American activists and advocates, from Savannah, Georgia, to Oakland, California, to tackle the cluster of problems that contributed to persistent poverty—single parenthood, high dropout rates, chronic health troubles, and problems that started even earlier, such as babies born at low birth weight. They traced it not to culture or character, but to an economy that had left people behind. I joined a visionary group in Oakland, the Urban Strategies Council, which introduced the city to Wilson’s analysis with data showing that the disappearance of manufacturing jobs and the skyrocketing rates of poverty and single-headed households tracked closely in Oakland, too.
There was a strong personal appeal to Wilson’s work for this new generation of community builders, and for me, too. Many black middle-class reformers welcomed his message as a catalyst to get reinvolved in the neighborhoods that success had allowed them to leave behind. An analysis developed around Wilson’s work, that along with jobs and investment, neighborhoods of chronic poverty lacked “social capital.” I knew that a web of churches, community groups, small businesses, and unions had helped my family climb from poverty to the working middle class in their little Irish village of Highbridge in the Bronx; a comparable network of teachers, entrepreneurs, artists, and unions helped produce a growing black middle class within segregated communities. But when successful white and black families left those neighborhoods, they took many of those advantages with them. This was my father’s old message, in a way. The work put black urban poverty on a continuum of economic disadvantage that connected it to white urban poverty, which we’d made great strides in reducing.
So I loved working with this new band of community builders, on the issue of African American poverty, the issue I’d always cared most about. I had an unusual gig “documenting” this work for foundations, scholars, and other activists. I got to interview both new and old local civil rights leaders—the heroes who’d kept working in poor black communities, even after the nation’s attention wandered away, as well as people who’d left and come back. I met teachers, youth workers, nurses, shop owners, academics, and activists whose faith hadn’t wavered despite years of social neglect and local despair. I made a close group of friends, too, most of them black.
In those years after my father died, I figured out what had always resonated with me about African American culture. Most black people seemed to know a truth that I’d had to learn on my own after losing my parents: life is heartbreakingly unfair—and it’s not our fault. A long history of suffering and oppression helped African Americans develop a cosmology that makes sense of injustice and misfortune and offers the strength to persevere. White people in trouble can find themselves alone, stuck with an individualist American culture in which bad fortune may seem not only deserved but also contagious. Every black person knows that life is deeply unjust, while a remarkable number of white people seemed to me to skate through huge portions of their lives unscathed, unmarked, unaware of the stacked hand they’ve been dealt.
I’d lost my mother in my teens, my father as I got married, and now I had a baby girl who would never know her amazing grandparents. I’d developed a dangerous self-pity streak; I needed a kick out of the world I’d locked myself into, where everything was about me. The Prayer of St. Francis had hung on the wall of my home while I was growing up, and both of my parents emphasized the words “it is in giving that we receive.” I’d been taught that God made us a perfect world, with one sad flaw: it’s unfair and indifferent to suffering. So justice, along with art, is our job; it’s what we’re here for. I felt as if I were doing the work I was born to do.
• • •
The national picture looked brighter, too. Along came Bill Clinton. I didn’t much like the political movement he came from, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), founded in the wake of the Mondale debacle as part of the Democratic effort to look more Republican or, at least, less like themselves. DLC leaders believed that being “the party of government” had hurt the Democrats, and it was time to acknowledge that government programs weren’t always the answer and that government made mistakes. No one could argue with that.
Yet the DLC made a couple of other sly maneuvers. Trying to get beyond the party infighting of the previous two decades, they simply declared themselves the winners. The group took a tough line on problems of crime, welfare dependency, and single motherhood, largely to lure back working- and middle-class Reagan Democrats. But they paid little or no attention to the chronic unemployment or the intergenerational poverty that created those “pathologies.” They wanted white working-class voters to know that they were no longer, as pollster Stanley Greenberg had put it, the “black” party. Yet in trying to address the legitimate concerns of those voters—that the economy was getting worse, and government was not only not helping, but might be contributing to the decline—they essentially conceded the economic fairness argument to the Republican Party. The DLC didn’t respond to white working- and middle-class voters’ well-founded fears that they were losing their hold on security by proposing a new government role in growing the economy; they just reassured them that unworthy people wouldn’t keep getting help, while co-opting the GOP’s procorporate agenda.
Those post-Reagan reformers were also trying to make the party competitive in the South again. Most early leaders—from Louisiana’s John Breaux to Tennessee’s Al Gore to Arkansas governor Bill Clinton—were Southerners. That strategy didn’t work, however; Democrats continued to lose ground in the South. Where the DLC succeeded was in making Democrats a probusiness party. The group played a huge role in helping Democrats catch up with Republicans in corporate fund-raising. The DLC offered “retreats” with its powerful elected officials, where corporate leaders could mingle with the party’s rising stars. They pushed tax cuts and deficit reduction and framed “entitlements,” those great Democratic legacy programs such as Social Security and Medicare, as a looming problem.
The DLC got one thing right: its leaders wanted to contest Republicans to be the party that made the economy run better. In the words of DLC founder Al From, “Its centerpiece was economic growth, not redistribution.” The problem was, they too often pushed the same old Republican solutions. And the growing power of the DLC created a “fundamental, revealing asymmetry between the parties,” as political science professors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson observed. Democrats suddenly had a probusiness force pulling the party right. It wasn’t as though they were proposing innovative economic ideas and collecting corporate dollars on the basis of their bold new approach. They were borrowing ideas from corporate America and its right-wing think tanks and tailoring their platform to attract corporate dollars, in order to take them away from Republicans. The GOP had no comparable ideologically moderating force; in fact, it was skidding even farther right. So the center of American economic debate lurched to the right, where it remains today.
The DLC’s preaching about “sacrifice” and “responsibility” and its castor-oil approach to politics and citizenship would never have put together a winning national coalition without Bill Clinton. His working-class Arkansas background, his roots in the civil rights and antiwar movements, his formative experiences in George McGovern’s sad, brave campaign: all of those things let Clinton appeal to African Americans and to the Democratic left, while reassuring the DLC wing that he could rein in the party’s too-liberal base and restrain its zeal for government activism. Speechwriter Michael Waldman called him “a one-man coalition.”
We laugh at Clinton’s “I feel your pain” politics, but an enormous part of his draw was that he believably empathized with both African Americans and the white working class, the estranged partners in that once-great New Deal political marriage. He had cultural affinity with both. He tried to offer the “cultural recognition” that Nixon pioneered but to both groups, not merely to the white working class, as well as race-neutral programs for economic opportunity that might arguably help black people more because they had the highest poverty rates.
The April 1992 Los Angeles riots offered Clinton a platform on which to demonstrate his DLC-with-a-heart approach. It didn’t go entirely smoothly. Like so many other urban uprisings before it, the LA violence was triggered by police brutality—in that case, the acquittal of four white cops whose savage beating of a black man named Rodney King was caught on videotape. Also, like so many riots before it, the LA conflict engulfed mainly black neighborhoods—but it also featured scenes of violence by African Americans against whites, Latinos, and Asians. At the end of the four days, fifty-three people were dead, thousands more wounded.
Clinton headed to Los Angeles to tour the scenes of destruction with Representative Maxine Waters, who represented the area in Congress. Whereas President Bush denounced the “anarchy” as “purely criminal” and never bothered to visit, Clinton blamed the Reagan-Bush administrations for “more than a decade of urban decay,” intensified by federal spending cuts. After Bush press secretary Marlin Fitzwater blamed the unrest on “the Great Society,” Clinton shot back, “Republicans have had the White House for twenty of the last twenty-four years, and they have to go all the way back to the sixties to find somebody to blame. I want to do something about the problems.” No white Democrat had talked back to the race-baiting right that way in a long time.
Yet the LA riots also provided the backdrop to one of the most controversial racial moves of Clinton’s campaign, one that seemed straight out of the DLC playbook, when he attacked rapper Sister Souljah for the disturbing antiwhite remarks she made to the Washington Post. She called the LA violence a “war,” a “rebellion,” and “revenge.” And when the Post reporter asked her about the black-on-white violence, she famously answered, “If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Could black people ever be condemned for violence in the name of “revenge”? the reporter asked. She said no. “I don’t think that anything we can do to white people could ever even equal up to what they’ve done to us. I really don’t.”
Her interviewer, Post writer David Mills, was disturbed by Souljah’s comments. Her empathy for the rioters, he wrote, reached a “chilling extreme.” I am not sure many people noted at the time that Mills himself was black. The hugely gifted Mills later became a writer for David Simon’s black urban chronicles, including Homicide, The Corner, The Wire, and Treme. He won two Emmys before he died of an aneurism at forty-eight in 2010.
A month after Sister Souljah horrified David Mills, she and Bill Clinton addressed Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, a day apart. Clinton used the opportunity to rebuke the rapper in what became known as his famous Sister Souljah moment. “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed them,” he said about her comments to Mills, “you might think David Duke was giving that speech.” Souljah’s remarks, he told the Rainbow Coalition, “are filled with a hatred you do not honor.”
It’s hard to find anything wrong with what Clinton said, but his remarks touched off the worst racial conflict of the campaign. The New York Times liberal columnist Anthony Lewis laid bare the racial divide, even among liberals, over Clinton’s statement. Lewis applauded it; rhetoric such as Souljah’s should be attacked by all of us, he believed. But then Lewis talked to writer and civil rights activist Roger Wilkins, who was furious—at the slight to Jesse Jackson, not to Sister Souljah. In fact, Wilkins told Lewis, Jackson had himself challenged Souljah’s remarks when she spoke to the Rainbow Coalition a night earlier. “In that context Clinton’s speech was arrogant, and it was cheap,” Wilkins charged. “He came there to show suburban whites that he can stand up to blacks. It was contrived.” Harlem representative Charlie Rangel compared it to the GOP’s using Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis.
A seething Jesse Jackson said Clinton’s remarks “again exposed a character flaw.” Jackson insisted that the Arkansas governor decided to “stage a very well-planned sneak attack, without the courage to confront but with a calculation to embarrass” him—and threatened to support H. Ross Perot. Howard University political analyst Ron Walters urged blacks to vote in November but to boycott the top of the ticket, over Clinton’s courting of white voters at the expense of blacks.
To this day, it’s not clear whether white working-class voters even noticed Clinton’s rebuke of Sister Souljah or Jesse Jackson. His campaign’s famous motto “It’s the economy, stupid” had much more demonstrable sway. It signaled his understanding that Democrats got in trouble when they ceded economic competence to the Republicans and got mired instead in battles over race and culture. And while yes, Clinton spoke that DLC language of “responsibility,” he won the election by promising to build “a bridge to the twenty-first century” with government investments in education, job training, child care, and, most famously and futilely, health care.
In 1992, Clinton didn’t quite succeed in luring the white working class back to Democrats, even though he’d hired Stan Greenberg; he lost Macomb County, along with that bloc nationally. Yet he did better with that group than Mondale or Dukakis had (and by 1996, he won Macomb County). Clinton seemed to have put most of the old New Deal coalition back together. The perception that he had courted white voters at the expense of blacks may have hurt him with black voters, however; he got a solid 83 percent of the black vote in 1992, but that was a drop from the 90 percent-plus support won by Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis. That old tension would come back to haunt Clinton’s wife in 2008.
• • •
Personally, I loved Bill Clinton, except when I didn’t. I thought a lot of his trouble with the political and media establishment had to do with his working-class “Bubba” background—but he gave his enemies a lot to work with, thanks to a lack of self-discipline, or maybe it was flat-out self-destruction. I’ve seen that a lot in working-class people who rise.
People can argue that Clinton sold the party’s soul to corporate America and Wall Street; I’ve thought that way myself. He gave an enormous gift to the banking industry with the repeal of Depression-era Glass-Steagall regulations, which separated investment from commercial banking and kept in check the kind of risk-taking and corruption that brought down the economy in 2008. It may well have been the worst domestic move of his presidency; Clinton says he regrets it himself. The party became more dependent on Wall Street campaign cash on his watch. His early missteps on health-care reform and gays in the military have been widely cataloged.
Yet he also faced an immediate and debilitating right-wing backlash from congressional Republicans. Clinton disappointed much of his liberal base when, after his election, he took the DLC line on the budget deficit, listening to his treasury secretary (and future Citibank head), Robert Rubin. Cutting the deficit, not investing in the “bridge to the twenty-first century” infrastructure he had promised, became his first priority. But even Clinton’s bipartisan, DLC-crafted, deficit-cutting policies couldn’t placate Republicans. Faced with a sluggish economy, he tried to push a small stimulus bill during his first months in office, and he was blocked by Republicans—as well as by conservative Democrats, foreshadowing President Obama’s wrangle with “Blue Dogs” in his party sixteen years later. Balancing the budget with program cuts and tax hikes the next year, he got zero Republican votes for tax increases. His display of political courage was rewarded by seeing Democrats lose control of Congress in the next election.
Maybe more important, Clinton faced a ferocious political assault from what his wife called “a vast right-wing conspiracy,” abetted by the mainstream media. It’s hard to say which was more damaging to Clinton’s presidency, though—his famous far-right antagonists or their media enablers. Banking scion Richard Mellon Scaife and Christian Right leader Jerry Falwell, among others, peddled a scurrilous string of lies—that Clinton was involved in drug running, murder, and even the death of his close friend Vince Foster, all of which was hugely influential on the right. Yet the right wing’s attempted Clinton takedowns didn’t have the influence of the mainstream media’s relentless focus on nonscandals such as Whitewater, the firing of travel-office employees, or allegedly unethical Chinese fund-raising. The New York Times and the Washington Post treated the Clintons as ethics-challenged yahoos from the beginning. Looking back, the hypercritical, allegedly liberal New York Times editorial pages editor Howell Raines may have hurt the president as much as the vengeful Republican independent counsel Kenneth Starr did.
There was such a clear class bias in the way the elite treated the president: many Washington mandarins saw Clinton as trailer trash. He hadn’t learned to control his appetites, whether for cheeseburgers or women, or to at least have the manners to hide them. Later, the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn wrote a stunning obituary for the Clinton years in which she revealed that a resentful “Washington Establishment” spent the eight Clinton years feeling that “their town has been turned upside down” by the Rude First Couple. “He came in here and he trashed the place,” said the late Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”
“It’s not his place.” If there’s ever been a better example of the Washington Establishment’s class bias, I can’t think of one. The great blogger Digby used Quinn’s piece to label clueless Beltway mandarins “the Villagers.” The Villagers’ obsession with Clinton bordered on madness. For some, it was a way to prove their own fitness for fine Washington society. Sally Quinn, for instance, married the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee after they’d had an affair, and she was widely, perhaps unfairly, blamed for wrecking his marriage. So she became the spokesperson for all that was right and proper in the Village. Howell Raines of the New York Times was a Southerner like Clinton, but he came from a wealthy elite family (he would win a Pulitzer Prize for telling the story of what his family’s black maid taught him, “a pampered white boy,” about race). There seemed to be class friction between Raines and Clinton.
From all sides, there was a sense that this hillbilly interloper didn’t know his place; that he was disgracing himself and Washington with his bad manners. What was worse, he seemed to enjoy himself, without shame. So they would shame him.
No organized left rose to defend Clinton, even though he retained his popularity with the American people, right through impeachment; in fact, his popularity only climbed.