(The title is a reference to statements by former Alabama governor George Wallace and Republican strategist Lee Atwater)
In a 1996 interview with PBS’s Frontline, Paul Greenberg, a progressive who at the time was an editor of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and a longtime Clinton-watcher, compared Bill and Hillary to Tom and Daisy Buchanan of Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known novel, The Great Gatsby. Of course, that was a couple of decades before Frank and Claire Underwood of House of Cards, whom I think are a better parallel.
In a 1996 interview with PBS’s Frontline, Paul Greenberg, a progressive who at the time was an editor of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and a longtime Clinton-watcher, compared Bill and Hillary to Tom and Daisy Buchanan of Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known novel, The Great Gatsby. Of course, that was a couple of decades before Frank and Claire Underwood of House of Cards, whom I think are a better parallel.
Contrary to what
Hillary recently claimed in one of the primary debates, she is not and never
has been progressive, at least not since the late 1960’s. Neither, for that matter, has Bill, and she
strongly and outspokenly supported every single one of his policies and major
legislative goals, from the Defense of Marriage Act, to the Personal
Responsibility Act, to the Violent Crimes Act, to the North American Free Trade
Agreement, and the list goes on.
Though Bill’s ability
to mimick empathy made and still makes a sizable portion of the Afro-American community
believe he really cares about their welfare, the social policies and racial
politics of Bill and Hillary Clinton come straight from dog-whistle politics
from the playbook of notorious Republican strategist Lee Atwater.
Lee Atwater
A Republican
consultant from South Carolina and strategist to Presidents Reagan and Bush,
Altwater perfected the dog-whistle politics that have come to characterize a
broad section of the Democratic Party since its Right Turn under the leadership
of Bill and Hillary Clinton (while the Republican Party, in the thrall of the Tea
Party and the Freedom Caucus, has nearly gone full-blown George Wallace).
In the 1980
campaign, Atwater was the consultant for a successful U.S. Senate campaign in
his home state of South Carolina. After
the presidential inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1981, Atwater went to work
for the man who opened his 1980 presidential bid with a speech promoting “states’
rights” at the at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the
same area in which voting rights activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and
Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964.
Atwater’s 1981 interview
In 1981, Atwater
sat down for an anonymous interview with Alexander P. Lamis, professor of
political science at Case Western Reserve University, about his political views
and tactics, particularly his own adaptation of the “Southern Strategy”. Lamis first published the interview in his
1990 book, The Two Party South, with Atwater’s name withheld, but after
Atwater’s death in 1995 reproduced the transcript in the book Southern
Politics in the 1990’s (1999) with Atwater's name included. Here
is the core part of that interview relevant to that topic and the one at hand.
Atwater: “As
to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr., and others put together
in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of
keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t
have to do that. All you have to do to
keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on
since 1964 and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you
know, the whole cluster.”
Lamis: “But
the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the
racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting
down on food stamps?”
Atwater: “You
start out in 1954 [the year SCOTUS decided Brown v. Board of Education] by
saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger’. By
1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires.
So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that
stuff. You’re getting so abstract now
[that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking
about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get
hurt worse than whites. And
subconsciously maybe that is part of it.
I’m not saying that. But I’m
saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing
away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting
around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the
busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger’.”
Nearly two decades
earlier, Barry Goldwater had pioneered this Southern Strategy during the 1964
presidential campaign by promoting “states’ rights” (a cover for segregation
and white supremacy), opposing the Civil Rights Act, and using the wink-wink,
nudge-nudge slogan aimed at white people, “You Know You Agree With Him”.
Atwater’s later career
Initially working
for President Reagan, Atwater served as deputy chairman of his re-election
campaign in 1984, then moved over to the offices of Vice President Bush, whose
successful election campaign he ran in 1988.
During that campaign, it was he who developed the tactic of associating
Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, then Governor of Massachusetts, with
black felon Willie Horton who kidnapped a young white couple, tortured the man,
viciously raped the woman. At the time,
Horton was out on furlough from prison, to which he had been sent after his
conviction for first-degree murder.
Atwater later went
on to become chairman of the Republican National Committee, and to inspire, at
least indirectly, the political agenda and politics of a future Democratic
president and his wife who was later a Senator and Secretary of State.
Few politicians and
no U.S. President have exemplified these tactics and this strategy, referred to
by many political scientists and pundits as “dog-whistle politics”, better and no with more finesse, than Bill Clinton (with the full support of, and later continuation
by, Hillary), who took the efforts of his political forebearers Goldwater,
Nixon, Reagan, and Bush to new heights, and did the long con so well that a
prominent Afro-American poet even called him the nation’s “first black
president”. Atwater could never have dreamed of a better disciple.
Governor Bill Clinton
First elected as
Governor of Arkansas in 1978 after serving two years as the state’s attorney
general, Bill at 32 was the nation’s youngest governor. He came into office at least posing as a
reforming New Deal Democrat, aiming to reform the educational system and
improve Arkansas’ roads, while Hillary headed an effort to reform urban
healthcare, successfully unlike later.
He also opposed the death penalty, and freed 70 people from jail, some
convicted of homicide.
Partly due to anger
over the wheel tax levied to raise funds for road improvement, partly over
dissatisfaction with his mishandling of a prison riot by Cuban internees, and
partly due to the coattails of Ronald Reagan that year, Bill lost the 1980 gubernatorial
election. It was his George Wallace
moment.
Alabama politician
George Wallace ran for the governorship of the state in 1958 as a New Deal
Democrat supporting the civil rights of Afro-Americans. After losing badly to his opponent in the
Democratic primary, he famously declared to his close aide, Seymore Trammel, “I
was out-niggered by John Patterson, and I’ll tell you here and now, no other
son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again.”
In 1962, he successfully ran under the slogan “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”.
Bill’s turnaround
was not nearly so dramatic, at least not on the surface, but when he
successfully campaigned to regain the governorship in 1982, and for the next
ten years as governor, it was as a much different Bill Clinton.
Following Reagan’s
landslide re-election in 1984, which actually had more to do with the then
prosperous state of the economy, the popularity of the incumbent, and the lack
of charisma of the Democratic candidate more than his politics, Bill joined the
Democratic Leadership Council of politicians around the country who wanted to
enact “welfare reform” (i.e., dismantle the New Deal), get “tough on crime”,
and abandon the party’s “racial politics” (defense of minorities) to recoup the
support of “mainstream” (for them, white, moderate, affluent, professional)
voters, all of these positions being long-term talking points of dog-whistle
politics.
Atwater translation: “Nigger, nigger, nigger”
Paul Greenberg, who
dubbed Bill with the moniker “Slick Willy” in 1980 while the Pine Bluff
Commercial, said of Bill in 1996 that “his guiding principal would seem to
be preserving his political viability within the system”. Besides Bill’s pretended progressive values
always taking a back seat in the bus to his political ambitions, Greenberg
labelled thus because of what he and fellow Arkansas newspeople called “Clinton
Clauses”, the escape clauses which “Slick Willy” has built into every position
he has taken throughout his political career.
While governor, Clinton was a member of and played golf at the Country Club of Little Rock, which barred black people. He only resigned his membership when he
decided to run for president. He later
claimed he was invited by a friend and had no idea the club was for whites
only, and that he left (after several years) when he learned that to be the
case. (He also smoked pot but didn’t
inhale. Nor did he have “sexual
relations with that woman”).
Atwater translation: “Nigger, nigger, nigger”
(According to a 21 February 2001 article by Joseph Perkins in the Gadsden Times--"Liberal hypocrisy on issue of race"--then-President Bill played golf at Indian Creek Country Club in Miami even after the mayor refused to play there with him because it barred not only blacks but Jews, with one sole exception in the latter case. He returned multiple times, even after being informed of the racist nature of the club's membership customs, because of the number of wealthy donors there.)
(According to a 21 February 2001 article by Joseph Perkins in the Gadsden Times--"Liberal hypocrisy on issue of race"--then-President Bill played golf at Indian Creek Country Club in Miami even after the mayor refused to play there with him because it barred not only blacks but Jews, with one sole exception in the latter case. He returned multiple times, even after being informed of the racist nature of the club's membership customs, because of the number of wealthy donors there.)
Sister Souljah moment, 1992
The presidential
campaign of 1992 was shaken by the Rodney King riots of 29 April-4 May that
year, centered in Los Angeles’s South Central but spread out across the
country, including cities such as Atlanta.
Based on an
interview with rapper and political activist Sister Souljah, David Mills wrote
a piece in The Washington Post on 13 May 1992 dripping with paternalistic
condencension and white liberal outrage, outrage toward the subject of his
interview, called “Sister
Souljah’s Call to Arms: The rapper says the riots were payback. Are you paying
attention?”.
Question: “When
America saw young people rampaging on the streets of Los Angeles, and buildings
ablaze, and white men being dragged from their vehicles and beaten, didn't that
only reinforce the presumed attitude of the Simi Valley jury -- thank God for
the police, the thin blue line that protects us and our property from those
violent criminals?”
Souljah: “"Black
people from the underclass and the so-called lower class do not respect the
institutions of white America, which is why you can cart out as many black
people on television as you want to tell {them} that was stupid. But they don’t care what you say. You don’t care about their lives, haven’t
added anything to the quality of their lives. And then {you} expect them to respond to your
opinions, which mean absolutely nothing?
Why would they?”
Question: “But
the people perpetrating that violence, did they think it was wise? Was that
wise, reasoned action?”
Souljah: “Yeah,
it was wise. I mean, if black people
kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? You understand what I'm saying? In other words, white people, this government
and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every
day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you’re a gang member and you would
normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person? Do you think that somebody thinks that white
people are better, are above and beyond dying, when they would kill their own
kind?”
At a speech before
the Rainbow Coalition on 13 June the same year, candidate Bill remarked “If you
took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed them, you might think
David Duke was giving that speech”. (Sounds a lot like 'All Lives Matter').
Atwater translation: “Nigger, nigger, nigger”
Comparing the
rapper to the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who was
then president of the National Association for the Advancement of White People
(NAAWP) was akin to comparing Jewish singer Leonard Cohen to George Lincoln
Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party.
The NAAWP, by the way, opposed affirmative action and supported “law and
order”, the death penalty, and three-strikes laws, just like Billary and the
DLC.
Atwater translation: “Nigger, nigger, nigger”
Most pundits agree
that the main target of Bill’s call-out of Sister Souljah was Jesse Jackson,
who at the time had a large following of people from whom Bill wanted to
distance himself in the name of “electability”.
It was also his way of “doing a Willie Horton” to undercut a potential
rival. To his credit, Jackson defended the
rapper’s rage, and her right to be enraged.
1992 Presidential campaign
Just weeks before the critical New Hampshire primary,
Clinton proved his toughness on crime by flying back to Arkansas to oversee the
execution of Ricky Ray Rector (24 January 1992), a mentally impaired black man
who had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked
for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him for later. After the execution, Clinton remarked, “I can
be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.”
Atwater translation: “Nigger, nigger, nigger”
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, 1994
“Law and order” was a centerpiece of the 1968 campaign of
Richard Nixon, who was well aware of its dog-whistle significance of opposition
to the civil rights movement. The phrase
was later altered in following years to “tough on crime” once that significance
became widely recognized.
Initiated by the administration, written by Sen. Joe Biden
(D-DE) at the request of the White House, and sponsored Rep. Joe Brooks (R-TX),
the Omnibus Crime Bill, as it was also known, passed Congress and Bill signed it
into law.
The Act built upon Reagan’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986,
which enacted mandatory minimums for
drug crimes and prescribed a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity (reduced to 18-to-1
by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010) between powdered cocaine, whose majority of
sellers and users were white, and crack, whose majority of sellers and users
were black. The new law increased
opportunities for the death penalty, eliminated higher education for inmates,
increased money for new prisons, gave money to states for keeping prisoners
inside longer, supported the private prison industry, allowed for states to
pass three-strikes laws, and left intact that 100-to-1 ratio.
It is because of this law that the United States has the
largest prison population in the world, not per capita, the largest population
period, nearly 1 million more than the next ranking country on the list, the
People’s Republic of China, a country with a population of 1.4 billion. That’s 2.4 million incarcerated out of a
population of 313 million, not counting those awaiting trial and on probation
and parole; go there, and the level rises to over 7 million. Of these, 39.4% are black males (according to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics), who make up
just 13.6% of the population, taken out of society and the electorate. By age 23, 49% of all black males have been
arrested.
“Gangs and drugs have taken over our streets and
undermined our schools,” Bill said upon signing the omnibus bill into law. “Every day we read about somebody else
who has literally gotten away with murder.”
Atwater translation: “Nigger, nigger, nigger”
1996 State of the Union address
The President’s
remarks that evening included the following:
“We know big
government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for
every problem. We know, and we have
worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in
Washington. And we have to give the
American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.” Much of the address was meant to foreshadow
the coming year’s main domestic legislative agenda, the destruction of “welfare
as we know it”.
Railing against “big
government” is another one of those dog-whistles, with the line “you know you
agree with him” unspoken but meant to be understood.
Atwater translation: “Nigger, nigger, nigger”
1996 Presidential campaign
Giving a campaign speech at Keene State University in New
Hampshire on 25 January, just five days after the above State of the Union
address, Hillary included the following:
“We also have to have
an organized effort against gangs, just as in the previous generation we
had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to drug
cartels. They are not just gangs
of kids anymore. They are often the
kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way,
but first we have to bring them to heel.”
She was specifically talking about Afro-American kids, whom the
authors of the feloniously flawed “study” which launched the “super-predator”
myth identified would be the primary source of the fantasy coming tidal wave.
Atwater translation: “Nigger, nigger, nigger”
(For further info on just how the racist "superpredator" bullshit is, see "The Coming of the Super-predators" in the 27 November 1995 issue of The Weekly Standard, and "My Black Crime Problem, and Ours" in the Spring 1996 issue of City Journal, both written by the pseudo-theory's creator John J. Dilulio, can be found online.)
(For further info on just how the racist "superpredator" bullshit is, see "The Coming of the Super-predators" in the 27 November 1995 issue of The Weekly Standard, and "My Black Crime Problem, and Ours" in the Spring 1996 issue of City Journal, both written by the pseudo-theory's creator John J. Dilulio, can be found online.)
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, 1996
Though many had always been unsatisfied with various social
welfare programs of the United States, not so much with their opposition but
their very existence, “welfare reform” had really only come into the national
agenda when Reagan introduced the mythic Cadlillac-driving “welfare queen”
stereotype at the 1976 Republican National Convention, where he also talked about "young bucks" buying bunches of steaks with foot stamps.
Bill worked with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott on the details of the bill which places a
lifetime limit on welfare benefits, devolves responsibility for welfare to the
states, and institutes a workfare-for-welfare program requirement, which ends
the sixty year old New Deal welfare program, the centerpiece of FDR’s terms of
office, a legacy which Bill rather hypocritically praised in 1999.
Hillary whipped up support for the bill among legislators,
uplifted the act in newspapers columns after it passed, and still defends it to
this day.
Despite the fact that the majority of recipients of AFDC
(Aid to Families with Dependent Children) were white, by advocates of the bill
they were portrayed, usually indirectly through codewords such as “urban” and “inner-city”,
as being mostly black, like Reagan’s “welfare queen” (a fiction based on one
single woman, a career criminal involved in swindling, theft, murder,
kidnapping, and child-trafficking besides welfare fraud, who was indeed black
and did drive a Cadillac, named Linda Taylor).
To affirm the stereotype when he signed the bill into law, Bill
even made sure he was flanked by two black women, one of whom later died due to
health complications because under the new system she was unable to afford the
medicine she had been paying for with money from welfare.
Atwater translation: “Nigger, nigger, nigger”
“Talking It Over”, 1999
In her syndicated column for 25 August that year, Hillary
commented, “Too many of those on welfare had known nothing but dependency all
their lives, and many would have found it difficult to make the transition to
work on their own.”
Atwater translation: “Nigger, nigger, nigger”
Interview, The Gettysburg
Times, 2002
In support of the
reauthorization of Bill’s anti-welfare act of 1996, then-Senator Hillary Clinton
commented during the interview published in the paper 12 April, “Now that we’ve
said these people are no longer deadbeats—they’re actually out there being
productive—how do we keep them there?”.
By “deadbeats”, she
meant all those eradicated from welfare roles by the afore-mentioned punitive
legislation initiated by Bill.
Atwater translation: “Nigger, nigger, nigger”
Sister Souljah redux
When Daniel D’Addario wrote “Sister Souljah’s New Moment” for TIME
magazine (12 November 2015), he said that when asked his subject what she
thought of Hillary, Souljah would not answer verbally but instead wrote her
reply on a piece of paper she handed him:
“She reminds me too much of the slave plantation white wife
of the white ‘Master.’ She talks down to
people, is condescending and pandering. She
even talked down to the Commander in Chief, President Barack Obama, while she
was under his command!”
Which is similar to Paul Greenberg’s comparison of her to
Tom Buchanan’s wife Daisy.
My conclusions
It does not matter whether or not Bill/Tom and Hillary/Daisy
Clinton/Buchanan are closet raving bigots of the caliber of Strom Thurmond and George Wallace or
not. I doubt it, because I do not
believe they care about anything outside of themselves, their own interests and
ambitions, enough to have the level of antipathy necessary for that. To paraphrase Kanye West’s comment about Bill’s
successor, Bill and Hillary Clinton simply do not care about black people. To them, black lives do not matter.
Their policies and political actions both together and
separately have wreaked massive harm to the Afro-American community all across
the country. Michelle Alexander of Ohio
State University calls the situation which their policies created the “New Jim Crow”.
Given that both Clintons are too damn intelligent not to
have foreseen such easily foreseeable consequences, it does not matter whether
either of them gave a damn then or gives a damn now. Those consequences are profoundly racist, and
they both need to be held accountable.
And no mea culpa hand wringing can make up for the damage done and still
being done.
Though Bill and Hillary bear the overwhelming majority of
the blame, that responsibility extends beyond the boundaries of the Clinton
family to all the other so-called “centrist” New Democrats who have done so much harm to the Afro-American community. And with all those, white and black, who have never called them out on it.
* * * * *
See also:
Bill Clinton's Apology: Not Accepted!
Bill Clinton's Apology: Not Accepted!
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/21/bill-clintons-apology-not-accepted/
Bill Clinton, the Jolly Racist
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/18/bill-clinton-the-jolly-racist/
The Coming of the Super-predators
http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-coming-of-the-super-predators/article/8160
My Black Crime Problem, and Ours
http://www.city-journal.org/html/6_2_my_black.html
THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Democrats; Club Where Clinton Has Golfed Retains Way of Old South
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/23/us/1992-campaign-democrats-club-where-clinton-has-golfed-retains-ways-old-south.html
Clinton The Racist Plays Golf At "No Blacks Allowed" Country Club
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/809507/posts
Double Standard
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1891&dat=20010221&id=kvMwAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XN0FAAAAIBAJ&pg=3869,2154007&hl=en
Black Lives Shattered: How the Clintons Built Their Empire on White Supremacy
http://usuncut.com/politics/black-lives-shattered-how-the-clintons-built-their-empire-on-white-supremacy/
Bill Clinton Has Always Been This Person
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/04/bill-clinton-has-always-been-this-person
http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-coming-of-the-super-predators/article/8160
My Black Crime Problem, and Ours
http://www.city-journal.org/html/6_2_my_black.html
THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Democrats; Club Where Clinton Has Golfed Retains Way of Old South
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/23/us/1992-campaign-democrats-club-where-clinton-has-golfed-retains-ways-old-south.html
Clinton The Racist Plays Golf At "No Blacks Allowed" Country Club
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/809507/posts
Double Standard
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1891&dat=20010221&id=kvMwAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XN0FAAAAIBAJ&pg=3869,2154007&hl=en
Black Lives Shattered: How the Clintons Built Their Empire on White Supremacy
http://usuncut.com/politics/black-lives-shattered-how-the-clintons-built-their-empire-on-white-supremacy/
Bill Clinton Has Always Been This Person
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/04/bill-clinton-has-always-been-this-person
How Bill Clinton’s Welfare “Reform” Created a System Rife With Racial Biases
http://billmoyers.com/2014/05/12/how-bill-clintons-welfare-reform-created-a-system-rife-with-racial-biases/