Clinton’s Speech Confirms Leftward Shift on Race Issues

WASHINGTON — With his long-awaited speech on race relations Saturday, President Clinton continued an odyssey toward convention on the most incendiary issue in American politics.

Though Clinton has always spoken with great passion about the need for racial healing, at different points in his career he has prescribed different methods for achieving it.

In his initial 1992 campaign--and at various points in his presidency--Clinton has offered a vision of racial reconciliation that departed from liberal conventions by emphasizing mutual responsibility among whites and minorities alike. But more often in the past few years--and again Saturday--Clinton has presented a much more traditionally liberal analysis that defended affirmative action, praised diversity and emphasized the history of discrimination against minorities.

“There has been a great difference between his campaign mode and his governing mode on this,” said Fred Siegel, a historian at Cooper Union, a New York City college.

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Beneath the shifting nuance of Clinton’s message is a larger question about the best path to easing racial tensions and broadening opportunities for minorities. While African American leaders like Jesse Jackson believe that the key is new, racially targeted government programs to attack poverty and discrimination, centrist Democratic thinkers like Siegel believe that a more promising approach is Clinton’s 1992 formula, which stressed reconciliation around the idea of shared values and race-neutral programs that link opportunity with responsibility.

“We are far from a colorblind society,” said Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, “but the country believes the problem is less and less a problem of discrimination and more and more one of poor people in minority communities lacking the opportunity to join the burgeoning black middle class.”

At the moment, Clinton appears to be adrift between these contending visions, offering neither a clear alternative to the traditional civil rights agenda nor specific initiatives for advancing it.

Since the first days of his 1992 campaign, Clinton has repeatedly condemned racism, insisting that the nation could not move forward without racial and ethnic reconciliation. But, especially in that first presidential campaign, he linked that reconciliation to demanding greater “personal responsibility” among the poor--most notably by requiring work from welfare recipients--and carefully suggested that discrimination could not explain all the problems confronting minorities.

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In effect, Clinton sought to bridge the racial and ideological divisions over race relations by arguing that the nation could come together around a vision that provided equal opportunity for, but demanded equal responsibility from, all Americans.

In the 1992 campaign and beyond, that synthesis carried Clinton into unusually candid discussions of racial issues. On successive days in March 1992, he made dramatic back-to-back appeals for racial harmony in Macomb County--a Detroit suburb symbolic to many of white flight--and an inner-city black church in Detroit.

In Macomb, he told members of an almost all-white audience that as president, he would work to “give you your values back” but in return would demand that they “give up some of the prejudices [of] the 1980s. . . .” The next day, at the black church, he said government efforts to help the needy would not work without greater initiative in poor communities. “I cannot do for you what you will not do for yourselves,” he said.

Even more dramatically--and controversially--later that spring Clinton condemned a black rap singer, Sister Souljah, who had been quoted after the Los Angeles riots suggesting that African Americans should commit violence not against other minorities, but rather whites. Critics accused Clinton of exploiting racial animosities, but supporters like Marshall believed that Clinton was sending a powerful message that he intended to hold all races to common standards.

Clinton was acutely aware that all of this represented a stark departure from the prevailing liberal discussion about race, which focused almost entirely on lingering problems of discrimination, said Stanley B. Greenberg, Clinton’s 1992 campaign pollster.

“What he was saying was there are values that unite black and white, and they [the races] were being divided by those who want to take advantage. He was saying the theme of personal responsibility provided the basis for the people in Macomb to reach out to Detroit and vice versa,” Greenberg said.

As president, Clinton has returned to this vision in some of his most powerful speeches--including his November 1993 address in the Memphis, Tenn., pulpit where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his last sermon, and his impassioned remarks on the day of the “Million Man March” in October 1995.

In the Memphis speech, Clinton emphasized the progress against discrimination and said King would have been horrified to see “13-year-old boys with automatic weapons” and “children” bearing children. In Texas, on the day of Louis Farrakhan’s sprawling separatist oratory at the Capitol, Clinton pointedly declared that whites and blacks alike had to “clean [their] house . . . of racism.”

Little of that astringent language was evident in Clinton’s speech on Saturday. His discussion of responsibility was cursory, muted and diffuse; he spent considerably more time emphasizing traditional liberal priorities like the defense of affirmative action and diversity.

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That fit his recent rhetorical pattern. In his 1996 campaign he mostly delivered broad, soft-edged appeals for interracial tolerance. As he did Saturday, Clinton in the 1995 speech in which he called for the continuation of affirmative action programs emphasized the “persistence of . . . bigotry.”

Clinton’s record on race-related issues shows the same division. Many of Clinton’s key domestic policies have been infused with themes of individual initiative and responsibility. Over the objections of civil rights leaders, he signed anti-crime legislation that balanced funding for prevention programs with tough new punishment measures, and welfare reform legislation that required work and imposed a time limit on government assistance. His urban agenda is based less on direct government spending than on the promotion of development with increased access to private investment.

But Clinton has disappointed centrist Democrats by refusing to consider alternatives to affirmative action that might be less racially divisive (like assistance based on economic class), though Clinton on Saturday fleetingly suggested that he would be receptive if anyone showed him a viable alternative.

Exactly why Clinton has given greater emphasis recently to conventional liberal arguments on race isn’t clear. But some close observers speculate that the push by some Republicans to eliminate all affirmative action programs has compelled him to intensify his defense of them. Conversely, Siegel suggests Clinton’s renewed focus on race may also represent an effort to soothe minority leaders angry over the welfare reform and balanced-budget agreements.

With these divergent strains of thought entwining through Clinton’s record, even close observers can’t predict with certainty whether his racial initiative will produce new directions or slide into the old grooves that have divided left from right, and black from white, on the issue.

“He is right to think there is work to be done in reconciliation, and he as president can do it,” Greenberg said. “But the tendency is to come back to it in more traditional terms rather than the terms he introduced in 1992.”