By Jonathan E.P. Moore
WHY HILLARY CLINTON DOESN’T DESERVE THE BLACK VOTE!
From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted—and Hillary Clinton supported—decimated black America.
“Republican voters have been turning out in record numbers in the primary contests held so far. Democrats on the other hand are showing up in lower numbers than they did in 2008, the last open election.”
In other notable election events, African-American communities voted out two county prosecutors in Democratic primaries: Anita Alvarez, in Cook County, Ill., and Tim McGinty in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. These electoral results reflected the mass outrage at police killings of African-American youth: Laquan McDonald, age 17, and Tamir Rice, age 12.
No matter which party wins, nationally oppressed and working people will face the necessity of building an independent political movement to challenge and defeat the inevitable programs of economic austerity, state repression and imperialist militarism.
BLACK STAYING HOME: NOT VOTING FOR HILLARY!
Most suspected that the black Democratic vote for Hillary would be lower than it was for Barack Obama.
But nobody thought it would be this low.
Despite blowouts in the (former) Confederate South for Hillary, the drop-off in black voters has been more than dramatic.
The number of African-Americans who voted in primaries dropped by an estimated 40 percent in Ohio, 38 percent in Florida and 34 percent in North Carolina compared with the 2008 Democratic primary when Barack Obama was on the ballot, reported the advocacy group Black Votes Matter.
Record numbers of African-American voters flocked to the polls to elect and re-elect America’s first black president, The New York Post is reporting.
Analysts expected some drop-off, but not the enormous numbers recorded.
“Hillary’s repeated trouncing of Bernie Sanders with the black vote has masked the alarming fact that there has been a dramatic drop-off in black turnout in the Democratic primaries,” said Charlie King, founder of the Black Voters Matter super PAC.
The decline provides an opening for likely GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump to win the presidency, King warned.
“It will be very hard for the Hillary campaign alone to have a message that excites Reagan Democrats and the 4 million new black Barack Obama voters to come out and vote. That is why Donald Trump poses a real challenge,” he said.
“And if that is not corrected, a number of states like Ohio, Florida and Virginia can turn to Republican-leaning states . . . Trump could become president.”
In 2012, the black vote provided Obama with slim margins of victory over GOP nominee Mitt Romney in Florida (50-49 percent), Ohio (50-48), Virginia (51-48) and Pennsylvania (52-47). It also put North Carolina in play for a Democrat for the first time in decades.
Clinton supporters said the thought of a Trump presidency would change all that.
The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.
Black voters have been remarkably loyal to the Clintons for
more than 25 years. It’s true that we eventually lined up behind Barack Obama
in 2008, but it’s a measure of the Clinton allure that Hillary led Obama among
black voters until he started winning caucuses and primaries. Now Hillary is
running again. This time she’s facing a democratic socialist who promises a
political revolution that will bring universal healthcare, a living wage, an
end to rampant Wall Street greed, and the dismantling of the vast prison
state—many of the same goals that Martin Luther King Jr. championed at the end
of his life. Even so, black folks are sticking with the Clinton brand.
What have the Clintons done to earn such devotion? Did they take extreme political risks to defend the rights of African Americans? Did they courageously stand up to right-wing demagoguery about black communities? Did they help usher in a new era of hope and prosperity for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization, and the disappearance of work?
NO. QUITE THE OPPOSITE!
When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, urban black communities across America were suffering from economic collapse. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs had vanished as factories moved overseas in search of cheaper labor, a new plantation. Globalization and deindustrialization affected workers of all colors but hit African Americans particularly hard. Unemployment rates among young black men had quadrupled as the rate of industrial employment plummeted. Crime rates spiked in inner-city communities that had been dependent on factory jobs, while hopelessness, despair, and crack addiction swept neighborhoods that had once been solidly working-class. Millions of black folks—many of whom had fled Jim Crow segregation in the South with the hope of obtaining decent work in Northern factories—were suddenly trapped in racially segregated, jobless ghettos.
On the campaign trail, Bill Clinton made the economy his top
priority and argued persuasively that conservatives were using race to divide
the nation and divert attention from the failed economy. In practice, however,
he capitulated entirely to the right-wing backlash against the civil-rights
movement and embraced former president Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime,
welfare, and taxes—ultimately doing more harm to black communities than Reagan
ever did.
We should have seen it coming. Back then, Clinton was the standard-bearer for the New Democrats, a group that firmly believed the only way to win back the millions of white voters in the South who had defected to the Republican Party was to adopt the right-wing narrative that black communities ought to be disciplined with harsh punishment rather than coddled with welfare. Reagan had won the presidency by dog-whistling to poor and working-class whites with coded racial appeals: railing against “welfare queens” and criminal “predators” and condemning “big government.” Clinton aimed to win them back, vowing that he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime than he.
Just weeks before the critical New Hampshire primary, Clinton proved his toughness by flying back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, 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.”
Clinton mastered the art of sending mixed cultural messages, appealing to African Americans by belting out “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in black churches, while at the same time signaling to poor and working-class whites that he was willing to be tougher on black communities than Republicans had been.
Clinton was praised for his no-nonsense, pragmatic approach to racial politics. He won the election and appointed a racially diverse cabinet that “looked like America.” He won re-election four years later, and the American economy rebounded. Democrats cheered. The Democratic Party had been saved. The Clintons won. Guess who lost?
Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. Clinton did not declare the War on Crime or the War on Drugs—those wars were declared before Reagan was elected and long before crack hit the streets—but he escalated it beyond what many conservatives had imagined possible. He supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, which produced staggering racial injustice in sentencing and boosted funding for drug-law enforcement.
Clinton championed the idea of a federal “three strikes” law in his 1994 State of the Union address and, months later, signed a $30 billion crime bill that created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces. The legislation was hailed by mainstream-media outlets as a victory for the Democrats, who “were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.”
When Clinton left office in 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Human Rights Watch reported that in seven states, African Americans constituted 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison, even though they were no more likely than whites to use or sell illegal drugs. Prison admissions for drug offenses reached a level in 2000 for African Americans more than 26 times the level in 1983. All of the presidents since 1980 have contributed to mass incarceration, but as Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson recently observed, “President Clinton’s tenure was the worst.”
Perhaps most alarming, Clinton also made it easier for
public-housing agencies to deny shelter to anyone with any sort of criminal
history (even an arrest without conviction) and championed the “one strike and
you’re out” initiative, which meant that families could be evicted from public
housing because one member (or a guest) had committed even a minor offense.
People released from prison with no money, no job, and nowhere to go could no
longer return home to their loved ones living in federally assisted housing
without placing the entire family at risk of eviction. Purging “the criminal
element” from public housing played well on the evening news, but no provisions
were made for people and families as they were forced out on the street. By the
end of Clinton’s presidency, more than half of working-age African-American men
in many large urban areas were saddled with criminal records and subject to
legalized discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and basic
public benefits—relegated to a permanent second-class status eerily reminiscent
of Jim Crow.
Some might argue that it’s unfair to judge Hillary Clinton for the policies her husband championed years ago. But Hillary wasn’t picking out china while she was first lady. She bravely broke the mold and redefined that job in ways no woman ever had before. She not only campaigned for Bill; she also wielded power and significant influence once he was elected, lobbying for legislation and other measures. That record, and her statements from that era, should be scrutinized. In her support for the 1994 crime bill, for example, she used racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals. “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she said. “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 may be surprised to discover that the younger generation
no longer wants to play her game. Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll all continue to
play along and pretend that we don’t know how it will turn out in the end.
Hopefully, one day, we’ll muster the courage to join together in a revolutionary
movement with people of all colors who believe that basic human rights and
economic, racial, and gender justice are not unreasonable, pie-in-the-sky
goals. After decades of getting played, the sleeping giant just might wake up,
stretch its limbs, and tell both parties: Game over. Move aside. It’s time to
reshuffle this deck.
“It will be very hard for the Hillary campaign alone to have a message that excites Reagan Democrats and the 4 million new black Barack Obama voters to come out and vote. That is why Donald Trump, THE OUTSIDER NON-POLITICIAN, poses a real challenge”
From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted—and Hillary Clinton supported—decimated black America.
“Republican voters have been turning out in record numbers in the primary contests held so far. Democrats on the other hand are showing up in lower numbers than they did in 2008, the last open election.”
In other notable election events, African-American communities voted out two county prosecutors in Democratic primaries: Anita Alvarez, in Cook County, Ill., and Tim McGinty in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. These electoral results reflected the mass outrage at police killings of African-American youth: Laquan McDonald, age 17, and Tamir Rice, age 12.
No matter which party wins, nationally oppressed and working people will face the necessity of building an independent political movement to challenge and defeat the inevitable programs of economic austerity, state repression and imperialist militarism.
Most suspected that the black Democratic vote for Hillary would be lower than it was for Barack Obama.
But nobody thought it would be this low.
Despite blowouts in the (former) Confederate South for Hillary, the drop-off in black voters has been more than dramatic.
The number of African-Americans who voted in primaries dropped by an estimated 40 percent in Ohio, 38 percent in Florida and 34 percent in North Carolina compared with the 2008 Democratic primary when Barack Obama was on the ballot, reported the advocacy group Black Votes Matter.
Record numbers of African-American voters flocked to the polls to elect and re-elect America’s first black president, The New York Post is reporting.
Analysts expected some drop-off, but not the enormous numbers recorded.
“Hillary’s repeated trouncing of Bernie Sanders with the black vote has masked the alarming fact that there has been a dramatic drop-off in black turnout in the Democratic primaries,” said Charlie King, founder of the Black Voters Matter super PAC.
The decline provides an opening for likely GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump to win the presidency, King warned.
“It will be very hard for the Hillary campaign alone to have a message that excites Reagan Democrats and the 4 million new black Barack Obama voters to come out and vote. That is why Donald Trump poses a real challenge,” he said.
“And if that is not corrected, a number of states like Ohio, Florida and Virginia can turn to Republican-leaning states . . . Trump could become president.”
In 2012, the black vote provided Obama with slim margins of victory over GOP nominee Mitt Romney in Florida (50-49 percent), Ohio (50-48), Virginia (51-48) and Pennsylvania (52-47). It also put North Carolina in play for a Democrat for the first time in decades.
Clinton supporters said the thought of a Trump presidency would change all that.
The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.
What have the Clintons done to earn such devotion? Did they take extreme political risks to defend the rights of African Americans? Did they courageously stand up to right-wing demagoguery about black communities? Did they help usher in a new era of hope and prosperity for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization, and the disappearance of work?
NO. QUITE THE OPPOSITE!
When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, urban black communities across America were suffering from economic collapse. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs had vanished as factories moved overseas in search of cheaper labor, a new plantation. Globalization and deindustrialization affected workers of all colors but hit African Americans particularly hard. Unemployment rates among young black men had quadrupled as the rate of industrial employment plummeted. Crime rates spiked in inner-city communities that had been dependent on factory jobs, while hopelessness, despair, and crack addiction swept neighborhoods that had once been solidly working-class. Millions of black folks—many of whom had fled Jim Crow segregation in the South with the hope of obtaining decent work in Northern factories—were suddenly trapped in racially segregated, jobless ghettos.
We should have seen it coming. Back then, Clinton was the standard-bearer for the New Democrats, a group that firmly believed the only way to win back the millions of white voters in the South who had defected to the Republican Party was to adopt the right-wing narrative that black communities ought to be disciplined with harsh punishment rather than coddled with welfare. Reagan had won the presidency by dog-whistling to poor and working-class whites with coded racial appeals: railing against “welfare queens” and criminal “predators” and condemning “big government.” Clinton aimed to win them back, vowing that he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime than he.
Just weeks before the critical New Hampshire primary, Clinton proved his toughness by flying back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, 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.”
Clinton mastered the art of sending mixed cultural messages, appealing to African Americans by belting out “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in black churches, while at the same time signaling to poor and working-class whites that he was willing to be tougher on black communities than Republicans had been.
Clinton was praised for his no-nonsense, pragmatic approach to racial politics. He won the election and appointed a racially diverse cabinet that “looked like America.” He won re-election four years later, and the American economy rebounded. Democrats cheered. The Democratic Party had been saved. The Clintons won. Guess who lost?
Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. Clinton did not declare the War on Crime or the War on Drugs—those wars were declared before Reagan was elected and long before crack hit the streets—but he escalated it beyond what many conservatives had imagined possible. He supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, which produced staggering racial injustice in sentencing and boosted funding for drug-law enforcement.
Clinton championed the idea of a federal “three strikes” law in his 1994 State of the Union address and, months later, signed a $30 billion crime bill that created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces. The legislation was hailed by mainstream-media outlets as a victory for the Democrats, who “were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.”
When Clinton left office in 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Human Rights Watch reported that in seven states, African Americans constituted 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison, even though they were no more likely than whites to use or sell illegal drugs. Prison admissions for drug offenses reached a level in 2000 for African Americans more than 26 times the level in 1983. All of the presidents since 1980 have contributed to mass incarceration, but as Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson recently observed, “President Clinton’s tenure was the worst.”
Some might argue that it’s unfair to judge Hillary Clinton for the policies her husband championed years ago. But Hillary wasn’t picking out china while she was first lady. She bravely broke the mold and redefined that job in ways no woman ever had before. She not only campaigned for Bill; she also wielded power and significant influence once he was elected, lobbying for legislation and other measures. That record, and her statements from that era, should be scrutinized. In her support for the 1994 crime bill, for example, she used racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals. “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she said. “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.”
“It will be very hard for the Hillary campaign alone to have a message that excites Reagan Democrats and the 4 million new black Barack Obama voters to come out and vote. That is why Donald Trump, THE OUTSIDER NON-POLITICIAN, poses a real challenge”
Jonathan E P Moore ‘While You Were Sleeping’
THE NEXT ‘While You Were Sleeping’
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