Posted on Wed, Jan. 01, 2003 story:PUB_DESC

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

Former President Bill Clinton called the Republicans hypocrites for lambasting Trent Lott while subtly pandering to racial bigotry. Clinton should talk.

In May 1991, then-presidential candidate Clinton, in a keynote address to the centrist Democratic Leadership Council convention in Cleveland, ripped a page from the political playbook of Republican presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. He delivered a bible-thumping speech on law and order and Republican-themed family values. After the speech, a group of black delegates accused him of sounding more like a Republican than Republicans.

At the Democratic convention the next year, Clinton repeated the same themes and promised to reject the racial orthodoxy of the left. He distanced himself from Jesse Jackson, attacked rapper Sister Souljah for her alleged anti-white remarks after the L.A. riots and brushed off attacks from black Democrats that he and white Democratic leaders were sacrificing their black constituents in a naked grab for white, middle-class votes.

Clinton's carbon-copy Southern Strategy worked. Though blacks voted overwhelmingly for him, it was white votes that put him over the top in the South. Despite his legendary appearances at black churches, Clinton didn't crack the Republican grip on the white South by charging the barricades on civil rights.

In 1994, Clinton rammed the most wasteful, punitive crime bill in American history through Congress. It gutted funds for drug rehabilitation, prevention, social service, youth employment and job training programs. It added scores of new death penalty provisions to federal law. America's prisons quickly bulged with mostly black and Latino males, many of whom were convicted of non-violent, petty crimes and drug offenses.

When the U.S. Sentencing Commission recommended that the harsh sentences for crack cocaine given to mostly black and Latino offenders and the light sentences for powdered cocaine given to mostly white offenders be "equalized," Clinton took no action. When Congress refused to accept the recommendations, he did nothing.

In 1995, Clinton promised to end "abuses" in federal affirmative action programs. Some programs were eliminated and funding for others was drastically scaled back.

In 1996, Clinton radically reshaped the welfare system but did little to dispel the popular myths that welfare encourages dependency, laziness, and out-of-wedlock births, and that the majority of the recipients are poor black women.

In 1997, he raised hopes that he would be the first president since Lyndon Johnson to do something about racial conflict in America by appointing a race panel. But his inability or unwillingness to put any political muscle behind the panel's proposals doomed it to be forgotten. Clinton also caved in and dumped Lani Guinier as his nominee to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, and Jocelyn Elders as Surgeon General after they got mild flack from conservative Republicans.

True, Clinton appointed blacks to several high administration positions and increased funding for AIDS prevention, minority business, education and African relief. But Bush's appointees, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Rod Paige, hold more important administration posts with far greater policy-making power than Clinton's appointees had. And Bush has also touted minority business, education reform, increased AIDS funding and African aid.

The strategy that worked so well for Clinton boomeranged on Al Gore in 2000. Blacks, frustrated and disgusted with the Democrat's perceived indifference to their interests, stayed away from the polls in droves and Bush swept the South. In the 2002 elections, blacks continued to stay away from the polls. This cost the Democrats several governorships and senate seats in the South.

Clinton rejected the crude racial appeals of Trent Lott, Jesse Helms, and Strom Thurmond. But his Southern Strategy was packed with enough racial codes and indifference to black voters to make him a poor choice to call the Republicans hypocrites on Lott.

-- Anonymous, January 01, 2003