If, as I insist,
the issue of race played a decisive role in the breakup of the New Deal
Coalition, how do I explain Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama? I’ll
deal with the first two in this post and reserve Obama for a later time.
To begin with,
although the coalition’s breakup is indisputable and southern whites are now entirely
lost, white, working-class voters in the north, especially in the rust belt
states, did not desert the ship en masse. In the turning-point election of
1968, the George Wallace vote never reached 12% in the Midwest. But Nixon’s
people knew that even a swing of seven or eight percent at the polls was enough
to determine the outcome of national and local elections. More than enough.
Ronald Reagan didn’t demean himself with his fried-chicken eatin’ welfare queen
in the hope of gathering every working-class vote north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
He only needed enough to win, which he did, securing every mid-western state
except Minnesota in 1980.
Jimmy Carter and
Bill Clinton, both good-old-boys from former slave states, shared a common
task. If they hoped to be elected president, they had to counter the Republican
party’s racist appeal without losing the African-American vote. The two men employed
nearly identical tactics to achieve this goal.
Carter, of
course, had a natural advantage going in. Nixon had resigned in disgrace, the
only President to do so, while Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, was widely
viewed as ineffective. Beyond that, however, like many Southerners, Carter was at
ease in the company of African-Americans. A born-again Christian from rural
Georgia, he related on a gut level to Black evangelicals, speaking the language
of temptation, sin and ultimate redemption with practiced grace. At no time
during his campaign was there even a hint that Black voters would turn to
Gerald Ford and the Republican Party.
But the Black
vote wasn’t enough, as Nixon had twice proven. Carter needed to lure at least
some of the George Wallace Democrats back to the Democratic Party. That he
ultimately succeeded is beyond doubt. Carter won every state in the South, from
Texas on the west to North Carolina on the east. Up North, though he lost
Michigan and Illinois, he swept the remainder of the rust belt, winning
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota, all states won by Nixon in ’72.
How’d he do it?
Jimmy Carter played the race card and he
played it pretty hard. Early on, he championed the right of white enclaves to hang
onto their “ethnic purity”. The remark was no secret, no skeleton-in-the-closet
locked away by the Carter campaign. When Carter was asked to clarify his
remarks, he doubled down. He spoke of the problems associated with “black
intrusions” into ethnically pure neighborhoods. That alone would probably
explain his southern victories on election day, but Carter didn’t stop there. He
opposed forced bussing to integrate schools and his campaign staff produced an
issues document that attacked welfare directly.
“The current
welfare system is demeaning to the recipients, overly burdensome to the
taxpayers, and overly bureaucratized. We need a streamlined, simplified welfare
system with strong work incentives.”
Enough said.
After twelve
years of Reagan and Bush, each of whom played the race card at every
opportunity, William Jefferson Clinton faced the same problems Carter had, with
an added fillip. In 1980, the George Wallace Democrats had morphed into Ronald
Reagan Democrats. They’d remained in the Republican camp for the following two
elections, spurred on by Willie Horton’s hooded eyes, open mouth and bulging
muttonchops. In 1988, George Bush had hammered Mike Dukakis so hard the man
went into hiding after the votes were counted.
Clinton just had
to snare some of those votes - no other path to the White House existed for an
obscure, small-state Governor - and he had to retain the African-American vote
at the same time. Like Carter, he did have an advantage here. As Governor of
Arkansas, he’d brought more Blacks into his administration than any of his
predecessors and his campaign staff was extremely diverse. More to the point, as
a poor boy from Little Rock who’d come up hard, he related directly to
African-Americans, especially in small groups. I recall the comedian, Chris
Rock, in performance before a predominately Black audience, telling a joke that
had ‘em rolling the aisles.
“I know Bill
Clinton. Hell, I am Bill Clinton.”
So, one down,
one to go. Clinton now had to work on the Reagan Dems, scattered as they were
throughout the south and the Midwest. Two examples will illustrate his tactics.
Crime and the
death penalty had been hot-button issues in campaigns stretching back to the
George Wallace era. They were still on the table when Clinton, at the peak of a
crime wave, entered the presidential race in 1992. Running as a centrist,
Clinton demonstrated his law-and-order creds early on. In the last week of
January, shortly before the New Hampshire primary, Clinton broke off his
campaign – at a crucial moment, his handlers insisted - and flew back to
Arkansas. There to supervise the execution of a murderer named Ricky Ray
Rector.
Ricky Ray’s
guilt was never in doubt. He not only killed one man in a dispute, he executed
the cop who came, at Ricky’s request, to accept his surrender. But then he
wandered into the backyard of his mother’s home and put a bullet through his
own head, destroying the frontal lobe of his brain.
Somehow, Ricky Ray survived the surgery,
living long enough to be executed. But his mental disabilities were obvious to
all who knew him, including the corrections officers who strapped him to the
gurney before he was executed. It seems Ricky had set aside the dessert served
with his last meal, asking that it be saved for later on.
And did I mention that Ricky Ray Rector
was a Black man?
So it was Bad-Ass
Bill, which nobody could deny. Law and order, as well as the death penalty,
were effectively neutralized and it was on to bigger and better displays. Six
months later, invited by Jesse Jackson, Clinton addressed a Rainbow Coalition
conference on the Los Angeles riot that followed the Rodney King acquittals. He
chose that platform to attack an obscure rap artist named Sister Souljah, who’d
made an unfortunate remark (in the furtherance of her career, no doubt) to a Washington Post reporter.
“I mean, if
black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white
people…. So, if you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing someone,
why not kill a white person?”
Clinton used his
moment before the Rainbow Coalition to attack Sister Souljah. Although her
indiscrete statement had been uttered a month earlier and she wasn’t at the
conference, he compared her attitude to that of David Duke and the Ku Klux
Klan. Jesse Jackson went through the roof. He even threatened to join the race
as an independent. But in the end, with Clinton holding firm, Jackson
capitulated, formally endorsing Clinton at the Democratic Convention.
Aided by third-party
candidate Ross Perot and a stubborn recession, Clinton won the election with
43% of the vote. He even prevailed in several deep-South states, including
Louisiana and Georgia, an achievement he repeated in 1996. Al Gore, on the
other hand, lost every former slave state in 2000, including his home state of
Tennessee.
Perhaps he needed a Sister Souljah moment.
Finally, and I don’t usually do this, I
want to recommend a book, Running on Race
by Jeremy Mayer. Mayer provides a quick, and very readable analysis of
presidential contests, and the role played by race in the campaigns, from JFK’s
in 1960 through Bush vs. Gore in 2000. Long out of print, it’s available from
third-party sellers on Amazon.
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