Searching for the Promised Land
Franks, Gary
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Searching for the Promised Land" The Gentleman From Connecticut Searching for the Promised Land: An African American's Optimistic Odyssey Gary...
...trict is 9o percent white-rejected this advice...
...Evidently, God never told Franks to be nice to his staff...
...You're just a congressman who happens to be black and is representing white people...
...Franks begins his book by "thanking and acknowledging God for His direction" and ends it by listing the Ten Commandments...
...Look," one Republican operative told Franks, "the Democrats have been pushing this for years...
...The only thing that seemed to bother members about Mfume's action was that it would complicate their fund-raising efforts among Jewish supporters...
...As my little boy would say, "Yuck...
...When the then-president of the CBC, Kweisi Mfume, announced that he had 80 September r 9 9 6 - The American Spectator concluded a "sacred covenant" with Farrakhan, most caucus members approved...
...81 The American Spectator • September 1996...
...His support for goals and timetables led him to oppose the Dole-Canady bill, which would have eliminated all federal race and gender preferences...
...Charles Rangel smiled and said, "Let him have his pie and ice cream before he leaves...
...I have less money now than when I entered politics...
...Besides making them receptive to demagogues like Farrakhan, the CBC's search for authenticity has made its members strong supporters of congressional redistricting designed to create authentic black voting enclaves that can be relied upon to elect authentic black politicians...
...During the negotiations over President Bush's iggi civil rights bill, Franks did not side with the conservatives...
...Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics Larry J. Sabato and Glenn R Simpson Times Books / 43o pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Christopher Caldwell...
...Unable to bear the sight of him, they resolved to force Franks to leave each caucus session after the 30 minute luncheon: As the clock ticked closer to Iz:3o PM, I was still eating my lunch...
...Money's Not the Worst of It: Who'll Reform the Reforms...
...But if Franks's book is flawed as a memoir, it is invaluable for its insights into the mindset of the Congressional Black Caucus-a group that is bipartisan in theory but liberalDemocratic in fact...
...I have only $ioo,ooo in the bank...
...Incredibly, Franks doesn't even attempt to account for it...
...Then there is his frequent invocation of God...
...You're not really a black congressman," Rep...
...ily, father who never went beyond the sixth grade, urban Catholic school education) Yale must have been a revelation...
...The real corruption we should worry about today, the authors opine, is the nearly ironclad system of incumbency protection consolidated by Democrats over six decades of rule and codified in the Campaign Finance Reforms of the 1970's...
...He has introduced legislation (the Franks amendment) that would eliminate race- and gender-based set-asides...
...Harold Ford of Tennessee told Franks during a caucus luncheon...
...The idea that only blacks could represent blacks and only whites could represent whites seemed an anathema to basic American principles," he writes...
...Yet Franks is widely reputed to be one of the worst bosses on Capitol Hill...
...Yet Franks's account of his college years focuses exclusively on his troubled relationship with Yale's basketball coach...
...Today, white Americans who endorse color blindness are viewed as conservatives, while black Americans who do so are frequently condemned as traitors to their race...
...What things...
...Our use of numerical standards in pursuit of equal opportunity has led ineluctably to the very quotas, guaranteeing equal results, that we initially wished to avoid...
...Everyone chuckled...
...It was truly news to me when I looked at myself in the mirror to realize that to some liberals I was not an authentic black...
...How did it come about...
...Why is it that, whereas most of his black political contemporaries have succumbed to the liberal Zeitgeist and supported Big Government, Franks stubbornly insists that "it's time we black Americans stopped looking to the government as the source of our redemption and started looking within our own souls...
...She also argued that blacks had no real representation unless they were represented by "authentic" black people...
...But while Franks is not, in the eyes of most of his black colleagues, authentically black, Louis Farrakhan apparently is...
...How does the system work...
...At the height of the Keating Five affair, California senator Alan Cranston complained he was being railroaded: "In every case of financial impropriety considered by the Senate throughout its history," said Cranston, "the alleged misconduct was the use of public office for a Senator's private profit...
...When he arrived at Yale, he says, he was a registered Democrat...
...Key's definition of graft-"abuse of power for personal or party profit" - and stipulates that the very worst corruption doesn't increase a politician's bank account...
...I bet he doesn't have chocolate ice cream on top of his apple pie," chortled Brooklyn's Major Owens...
...tered...
...he has been forthright in his denunciation of racially gerrymandered congressional districts...
...Many Republicans, recognizing that racial redistricting would actually make it easier for them to win in areas that had gone Democratic in the past, cynically endorsed this liberal initiative...
...The greatest strength of Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson's Dirty Little Secrets is that it takes V.0...
...Funny how quickly political fashions change...
...For someone of Franks's background (working-class fam...
...Or take Franks's political evolution...
...Politicians love this definition of corruption, because none of them care about money-they care about power...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL, a former TAS senior editor, is senior writer at the Weekly Standard...
...in between, he is constantly praying, meditating, reading the Bible, and applauding God for backing his political career...
...If they cared about money, they'd be businessmen...
...I am against set-asides...
...But I am for outreach which includes the use of goals to measure progress...
...Take his four years at Yale...
...Even Franks's position on affirmative action is not quite what it seems...
...So is a preoccupation with the writings of Lani Guinier, President Clinton's initial nominee (later dropped) for assistant attorney general for civil rights: Guinier had developed an elaborate set of schemes that would give blacks voting power disproportionate to their numbers...
...I'll pass on both," I said and quickly departed...
...The postWatergate reforms richest in unintended consequences were the limits on individual and Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions...
...I n 1989, when House Speaker Jim Wright was being driven from politics by a Newt Gingrich-led investigation of his finances, he called journalist John Barry into his office and burst into tears...
...In the sixties, if you supported Martin Luther King's call for a color-blind society you were a liberal...
...Finally, and most seriously, the reforms affected the way we are governed: The most opportunistic of the post-Watergate innovations in Congress was the proliferation of subcommittees, on the pretext of...
...Today, while continuing to denounce racial set-asides, Franks nonetheless favors "flexible goals and timetables...
...and he has been one of the few black politicians publicly to denounce Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan...
...By making money more expensive, such limits increased the influence of big donors, since candidates could not waste their time scrambling after small ones -they had to be extra-solicitous of those interests (usually PACs) that could max out at $5,000 per election and $io,ooo per cycle...
...By starving the campaigns of money, the reforms also put a premium on "soft money" (the lessaccountable campaign funding that comes from party treasuries rather than individual campaigns) and "independent expenditures" from nominally nonpartisan groups, which often as not are in the back pocket of party interests...
...Unfortunately, Searching for the Promised Land answers neither of these questions...
...That's a major transformation...
...To his great credit, Franks-whose dis...
...According to Franks, this distinction between real and unreal blacks is widespread within the CBC...
...Nor did God remember to tell Franks, whose pro-choice position on abortion goes unmentioned in his book, that He disapproves of infanticide...
...Searching for the Promised Land: An African American's Optimistic Odyssey Gary Franks HarperCollins-ReganBooks zo7pages / $z4 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan...
...he mut...
...2. the importance of soft money and independent expenditures made campaign financing considerably more secretive than it had been previously...
...Let them have what they want...
...after all, "he doesn't care about money...
...Republicans suc ceeded in overcoming it in 1994 not because the system became fairer, but because they possessed an organizational genius in Newt Gingrich, who himself mastered the rules of the corrupt campaign system and turned them to his advantage...
...Unfortunately, trying to abolish quotas while maintaining goals and timetables is like trying to destroy Iraq's unconventional arsenal while leaving Saddam Hussein in power: It can't be done...
...As Laurence Silberman, who helped devise the goals and timetables approach when he served as Nixon's Undersecretary of Labor, later wrote: "I now realize that the distinction we saw between goals and timetables on the one hand, and unconstitutional quotas on the other, was not valid...
...to ensure that employers are making a genuine effort to mend the practices of the past...
...Gary Franks, who represents Connecticut's Fifth District in Congress, is one such "traitor...
...To say that Franks's decision to join the CBC dismayed the rest of the group is putting it mildly...
...3. the shortage of money in absolute terms fostered bang-for-the-buck television-based campaigning...
...Even more than his opposition to racial set-asides, Franks' outspoken criticism of racial redistricting enraged the other members of the CBC...
...But when he was elected to Congress, twenty years later, it was as a conservative Republican...
...This had at least four highly negative consequences: 1. Given the special position of labor, which could use large parts of union dues for political organizing, the "reforms" gave, at least until the 198o's, a huge leg up to the Democrats...
...Not surprisingly, once in power, the GOP has been slow to dismantle such an efficient instrument of power-consolidation...
...What makes Franks tick...
...To my amazement," writes Franks, "I sensed a tremendous amount of support for the Nation of Islam within the caucus...
...The laughter grew louder...
...We never even learn what subject he majored in...
...I am against quotas," he explained...
...JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...
...Similarly President Clinton's allies claim his Whitewater shenanigans can't be corrupt...
...I saw myself as a mediator," he writes, "between extreme liberals such as Senator Edward Kennedy, who I felt wanted outright quotas on the bill, and extreme conservatives such as Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois, who obviously had other things in mind...
...A mediocre book that touches on important issues but grapples with none of them in any depth, it leaves the reader with the uneasy feeling that Congressman Franks is holding lots of things back...
Vol. 29 • September 1996 • No. 9
