Clinton and the "Race Issue,"

...Perot garnered 20 percent of the white vote...

...Another feature of the establishment liberal characterization of Clinton is a tendency to make disparaging comments about those among Clinton's allies who believe that a careful use of preferential treatment in affirmative action is as democratically legitimate as the preferential treatment involved in longstanding affirmative assistance policies like subsidies and tax benefits for, say, all kinds of farmers (wheat, dairy, tobacco, and so on) or for a variety of businesses...

...This is the kind of liberalism that progressive intellectuals can both respect and accommodate, as Irving Howe recently observed in the New York Times Op Ed page...

...Clinton's progressivism on the diversity issue is also evident in the virtually revolutionary composition of his cabinet...

...News & World Report, gets a bit shrill in warning President Clinton about "Clinton's Enemies On The Left...

...I would rather characterize Clinton—Gore liberalism as pro-active or innovative—pragmatically respectful of establishment verities but also prone to test and extend their boundaries...

...My reading of Clinton's liberalism as pro-active differs fundamentally from Woodward's perspective...

...But more important perhaps than the overall black vote for Clinton was the role of that vote in key states...

...In short, they did not "Willie Hortonize" the racial issue...

...For example, job training programs will be designed without any racial labeling, as are day-care and Head Start programs...

...Progressive allies of Clinton and Gore (allies like Marian Wright Edelman and Jeff Faux of the Economic Policy Institute) know well the importance of deracializing these policy areas...

...I cannot, of course, predict a full innovative liberal trajectory for the Clinton administration in regard to racial issues...

...The Clinton-Gore ticket gained a landslide in the electoral college but only a plurality in the popular vote (43 percent to Bush's 38 percent and Perot's 19 percent...

...Is it a narrow realpolitik liberalism, hangdog in its deference to establishment pieties...

...Woodward takes the issue of affirmative action and looks for comments from Clinton that reflect support for civil rights policies but, in Woodward's words, "make no separate case for the rights of racial minorities...

...Such a projection would be naive...

...As Woodward puts it: Clinton will undoubtedly be challenged by sincere advocates of preferential discrimination—depending on how far his administration goes in reversing the policy...

...Electoral analysts consider the black vote responsible for Clinton's narrow victories over Bush in Louisiana (46 percent to 42 percent), Georgia (44 percent to 43 percent), New Jersey (43 percent to 41 percent), and Ohio (40 percent to 39 percent...

...Clinton has, I think, made it clear that Democrats must keep the American system true to its moral obligations to black folks...

...And during the last several months of the campaign the Clinton machinery allocated at least $5 million to Jackson himself for registration and voter-turnout activity...

...A U.S...

...Projecting the future character of the Clinton administration's interaction with African Americans and their major problems (poverty, inner-city education, and family crises, high unemployment, and so on) depends partly on one's understanding of the importance to Clinton's victory of the black vote...

...and the new-style Democrats (like Clinton himself and his friends at the Democratic Leadership Council), who . . . speak of . . . learning from mistakes of their past and the experience of conservatives...

...I call the book curious because, though penned by two ostensibly progressive intellectuals, Chain Reaction spooned up a lot of cynical formulations regarding the racial issue that almost amounted to advising Democratic candidates to "Willie Hortonize" their way back into the White House...

...Clinton understands something about today's America that conservatives and establishment liberals fail to grasp—that America cannot fulfill its democratic destiny without first fulfilling its moral obligation to its maltreated citizens, African Americans, and that in the core of American society there is a growing desire to fulfill our democratic destiny, especially in regard to women, blacks, class equity, and the environment...

...President Clinton's boldness in selecting this cabinet is not the stuff of establishment liberalism...

...And it depends even more upon how one understands SPRING • 1993 • 151 Clinton Proposes, We Respond the nature of Clinton's liberalism...

...C. Vann Woodward, writing in the February 1, 1993 issue of the New Republic, offers an approving view of Clinton as a narrow realpolitik liberal...

...None of the black cabinet members holds a "token black" post (for example, HUD...

...Yet I think there are already features about the Clinton administration that suggest that we can expect a serious endeavor toward pro-active liberalism in regard to black-related policy issues...

...Helping Clinton to place the Reagan Democrats at the center of the campaign was the goal of Thomas and Mary Edsall's curious book Chain Reaction...

...Clinton and Gore also had a keen sense of the moral limits that liberal and progressives must always apply to their pragmatism, moral limits not apparent from my reading of Chain Reaction...

...Bush won the white vote over Clinton, 41 percent to 39 percent...

...They had their own understanding of America's pathological racist legacy—an understanding leavened by a sensitive grasp of how racism has ravaged African American lives...

...In addition to three women, including the first woman attorney general, the Clinton cabinet has four African Americans and two Hispanic Americans...

...Three hold posts relating to systemic economic processes (Commerce, Energy, and Agriculture) and all hold positions relating to processes basic to all class levels among African Americans...

...For one thing, as Andrew Hacker points out in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, the Clinton administration, influenced by Professor William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago, is seeking to deracialize a variety of issues that touch on black American concerns...

...Only the Jewish vote (78 percent) matched the black vote for Clinton, and the Latino vote came in a strong third (62 percent), with the Asian-American vote lagging badly (35 percent...

...Two shrewd liberal southern politicians like Clinton and Gore didn't really need the Edsalls' formulations to guide their campaign...

...There are likely to be conflicts to be resolved between the old-style Democrats (like his wife, Hillary, and her close friend Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund), who strive to expand welfare benefits, job training, free health care and help for disadvantaged black people...

...Above all Clinton morally leavened his quest for a new Democratic demeanor that would return Democrats to the White House: he refused to sacrifice the Democratic party's soul on the neoracist altar of "Willie Hortonism...

...So a strong majority of the white voters again deserted the Democratic candidate, but this vote was split among two conservative candidates, thereby weakening the white vote's ultimate impact...

...They know that Clinton's lifespan as an innovative liberal president will depend on his bringing into the Democratic voting column large numbers of the politically inert white poor 152 • DISSENT Clinton Pruses, We Respond (some fifteen million Americans) as well as the white working class...

...A strong black vote for Clinton was absolutely necessary, and he got it: some 82 percent of the black vote went to the Clinton-Gore ticket...

...In a similar vein, Michael Barone, in the February 1 U.S...

...It is precisely this moral leavening that is absent from the establishment liberal view...

...Though Clinton's experience in the Democratic Leadership Council involved a turn toward political pragmatism, Clinton nonetheless salvaged a key element of pro-active liberalism...

...Clinton's strategists—both white and black— were well aware of the need for any successful Democratic presidential candidate to win back a significant number of "Reagan Democrats" (upper working-class and new middle-class white ethnics...

...Perhaps, but I think not...

...In short, in our racist legacy...

...For instance, the new Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, has favored advancing diversity on our campuses by restoring federal scholarship loans designated for minority students— a policy heavily restricted by the Bush administration...

...Policy deracialization, while in no way harmful to black concerns, will facilitate this goal...

...Finally, the Clinton administration has staked out for itself a distinctly activist liberal posture on the diversity issue...

...This splitting of the white vote was not in itself enough for a Clinton victory...

...Consequently, while the Clinton-Gore campaign refrained from anything approaching an embrace of the Reverend Jesse Jackson— evoking many complaints from Jackson about being neglected—Clinton and Gore nevertheless worked closely with mainstream black leadership groups (civil rights leaders, clergy, mayors, and leading black congresspersons such as John Lewis of Georgia and Charles Rangel of New York, among others...

...News and World Report poll (January 12-13, 1993) found that 75 percent of Americans approve of Clinton's "giving priority to women and minorities for high-level positions...

...Which means, of course, America's moral obligation to close the mobility gap between blacks and whites that has its origins both in slavery and in four generations of vicious institutional marginalization of blacks in American life...