Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (40 page)

Bush’s first Supreme Court nominee, David Souter in 1990, did not arouse opposition among congressional Democrats. Though Souter did not seem to be the passionate liberal that his recently retired predecessor, William Brennan, had been, he frequently sided with moderates and liberals on the Court. In an especially controversial case in 1992, Souter’s vote helped to produce a last-minute, five-to-four majority in a hotly contested decision that reaffirmed the essence of
Roe v. Wade
. Three of the five justices in this majority of five were appointees of Reagan and Bush.
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Advocates of choice, though still harassed by militants from organizations such as Operation Rescue, rejoiced that choice had survived.

On the other hand, Bush’s second nomination, of Clarence Thomas in 1991, provoked one of the nastiest congressional battles in years. Thomas, only forty-three years old at that time, was a relatively rare phenomenon: a black conservative. In selecting him, Bush and his advisers expected that liberals, while disapproving of Thomas’s conservative opinions, would think twice before rejecting an African American. But Thomas, as head of the EEOC and then as a federal judge, had opposed affirmative action procedures. Advocates of choice fretted that he would vote to overturn
Roe v. Wade
. The national boards of the NAACP and the Urban League opposed his nomination. They were appalled to think of such a conservative taking the “black seat” that Thurgood Marshall, “Mr. Civil Rights,” had filled since 1967.

Thomas’s road to confirmation in the Senate, already bumpy, became rocky when Anita Hill, a black law professor at the University of Oklahoma, charged that he had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at the EEOC. Her reluctant but startling testimony—which among other things revealed that Thomas looked at porn movies—infuriated his supporters. Thomas, denying Hill’s accusations, exclaimed hotly that he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.” Some Democrats, including a few liberals, worried about the wisdom of voting against a black nominee. Thomas’s nomination opened a rift between his supporters, most of them Republican men, and a great many women, black as well as white.

All but two of forty-six Republicans in the Senate ultimately voted for Thomas’s confirmation, which was finally approved, 52 to 48, in October 1991.
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But the partisan, often vicious fight—reminiscent in many ways of the battle against the nomination of Bork that had polarized the Senate in 1987—left bruises. Politically liberal women charged that the Senate, which was 98 percent male, had brushed aside Hill’s accusations concerning sexual harassment. They resolved to fight back at the polls, where in 1992 women succeeded in winning five Senate races and increasing their numbers in the House and in state legislatures. Encouraged, they hailed 1992 as “the Year of the Woman.”
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Hill’s accusations also highlighted the issue of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment lawsuits, which multiplied in number during the 1990s, further empowered the courts as arbiters of the rights revolution in American life.

While controversy over Thomas’s nomination was dominating the headlines, racial tensions were mounting in the Los Angeles area. In March 1991, highway police had given chase to a speeder, Rodney King, for 7.8 miles on the Foothill Freeway near San Fernando. When King, an African American, finally stopped and got out of his car, he resisted arrest by Los Angeles police. Hearing commotion outside, a nearby resident trained his home video camera on the confrontation, filming baton-wielding white policemen who subdued King by stunning and then beating him as he lay on the ground. Thanks to the tape, four policemen were charged with the beatings. The venue for the trial was moved to nearby Simi Valley, an area that was predominantly white and whose residents were known to be strong advocates of law and order.

The televised trial, which finally took place more than a year after King’s beating, captured a large audience throughout the greater Los Angeles area. Testimony revealed a number of damning facts about the LAPD—notably that it was shorthanded and that it did a poor job of training its officers—but the all-white jury from Simi County was ultimately convinced that the behavior of the LAPD was within California’s legal guidelines for handling unruly suspects like King. In April 1992, the jury found three of the policemen not guilty and deadlocked in the case of the fourth.

News of these verdicts immediately touched off rioting, looting, and burning in many parts of Los Angeles. Lasting four days, the rampaging left 55 people dead and 2,300 injured. Fires burned some 800 buildings to the ground and caused an estimated $1 billion in property damage. It was clear that a complex of class and ethnic tensions had exacerbated those that already divided blacks and whites. Minority groups in Los Angeles, like those in many urban areas, confronted serious social problems, including poverty, family breakup, and schools that had difficulty educating inner-city pupils. Violent gangs patrolled minority-dominated neighborhoods and fought over drug dealing and other matters. Unemployment was especially high in the area, in part because of post–Cold War cutbacks that depressed the region’s aerospace industry. Many blacks in Los Angeles resented the rising numbers of Latinos and Asians who were competing with them for jobs. Latinos, too, felt ill treated and angry: Half of the arrestees were Latinos. Many rioters had targeted Korean American and other Asian American storekeepers, whose economic progress—and allegedly hostile treatment of non-Asians of color—infuriated many of the Latinos and blacks engaged in the disturbances.

The riot, though frightening, did not necessarily show that American race relations in general were deteriorating.
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Still, it was evident that the expectations of many African Americans, whose hopes had greatly risen in the 1960s, continued to outpace the gains that they had made since that time. And it was indisputable that volatile relations between Los Angeles blacks and whites, notably white police, had ignited the rioting. Widely shown footage of blacks dragging a white truck driver out of his cab, beating him unconscious, and kicking him while he lay on the street appalled television viewers throughout the country. The riots, which were the worst since the draft riots of the Civil War era, were followed by interracial violence in a number of cities, including Atlanta, Birmingham, Chicago, and Seattle.
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T
HE LOS ANGELES RIOTS CLEARLY INDICATED
that racial tensions, accompanied by divisions of ethnicity and class, remained strong and troubling. Bush, however, did not imagine that these troubles would greatly affect his political prospects for reelection. Having been buoyed by the fantastic approval ratings that had lifted him after the Gulf War, he expected to soar safely into a second term. Two burdens helped to drag him down to earth: splits within his party, and a serious recession. Together, these enabled one of the most charismatic, intelligent, politically shrewd, slick, and personally reckless politicians in American history to drive him out of the White House.

The split within the GOP, which pitted conservatives against moderates such as Bush, owed some of its development to the ending of the Cold War. During that long and grim conflict, anti-communist feeling in the United States had done much to boost the political fortunes of Republicans, who posed as the firmest foes of the Soviet Union. Anti-Communism had served as a glue to hold diverse conservative Republicans together. With the threat from the Soviet Union a matter of history, domestic issues moved more to the fore, thereby offering Democrats a better shot at winning. Anti-Communist Republicans, deprived of a common bond, found it easier to squabble among themselves. In these unanticipated ways, the end of the Cold War improved Democratic political opportunities in the 1990s.

A more calamitous source of GOP divisions in 1992 dated to the summer of 1990, when Bush had decided that he had to stem the escalating federal debt. In current dollars, this had risen from $909 billion in 1980 to $3.2 trillion in 1990. Thanks in part to the enormous costs of the government bailout of savings-and-loan institutions, the federal deficit, which totaled $153 billion in fiscal 1989, leapt to $221 billion a year later.
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Bush thereupon worked out a tax hike and deficit reduction package that promised over time to reduce the federal debt by as much as $500 billion. Marginal tax rates in the top bracket were scheduled to increase from 28 to 31.5 percent.

Many Democrats welcomed this deal, but supply-siders were outraged. Some pointed out that federal expenditures in the early 1990s, though at record highs in dollar terms, represented roughly the same percentages of GDP (21.8 percent in 1990) as had existed in the mid-1970s. Conservatives were especially outraged that Bush had gone back on his pledge in 1988: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” The
New York Post
headlined, “Read My Lips: I Lied.” In October, when Congress finally enacted the deal—the so-called Budget Enforcement Act—large majorities of Republicans voted against it. Following congressional elections a month later, when the GOP lost seven seats in the House and one in the Senate, these conservatives angrily blamed Bush for weakening the Republican Party.
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Whether the deal had great economic effects is unclear. Thanks in part to inexorable increases in government entitlements, and in part to continuing costs of the S&L bailout, federal expenditures rose in the next few years, and at roughly the same rates as earlier. The annual federal deficit climbed to an all-time high of $290 billion in fiscal 1992, before descending at last in the mid-1990s. The tax increases, however, had enduring political consequences. Led by Representative Newt Gingrich, a firebrand Republican from Georgia, conservative Republicans could scarcely contain their fury at the president. The budget deal widened a rift within the party.

The recession began to emerge in 1990 and lasted until mid-1991, when recovery very slowly took place. As usual, explanations for the slump varied. Some blamed the end of the Cold War, which caused modest cutbacks in defense spending. Others, including Bush loyalists, criticized Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who they said was slow to lower interest rates that would have countered or prevented the economic slowdown. Other observers pointed out that the economy had improved every year since 1982—a recession was to be expected sooner or later. Whatever the causes, the decline was severe. An estimated 4.5 million Americans lost their jobs, including many who had been members of the middle classes. Contemporaries spoke of a “white-collar recession.” Unemployment jumped from 5.9 percent in 1989 to a peak of 7.8 percent in mid-1991. This was the highest rate in ten years.

Bad economic news dominated many headlines in 1991 and 1992. AT&T fired 100,000 workers, GM 74,000. Pan American and Eastern Airlines went under, throwing 48,000 people out of work. Japan, though beginning to lose its competitive edge, still seemed to threaten America’s economic hegemony. In 1991, Matsushita, a Japanese corporation, paid $6.4 billion to buy MCA, which owned Universal Studios and MCA Records. Former senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, who was making a run for the Democratic presidential nomination, exclaimed, “The Cold War is over, and Japan won.”

In early 1991, with Bush enjoying high ratings in the aftermath of the Gulf War, Tsongas was the only Democrat in the field, but as the economy wobbled, others entered the fray. They included former California governor Jerry Brown, Senator Robert Kerrey of Nebraska, who had won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, and L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia, who in 1989 had become the first African American since Reconstruction to win a gubernatorial race. In October, Bill Clinton, who had served six two-year terms as governor of Arkansas, joined the crowd of aspirants. By the end of the year, as Bush’s approval ratings were plunging to below 40 percent, the Democrats were excited about the prospects of winning in 1992.

Clinton soon emerged as the strongest challenger to Tsongas. Born in Hope, Arkansas, in 1946, he was named William Jefferson Blythe III, but his father had died in an auto crash three months before he was born, and he later took his surname from his stepfather, Roger Clinton. His home life—mostly in Hot Springs west of Little Rock—was far from serene, because his stepfather was an alcoholic who abused Bill’s mother.
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But Clinton was a bright and ambitious young man. He loved politics, idolized JFK, and yearned to be at the center of political life in Washington. He left home to attend Georgetown University, later won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, and then went to Yale Law School, where he met the classmate he would marry, Hillary Rodham. Returning to Arkansas, he plunged quickly into politics and won election as attorney general in 1976. In 1978, he won his first term as governor. Only thirty-two at the time, he was the youngest American governor in thirty years. Though he lost in 1980, he served five more two-year terms between 1982 and 1992. Only forty-five years old in late 1991, Clinton aspired to become the first product of the post–World War II boomer generation to win the presidency. He was twenty-one years younger than President Bush.

Extraordinarily well informed about domestic issues, Clinton had impressed many party leaders when he headed the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank that blossomed after 1989 within the ideologically centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Like a great many boomers, he took liberal positions on a range of social issues such as abortion and health care, but though he had a populist touch as a campaigner, he did not position himself on the left. A moderate as governor, he distanced himself as a presidential candidate from liberals like Mondale and Dukakis, who had been badly beaten in 1984 and 1988.