Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (52 page)

Especially disheartening to many Americans was the polarization along racial lines that the case continued to reveal about attitudes toward the criminal justice system. It replicated the divide that had been exposed over reactions to police actions in the arrest of Rodney King in 1991. Not long after Simpson was arrested, 63 percent of whites opined that he would get a fair trial. Sixty-nine percent of blacks disagreed. When he was acquitted of first-degree murder charges in October—after the jurors had deliberated for only three hours—polls revealed similarly sharp divisions along racial lines. Jubilant celebrations erupted in black sections of L.A. “The Juice is loose,” blacks rejoiced. African American law students at Howard University, having anxiously awaited the verdict, broke out in prolonged cheering. White law students—like virtually all whites in America—were stunned and disbelieving. As since the beginning of the Simpson case dramatics, racial polarization remained strong.
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W
AS THERE HOPE THAT RACE RELATIONS
in the United States might improve in the future? The answer depended partly on America’s public schools, where it was hoped that subsequent generations of minority students might do better.

Formidable racial problems, however, continued to plague the public schools, especially in inner-city areas. Stubbornly persistent residential segregation, along with conservative Supreme Court decisions that terminated a number of school desegregation orders, combined to promote resegregation of public education in the 1990s.
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In 1988, when the long and arduous drive to desegregate public schools had peaked, 43 percent of black students in the South had attended public schools that were 50 percent or more white. Thirteen years later the percentage of southern blacks in such schools had skidded to 30—roughly the same as it had been in the early 1970s. “Tracking”—the placement of white students in college-bound classes and of blacks in less demanding courses—increased in many of these schools. Thanks to very high concentrations of African Americans in many large cities of the North and Midwest, segregated schools were more common there than they were in the South. Similar trends pushing greater school segregation separated Latinos from whites.
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The quality of a large number of predominantly black and Latino inner-city schools at the end of the twentieth century was scandalously poor. Why was this so? After all, real per pupil spending for American schools, including most schools with high percentages of minority students, had increased over time, and student-teacher ratios had improved. Average SAT test scores crept upward in the 1990s.
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Thus it was at best an oversimplification to say—as many Americans did—that public schools in general were a great deal “worse” than they had been in the Good Old Days.
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Most black students by the 1990s had access to considerably better educational resources than they had had in the days of Jim Crow, or in the 1970s, when desegregation had finally begin to take place. In the 1990s, as earlier, American schools steered steadily higher percentages of their pupils, including blacks, through to graduation, and then to colleges and universities.
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The percentage of American white people twenty-five years of age or older who had graduated from four-year colleges or universities increased from 11.3 in 1970 to 26.1 in 2000. The percentage of similarly educated blacks who were twenty-five years of age or older rose during the same thirty years from 4.4 to 16.5.
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If anything comparable to the encouragingly high rate of these increases for African Americans—nearly 400 percent over the previous thirty years—were to persist in the near future, historically large gaps in educational attainment could narrow.
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As in the past, however, more than 90 percent of money for public schools came from state and local coffers. A substantial amount of this money continued to nourish urgently demanded but expensive programs such as special and bilingual education. These were among the many rights that had been mandated by the federal government since the 1970s and that had therefore become available to millions of students. In 2004, 6.5 million public school students were in special education classes, but these were not mainstreaming programs, and for the most part they did not feature academic work aimed at college placement. Despite the inching ahead of average test scores, it was also obvious that millions of American children, especially minority children, graduated from high school unprepared for challenging college-level work. Some 75 percent of American universities at the turn of the century felt obliged to offer an array of remedial academic services.

Large inequities in per pupil spending—across states, across districts, across schools within districts—continued to characterize America’s public education system. Per student spending for predominantly black and Latino schools in many central-city areas lagged behind spending for largely white schools in the suburbs. “Back of the classroom” disorder disrupted learning in many of these inner-city schools, some of which relied on poorly trained teachers. Substantial black-white gaps in a number of standardized test scores, having narrowed slightly in the 1970s and early 1980s, increased in the 1990s. These gaps were a little larger than those separating Latino and white students. Studies of these and other test results confirmed two long-standing facts about America’s public education: The lower the social class of the student, the lower the scores; and blacks and Latinos had considerably lower scores on the average than whites at every level of social class.
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The educational difficulties of black and (to a lesser extent) Latino pupils in America in the 1990s were profoundly demoralizing. Reformers called for a variety of changes: eliminating racially biased questions from standardized tests, spending more money per pupil on classroom education and tutoring for minority children, strengthening the hand of principals and superintendents, improving the training of teachers, lowering class sizes, raising expectations about what students could accomplish, and—above all—raising academic standards, as measured by rigorous testing.
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By the late 1990s, demands for “standards-based” public education that had spread since publication in 1983 of
A Nation at Risk
grew more insistent.
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Losing faith in the public education system, many black parents by the late 1990s were joining white parents in pressing for voucher programs that would offer them money for tuition at private schools. Other parents swelled a chorus of voices calling for charter schools. Some minority leaders stopped struggling for integration of public education, preferring instead to agitate for well-supported neighborhood schools with properly trained black or Latino teachers. There, they thought, their children might learn better—or at least experience less racial tension than they had had to confront in the “educational dead zones” of their inner-city schools.
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Because the socio-economic problems facing many minority children continued to be formidable, though, little seemed to change for the better in their schools, which should not have been expected to compensate for these large and fundamental handicaps. A characteristically discouraged assessment of the situation, focusing on the still substantial racial gaps in academic achievement, concluded in 2001: “W.E.B. Du Bois correctly predicted that the problem of the twentieth century would be the color line. The problem of the twenty-first century might be the color line in academic achievement.”
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F
OR ALL THESE REASONS
, the 1990s were truly the best of times and the worst of times for black Americans. Not surprisingly, therefore, African Americans conveyed mixed opinions and feelings to the many pollsters who asked them about their lives. These opinions, like those of whites at the time, indicated that most blacks (like most recent immigrants) subscribed to a core set of beliefs: that hard work, if combined with equal opportunity, would lead to social and economic advancement in America. Three-quarters of blacks in the economically prosperous late 1990s professed to be satisfied with their standard of living. Some 60 percent said that they had not personally experienced discrimination. A majority anticipated good futures for their children. Only a small percentage told pollsters that they were bitter or alienated. Responses such as these suggested that a great many blacks—like other minorities—probably continued to embrace some versions of the American Dream.
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But the polls also exposed negative responses. While most African Americans said that they had not personally suffered from racial discrimination, they did believe that racism—in general—was alive and well in the United States. Harassment and discrimination, they said, were afflicting
other
black people, notably in “racial profiling” by white police. This sort of response—one of “I’m OK—They’re Not”—echoed those of other Americans in the 1990s. People repeatedly said, for instance, that their congressional representatives were doing a good job (in part because of that belief—and because of gerrymandered districts—incumbents were very hard to beat) but that Congress as a body lay prostrate under the heel of special interests. Most Americans also reported that their own children attended good schools but that public education in general was poor. Critical but often conflicted responses about these and many other American institutions made it a relatively simple (but often distorted) matter for Jeremiahs to conclude that the nation was deeply divided and declining.

The poll responses of minorities, notably African Americans, were revealing in another way. Though blacks advanced faster economically during the 1990s than in any other decade in United States history, many remained restless, often dissatisfied. As one careful scholar concluded, blacks were “succeeding more and enjoying it less.”
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Feelings such as these indicated that the majority of African Americans, like most whites, continued to have high expectations. The more rights and comforts that they gained, the more they desired. Moreover, most black Americans (and Latinos) knew that they had a long road to travel before they might catch up with whites. Acutely aware of their relative deprivation, they understood all too well that an arduous trek lay ahead.

10
Political Wars of the Early Clinton Years

William Jefferson Clinton, an admirer of FDR and JFK, often thought about his place in American history. Remarkably self-absorbed, he yearned to be remembered as a great president. Throughout his frequently troubled time in office he continued to hope that he could reverse the anti-government tide with which his Republican predecessors had ridden to power. In his first inaugural address he proclaimed: “Let us resolve to make our government a place for what Franklin Roosevelt called ‘bold, persistent experimentation,’ a government of our tomorrows, not our yesterdays. Let us give this capital back to the people to whom it belongs.”
¹

He cared above all about domestic policies. Having worked on these matters for twelve years as governor of Arkansas, he was knowledgeable about even the smallest details of many of them. He had a quick intelligence and a capacious memory. Whatever the subject—Social Security, health care, the minimum wage, taxes, trade, welfare, education, obscure social programs—Clinton appeared to have an amazing command of information. He loved to talk, sometimes in college-like bull sessions with staffers that ran far into the night, about the intricacies of government policies and about ways that government—his government—might improve the lot of Americans in need.

The new president possessed extraordinary political skills. Wherever he went, he seemed totally at ease, eager to shake hands and exchange a few words with anyone within reach. Having grown up around black people in Arkansas, he was especially comfortable among African Americans. The novelist Toni Morrison, impressed, said he was the nation’s first black president. Like JFK, his idol, he radiated a personal magnetism that drew people to him, and he possessed a physical presence that enabled him to dominate almost any room he entered. Clinton also had seemingly inexhaustible energy. He was constantly on the move, and he gave hundreds of speeches. Though he could be long-winded, he was normally an articulate and compelling extemporaneous speaker. Like Reagan, he projected great enthusiasm and optimism. As a discerning biographer emphasized, Clinton as campaigner and politician was a “Natural.”
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Clinton was almost desperately eager to please. In the manner of many fellow boomers who were comfortable with open displays of emotion, he was quick to touch, hug, and reassure his fellow Americans. “I feel your pain,” he told anguished people. His yearning to be liked struck some contemporary observers as neurotic—a compulsion so powerful that it led him to say nearly all things to all people and to dither before making decisions that might offend anyone. Clinton fretted over matters small and large, garrulously rehashing pros and cons in drawn-out meetings, and sometimes reversing himself. Partly for these reasons, he was habitually late for appearances, and he was a careless administrator who greatly distressed his aides. As Michiko Kakutani of the
New York Times
noted in 1998, Clinton was “emotionally needy, indecisive, and undisciplined.”
³

His need to please, however, seemed over time to become a political asset. Slowly but increasingly, millions of Americans appeared to identify with him, regarding him—warts and all—as an unusually caring and sympathetic man. As Kakutani wrote in 2001, Clinton was America’s “first user-friendly president. . . . The president as the guy next door—an Oprah guest who feels our pain because he struggles like the rest of us with his weight, his marriage, and his golf game.” She added, “In his adolescent craving to be liked . . . and the tacky spectacle of his womanizing, Mr. Clinton gave us a presidency that straddled the news pages and the tabloid gossip columns.”
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Though many of these characteristics helped him politically, they did not endear him to people who had to work under him. Aides who marveled at Clinton’s political skill or who approved of his policies nonetheless resented not only his indecisiveness and sloppiness but also his unpredictability and hot temper. They came to believe that he was unusually self-indulgent, inconsiderate, self-pitying, and narcissistic. If it suited his purposes, he might lie to them. If things went wrong, he might fly into a temper tantrum and blame long-suffering people around him.
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While he was skilled at “feeling the pain” of voters, he was often a poor listener who dominated conversations. What mattered above all to Clinton, these aides concluded, was advancing his own political standing.

Like Nixon, who was in most ways a very different man, Clinton was a permanent campaigner who never stopped thinking about reelection and about the polls. Especially after 1994, he relied heavily on the advice of Dick Morris, a politically opportunistic guru and student of polls who periodically helped him refashion his ideas so as to move with the ever shifting currents of popular opinion.
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The president spent great amounts of time fund-raising, at which his skills were outstanding, and trying to manipulate the reporters who covered his activities. “Slick Willie,” as many people called him, was a master of “spin”—an art that earlier presidents had practiced but that he often elevated to new heights. Most reporters recognized that Clinton, even more than most politicians, was using them, and they never warmed up to him. Members of Congress, too, resented his politically driven self-absorption. An aide to House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt observed—without revealing his own name—that “the thing that drives Dick [Gephardt] absolutely crazy is that every time they have a conversation, Clinton spends all his time talking about polling numbers.”
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Though reporters exposed Clinton’s personal flaws, they did not break the political hold that he managed to gain on voters over time. This was a distinctively personal hold: Clinton did not succeed in building up his party. Democrats lost ground to the GOP in the 1990s. Weaving his way through dangerously partisan minefields, he nevertheless survived a great many missteps and left the White House in January 2001 with unusually favorable job performance ratings. After he had departed from the White House, many Americans said that they missed his colorful and highly entertaining presence.
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W
HEN
C
LINTON TOOK OFFICE
in January 1993, he had reason to hope that he might expand liberal social policies. To help him do so, he could call on a host of aides: Thanks to the growth of government since the 1960s, the presidential and vice-presidential staffs included more than 800 people.
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Clinton might also expect to enjoy a reasonably friendly relationship with Congress, where Democratic majorities of 258 to 176 in the House and 57 to 43 in the Senate seemed reliable.

The president recognized that most Americans, notwithstanding their grousing about politicians, continued to expect Washington to
do
things for them. Over time government, notwithstanding conservative resistance, had slowly responded. In 1970, non-discretionary entitlements of various sorts (notably the largest, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) had amounted to 30 percent of the federal budget; by 1995, they accounted for 60 percent.
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While a leveling off of defense spending after the end of the Cold War helped boost the percentages allotted for domestic programs such as these, the main source of change came from slow but real increases in spending for social purposes. The total expended (in constant 1999 dollars) for the most important programs such as Social Security and Medicare had tripled between 1970 and 1999.
¹¹
The value of income-tested benefits (in constant 2000 dollars) nearly doubled in these years.
¹²

Clinton had cause to anticipate popular support for expansion of such programs. As in 1977, when liberals had cheered the end of eight years of Republican control of the White House, they had high expectations that the new administration might reverse the conservative initiatives set forth during the twelve previous years of Republican. In particular, they hoped to stem the tide of income inequality, which had been rising since the 1970s. An important cause of this inequality was the increase in the numbers of immigrants, but liberals correctly maintained that some of it emanated from other sources, notably Reagan’s tax cuts.

Liberals had other expectations from the new administration. Popular complaints concerning whopping corporate salaries, the woes of the Rust Belt, neglect of infrastructure, and the spread of low-paying, “dead-end” service sector jobs, encouraged reformers to argue that more generous social policies, notably some form of national health insurance, would secure considerable popular support.
¹³
Two widely held beliefs underpinned these familiar arguments and assumptions. One was the conviction that the federal government had a responsibility to advance the rights and entitlements of deserving people. The other was the sense that the government had the capacity to do so.

Clinton was too shrewd a political navigator to think that he would enjoy clear sailing. After all, having received only 43 percent of the vote in 1992, he lacked a popular mandate to chart a bold new course, and a host of obstacles—the same that had frequently frustrated liberals since the late 1960s—loomed in his way. Though the once powerful Democratic electoral coalition forged by FDR still showed some signs of life, notably in urban areas inhabited by substantial percentages of unionized workers, minorities, and low-income people, a number of economic and demographic trends continued to favor Republicans and conservative Democrats. By the early 1990s, a majority of Americans lived in suburban areas—more than double the percentage in the early 1950s. Rising numbers of people, including a great many white families with young children, were moving to developments in exurbs, once rural areas that were being bulldozed into sites for shopping centers and subdivisions. Having escaped the cities, exurbanites were more likely to identify with the haves than with the have-nots. Many, voicing a faith in self-reliance, opposed expansion of means-tested social programs.
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It was also questionable whether the class resentments that had helped to create the New Deal coalition were as sharp as they had been in the past. While most labor union leaders continued to support liberal programs, their clout had been weakening since the 1950s. By 2001, only 13.5 percent of American workers (and but 9 percent of those in the private sector) belonged to unions.
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The level of personal and family income in America, moreover, was no longer as reliable a predictor of partisan preference as it had been. As early as the late 1960s, when Nixon had highlighted social and cultural issues—many of them involving race—rising numbers of white working-class people had begun to turn to the GOP. In the 1980s, many of these people had proudly called themselves Reagan Democrats. By contrast, increasing numbers of middle- and upper-middle-class professionals—teachers, professors in law and the humanities and social sciences, people engaged in the creative arts, journalists, public interest and personal injury lawyers—had come to favor liberal policies and to vote Democratic in national elections. In 1996, Clinton carried thirteen of the seventeen most affluent congressional districts in America.
¹⁶

Regional animosities, stoutly persisting amid the supposedly all-centralizing tendencies of modern life, further threatened the aspirations of Democratic liberals. Progressive Democrats were strong in urban areas of the Northeast and the Pacific Coast, and in many industrial regions of the Midwest, but they had become increasingly vulnerable in most parts of the still rapidly growing and more politically conservative Sunbelt, where Republicans continued to gain during Clinton’s tenure in the White House. A majority of Americans living in the Plains states and in the Mountain West, though benefiting from a range of government programs—notably irrigation and power projects and farm subsidies—continued to complain about the influence, as they saw it, of “elitist” eastern liberals, environmentalists, and regulatory bureaucrats who told them how to run their lives. Many other westerners hotly opposed the surge of illegal immigration from Mexico. In Colorado some motorists proudly displayed bumper stickers: D
ON’T
C
ALIFORNICATE
C
OLORADO
.

Partisan warfare, already intense during the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, frequently seemed out of control during the Clinton years. As earlier, these partisan battles were not so deep-rooted in popular feelings as media accounts—ever highlighting conflict, scandal, and controversy—implied. On the contrary, the major parties had weakened over time, casualties of the rise of independent and split-ticket voting and of the entrepreneurial, candidate-centered, television-driven style of politics that had ascended since the 1960s. This “de-alignment” of parties, as political scientists tended to call it, revealed that the American people were less partisan than most of their elected representatives.

Still, there was no doubting that partisan rancor soured the political scene. Many conservatives developed a special loathing for Clinton—and for his wife, Hillary, a liberal lawyer and career woman who emerged as a highly visible adviser. They fumed at Clinton’s closeness—a pandering closeness, they thought—to the glitterati of Hollywood, many of whom contributed lavishly to the Democratic Party and gave highly enthusiastic backing to left-wing causes. Among these angry conservatives were radio talk-show hosts whose listeners numbered in the millions. By far the best known of these was Rush Limbaugh, who attracted an avid following estimated at 20 million people by the mid-1990s. Limbaugh reveled in ridiculing “feminazis” and “environmentalist wackos.”
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