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pinebox

(5,761 posts)
Sun Jan 31, 2016, 01:26 PM Jan 2016

The Clinton's Race Games

Wow.....just wow. I am not saying a word on this and instead will just let the article speak for itself.

The Clintons’ sordid race game: No one will say it, but the Clintons’ rise was premised on repudiating black voters
Here's what Bill and Hillary mean to me: Sister Souljah, welfare reform, Ricky Ray Rector and the crime bill

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/31/the_clintons_sordid_race_game_no_one_will_say_it_but_the_clintons_rise_was_premised_on_repudiating_black_voters/

It may be a generational thing—I was born in 1967—but this is what Hillary and Bill Clinton will always mean to me: Sister Souljah, Ricky Ray Rector, welfare reform, and the crime bill. And beyond—really, behind—all that, the desperate desire to win over white voters by declaring to the American electorate: We are not the Party of Jesse Jackson, we are not the Rainbow Coalition.

Many of the liberal journalists who are supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy are too young to remember what the Clintons did to American politics and the Democratic Party in the 1990s. But even journalists who are old enough seem to have forgotten just how much the Clintons’ national ascendancy was premised on the repudiation of black voters and black interests. This was a move that was both inspired and applauded by a small but influential group of Beltway journalists and party strategists, who believed making the Democrats a white middle-class party was the only path back to the White House after wandering for 12 years in the Republican wilderness.

But for me, it’s as vivid as yesterday. I still remember Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg’s American Prospect article (reposted in 2005), which claimed that the Democrats were “too identified with minorities and special interests to speak for average Americans.” Black people not being average Americans, you see. This article, American Prospect co-editor Paul Starr proudly proclaimed last year, is “widely recognized for its influence on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign” in 1992. Starr, incidentally, just penned a [link:http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-2016-213560|defense in Politico of Hillary Clinton as the only serious Democratic candidate.
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Maybe I remember this all because it happened at a formative period of my life, during my first years in graduate school. My roommate and closest friend throughout those years was Paul Frymer, who’s now a political science professor at Princeton. Paul’s dissertation—which he began to write in the apartment we shared on Canner Street in New Haven, and which formed the basis for his now classic book “Uneasy Alliances,” which shows how the combination of racism and the two-party system encourages African-American voters to be “captured” (taken for granted) by one of the parties—was born out of the tremendous frustration and anger many of us felt about the wrenching transformation the Clintons imposed upon the Democratic Party.
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PatrickforO

(14,516 posts)
1. Thank you for the post. It is a good article and will make some Third Way types uneasy indeed.
Sun Jan 31, 2016, 01:33 PM
Jan 2016

I can also remember the racism in 2008. Of course Obama's been subjected to systematic racist hatemongering from the right wing his whole time in office and it makes me want to puke.

But you wouldn't expect it of a Democrat. That's why I'm for Bernie.

MisterP

(23,730 posts)
2. it's how Rahm won Chicago: he told the North Side "I'll keep the South Siders away from you"
Sun Jan 31, 2016, 03:55 PM
Jan 2016

and the South Side "do you KNOW what they're saying about you on the North Side": since they didn't compare notes he won both as constituencies

boil people down to pushable buttons, demobilize, demoralize

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