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Subject: The New Black Powers;Younger Leaders Lining Up With Clinton Have Clout But No
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 92 09:14:31 EST
Message-ID: <60.1992Nov1.091431@AmeriCast.com>

The New Black Powers;Younger Leaders Lining Up With Clinton Have
Clout But No Consensus<By Juan Williams=

THE WAY Jesse Jackson sees it, Bill Clinton still owes him. And
if, as Jackson predicts, the Arkansas governor becomes the
nation's next president, he will find himself facing "another
struggle" with black America.

In Jackson's view, expressed recently to a reporter in Washington
state during a voter registration drive, Clinton is fooling him-
self if he attributes his potential victory to the distance he
put between himself and the older generation of black leaders.
Clinton's courting of a younger generation of black politicians,
ministers and professionals, says Jackson, was of minimal impor-
tance in securing black - or white - support. What will put Clin-
ton in office, Jackson said he told him in a phone conversation,
is the "inexplicably weak campaign" run by President Bush, "the
collapse of communism which weakened the Republicans' appeal to
the need for military strength and the bad economy which made
this year tailor-made for a Democrat." Jackson, meanwhile, has
muted his criticism of Clinton and, with the help of $1.2 million
from the Democratic National Committee, has continued his regis-
tration drives. If they succeed in translating high levels of
black support in opinion polls into actual votes for Clinton on
Tuesday, Jackson will feel still more that Clinton is in his
debt.

Of course, the newer crop of black leaders sees things different-
ly. "For a moment there, I almost asked Morris, vice president of
the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the nation's
major black think tank. "Jackson has been grumbling throughout
this campaign to almost no effect. The people doing very well in-
side the Clinton campaign, thank you, are the Southern congress-
men who lined up with Clinton early and stuck with him. Jackson
preempted those people (in '84 and

Still Jackson is right that, if elected, Clinton will be under
strong pressure from black Americans. And, precisely because
their concerns are more general in scope than in earlier elec-
tions, Clinton might find it hard to deliver.

Recent polls show upwards of 75 percent of black potential voters
supporting Clinton (a Wall Street Journal poll last week showed
that black support exceeded even that of self-identified Demo-
crats and liberals.) "The expectations should be high for Clin-
ton," said Rep. Michael Espy (D-Miss.), one of Clinton's strong-
est black supporters. "He's the first Democrat in the White House
since Carter. But he knows expectations will be high. He'll ful-
fill them."

But who in the black community would set the standard for ful-
fillment?

"Clinton's problem is he's going to be pressed from all sides,
for example, by Reagan Democrats as well as blacks, by young peo-
ple as well as all those businessmen who have been sending him
money," said John Hope Franklin, a black historian at Duke
University. And inside black America, as with so many of the
groups that would be looking to Clinton for delivery on his cam-
paign promises, Franklin sees many new competing layers of black
leadership.<In a Clinton victory parade, young black politicians
like Espy, Rep. Bill Jefferson (D-Missouri) and John Lewis (D-
Ga.) - all long-time Clinton backers - would be lined up well in
front of Jackson. They would be joined by an expected 14 new
black members, who would bring the number of black congressmen to
40 - an historic high. These new members will have unprecedented
power in the back rooms of Congress where deals are made on budg-
et and job issues, and their professed interests and expectations
differ greatly from those of earlier civil rights leaders who
traditionally sought funds for social programs specifically run
by civil rights organizations.  Black politicans close to Clinton
expect him to continue, as he did in his campaign, to address
black people as part of the larger society, not as a special in-
terest group. While Jackson and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) com-
plained that Clinton was ignoring blacks (Rangel told the Wall
Street Journal that Clinton was avoiding kissing black babies),
Clinton focused his appeal on the diverse political interests of
ever-larger numbers of middle-class black Americans (now a group
four times as large as in 1967).  Less narrowly focused on civil
rights issues, the black middle class is concerned with many of
the same economic, crime and educational issues affecting the
rest of America, according to survey data.

In fact, one recent poll done by the Joint Center and HBO found
that black Americans were evenly divided in describing themselves
as liberals, moderates and conservatives and were in agreement
with most white Americans in supporting the death penalty.
"Clinton has an advantage," suggested Louis Martin, a top adviser
to John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson on black America. "He didn't
have to make the open appeal to blacks that Democrats have had to
make in the past. He just had to run because people today know
more about who these people running for president are - Republi-
cans and Democrats. That's why I say race has been an issue in
this campaign but it has not had to be an out-in-the-open issue.
All Clinton had to do was focus on promises of equal opportunity,
especially in employment, and make the color line a secondary is-
sue."

"The strategy has to be to uplift everybody, man and woman and
child and that means more jobs, job training and education," said
Espy. "If you reduced this campaign to its essence, that is what
black people are talking about." Espy's contention is born out by
another Joint Center study released this week that shows that 38
percent of blacks (and 54 percent of whites) rate the economy the
primary issue of personal interest to them while only 5 percent
of blacks (and 1 percent of whites) consider race relations of
paramount interest.

The Clinton strategy of avoiding racial appeals has been so ef-
fective in denying Republicans their accustomed wedge issue with
whites that some GOP-ers now complain that Clinton is insuffi-
ciently attentive to blacks. Republicans point to Clinton's ad-
vertisements on workfare, the lack of a civil rights act in his
home state of Arkansas and the shortage of blacks in the upper
echelons of his campaign as evidence.

"The subtle message from Bill Clinton's TV ads down here is that
(the Democratic party) is no longer the party of welfare or poor
folks," said North Carolina businessman Robert Brown, a former
Nixon White House aide. "Nothing is more clear to most folks than
that Clinton has been pushing them behind the closet if not
throwing them out. I don't see Jesse, (former NAACP chief) Ben
Hooks or Joe Lowery (of the Southern Christian Leadership Confer-
ence) talking with him. The Clinton campaign people know what
they are doing. They are appealing to white people who are fairly
conservative and would otherwise go with Bush."

Many black Republicans are upset that their party did not follow
the late Lee Atwater's advice and do more to court under-35 black
voters who show a stronger than usual inclination to Republican
and conservative politics. Instead, divisive speeches by Pat
Buchanan put black Republicans in the tough position of defending
their allegiance to the GOP.

Nonetheless, Brown expects a surprise showing of latent black
support for Bush on Tuesday. Bush's record level of black ap-
pointments - notably Colin Powell as head of the Joint Chiefs,
Constance Newman as head of the office of personnel management
and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court - has Brown and other
black Republicans convinced that black people know Bush is a ra-
cial moderate and trust him.

"We've got blacks in places where black Democrats had to fight
like hell to get in and they mostly failed," said Brown. "With
Bush we can get him to react. Clinton is already telling black
folks he can't react to blacks because his people are telling him
it will cost him white support."

This skepticism about Clinton's approach on the right is echoed
on the left by Jesse Jackson, who doubts that even middle-class
blacks can afford to abandon a race-based agenda. While civil
rights laws may be on the books, he told the Wall Street Journal,
"the Indian treaty is on the books too." Duke University's Frank-
lin also sees the need to keep race relations a priority topic.
When Franklin was invited onto Clinton's bus in North Carolina
last week, Clinton asked him what America could learn about its
own racial problems from the ethnic turmoil in Eastern Europe.
Franklin said he told Clinton that "in the first place it tells
us there is not necessarily any connection between ethnic, reli-
gious and racial peace and a free market economy because things
were peaceful when there was repression in the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia." There is a need, Franklin told Clinton, to begin
dealing with ethnic and racial matters in the United States "in a
constructive way."<But even if the majority of black Americans
are ready to downplay race-specific remedies, Clinton, if elect-
ed, will not find it easy to fulfill their expectations.

After Kennedy was elected in the razor-close 1960 election with
overwhelming black support, he failed to keep a campaign promise
immediately to sign a bill that would, with "one stroke of the
pen," eliminate discrimination in federally funded housing pro-
jects. His aides explained that Kennedy didn't want to antagonize
his white, Southern supporters. Civil rights leaders took to
sending Kennedy ink pens with the words "one stroke of the pen"
printed on them.

But for Clinton, there would be no single black agenda to satis-
fy. There is no legal segregation to abolish, no fair housing
bill to sign. His appointments would be his first, relatively
clear-cut test: Does he appoint members of the burgeoning black
middle class to top Cabinet posts previously not held by blacks?
(The biggest expectation on this last front is that Washington
lawyer Vernon Jordan would be offered the job of attorney gen-
eral.) But for the longer term, Clinton would be measured on
several fronts - cutting poverty, expanding jobs, improving
schools and controlling crime.  Progress in these areas is hard
to measure and slow to come.

And if black America became impatient with the seeming paucity of
its gains in a Clinton administration, the voices of the older
black leadership might again drown out those of the younger,
lesser-known politicians who now have Clinton's ear. And Jesse
Jackson would be waiting to collect his debt.<

Juan Williams writes frequently for Outlook on politics.<02:56
11-01C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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