These two victories are classic Clinton. He stoops to conquer. He is at his best, and most comfortable, when enveloping the opposition in a great, sloppy, suffocating embrace. But: another crisis looms, and it will require steadfast leadership, a president ready to challenge the country–including his party’s most loyal supporters–rather than smooth things over. That crisis, hinted again by the Supreme Court last week, is the growing national torment over affirmative action.
The court’s curious, diffident decision in the Adarand case confused almost everyone. “It was a surprisingly uncommanding decision,” said Paul Gewirtz of the Yale Law School, one of a legion who have advised the president on this issue. “The court said the government needed a ‘compelling interest’ to continue these [minority set-aside] programs, but it didn’t define what a ‘compelling interest’ was. It didn’t even rule on the case before it, but sent it back [to a lower court for read judication]. The court did seem to insist, though, that the public dialogue take account of the heightened suspicion of these programs.”
The president’s initial reaction (“The Supreme Court has raised the hurdle, but it is not insurmountable”) placed him firmly in the ranks of liberals deluding themselves last week, much in the manner of Southern governors after the Brown v. Board of Education decision in the 1950s: nothing had really changed, technical adjustments would be made and racial-preference programs could go on pretty much as before. They won’t, of course. Affirmative action is about to be subjected to democracy for the first time–a public referendum in California, votes in Congress and state legislatures. There will be other court cases. And the trend seems clear: “heightened suspicion” of race-based remedies is drifting toward outright rejection.
The president could, conceivably, react passively to all this. He could appoint a commission to tighten up federal set-aside programs, and make them conform to the “compelling interest” standard of the Adarand decision, whatever that means. He could stand aside as democracy pecks away at affirmative action-occasionally shrugging eloquently and saying, in effect: we’ll just have to go along with this; the Devil is making us do it. He could drag his feet, make a bland, technical speech drawing new, incomprehensible guidelines for preference programs and do, as one Democrat put it, “just enough to piss off Jesse Jackson, but not nearly enough to satisfy the rest of the country.”
But that won’t cut it, politically or morally. If he wants to be considered a plausible leader–and maybe even if he wants to be re-elected – Bill Clinton is going to have to place himself firmly in the middle of this debate, just as he’s done with the budget, and deliver a speech that transcends legalism and speaks to the profound racial anguish at the heart of the matter. It won’t be easy. He’ll have to challenge blacks and whites. He’ll have to lay it out plain for blacks: affirmative action–a questionable, if well-intentioned, notion to begin with–is about to be severely limited. Strict racial preferences written into law, like “set-aside” programs for minority contractors, are going to be abolished (more informal, and subjective, efforts to achieve “diversity” in colleges and corporations are likely to survive, and probably should). He will also have to tell blacks that government can’t cure racism, can’t force integration and can’t alone solve the social problems caused by a culture of poverty; only individuals, and communities, can do that.
But he will also have to speak plainly to whites: do not be deluded that this is a colorblind society or that “equal opportunity” will simply happen without activist intervention. There is a desperate, festering crisis among the urban poor-yet another generation of alienated fatherless children creating havoc in the streets. We need to act affirmatively in their behalf. If we don’t, the chaos they cause could destroy this country. We need to spend more on policing, on education (as Clinton said in his budget message). We need to expand national service to provide more opportunities to integrate these damaged children into the American family (as he told Newt in New Hampshire).
Bill Clinton has spent a lifetime getting ready for this speech. Perhaps no American politician is better prepared, or more credible on the subject of race. He made a beginning with his eloquent Memphis jeremiad against black violence in the fall of 1993. But now he needs to go much farther. On the Monday after his love-in with Gingrich, the president–aides say–was full of anecdotes about how the folks up in New Hampshire were sick of partisan bickering, anxious for reconciliation on the budget. It may be too much to hope that the American public would, finally, be prepared for a far more profound reconciliation, prepared to face the racial anger that terrifies and exhausts this society. But that is a gamble this president will have to take.
