The Race Card

The New Republic, vol. 207, no. 25, pp. 17-19
December 14, 1992)

by
Tony Snow

As pundits paw over this year's election results, they should ponder an event that should have taken place, but didn't: an overdue revival of the civil rights movement. As this year's election approached, a host of factors--anxiety about the L.A. riots, impatience with racial theatrics in places like New York, and a surge of post-Gulf war idealism--gave both political parties a chance to assert that claim in a new and exciting way. Neither party rose to the occasion.

Since the death of Martin Luther King Jr., the United States has lost its civil rights bearings. Laws have been instituted that encourage division and reward envy. By the 1970s federal judges were redesigning school districts and drawing up business plans. Employers were crafting minority quotas in order to avoid costly lawsuits. The Civil Rights Movement began to degenerate into something Hubert Humphrey promised it would not: "an endless power struggle among organized groups ... a society where there is no place for the independent individual." And whites who had struggled in places like Selma began to mutter about "reverse discrimination."

By this year Democrats had surrendered their monopoly on the minority vote. Black middle-class voters and the civil rights establishment openly advertised their skepticism about Bill Clinton. Although he talked about unity and harmony, he employed legalisms that left conspicuous avenues of escape. Moreover, he delivered the campaign's only racially divisive speech when he spoke to the Rainbow Coalition. His seeming determination to snub Jesse Jackson offended potential admirers. A friend of mine, a conservative black not involved in politics, put it this way: "I don't care what he said about Sister Souljah. That wasn't the point at all. He came to show up Jesse. And even though I don't like Jesse, I hate that kind of grandstanding even more."

Clinton's missteps handed Republicans a major chance to regain the high ground on the civil rights debate. We needed just three things: rhetoric worthy of the moment; actions consistent with the rhetoric; and a Big Tent that would let us assail prejudices without creating new class frictions. We fumbled each.

Take rhetoric. The first rule of racial politics is: show you care. John F. Kennedy set off a sea change in black voting patterns by placing a phone call in 1960 to Coretta Scott King while her husband was in jail. We failed to provide any such acts of concern. President Bush took no trips into embattled black communities outside Los Angeles. Nor did he use black success stories to promote and explain his vision of government. He delivered no significant campaign speeches on race and racial harmony; no speeches to invite black voters into the Republican Party; and no speeches explaining how his policies offered minorities the greatest compliment of all--treatment as capable equals, rather than as members of a victimized class entitled to dribs of pity and drabs of the public fisc. The closest we got to "I have a dream" was to say, "I have a thirteen-point action plan," seasoned with the applause line--"And there is no room for racism, intolerance, or bigotry in this country!"

Republicans could have shattered this political gridlock by saying: enough of this silliness. Let's be honest. Let's talk. Instead, we clumsily courted minority voters. The Republican convention featured blacks primarily as props--candidates, preachers, entertainers, and emissaries from the wildernesses where poor people live. With a few exceptions, we did not celebrate black success or hold up our speakers as role models for our kids.

Meanwhile, our tortuously ambivalent actions seemed to say: we don't know what we believe. Consider our handling of the Voting Rights Act. In recent years Republicans have joined dozens of court suits designed to create "black" congressional districts. The idea is to persuade courts to create suburban, Republican districts next to the court-ordered minority districts. This tactic not only violates the conservative opposition to quotas; it doesn't work. This year's election did not produce the dramatic swing in congressional seats that our redistricting mavens sought.

We also have fumbled away incredible assets. Clarence Thomas's confirmation victory gave the administration a chance to demand a new pluralism in the civil rights debate. The almost comic discomfort of the Senate Judiciary Committee cleared the way for a challenge to the civil rights orthodoxy and a declaration of intent to revive the spirit of the civil rights movement. A few speech drafts along these lines circulated among senior- and junior-level officials, but nothing reached the president's desk. In the end, President Bush blasted congressional arrogance in what White House insiders called "the process speech," but he did not tackle the grittier issues of race. Instead we chose to play on the Democrats' turf, talking defensively about sexual harassment--and letting Joseph Biden and company off the hook. In our big moment, we chose process over passion.

That wasn't the only fumble. On the night of the Thomas confirmation, we announced agreement on the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Our lawyers worked hard and long to ensure that the bill prosecuted acts of discrimination without coercing businesses to adopt racial quotas for hiring or advancement. But Democrats simply declared victory, implying that we had caved in on quotas. Our silence gave the impression that we had. This made everyone mad. The president's courageous actions thus earned him virtually nothing in terms of political capital.

When Assistant Secretary of Education Michael Williams proposed that the Department of Education abolish race-specific scholarships, he reiterated a natural-rights position as old and venerable as Lincoln. Yet the moment his recommendation attracted hostile fire from the press and pols, we pulled back--said we'd study the recommendation.

Similarly, panic broke out when White House counsel C. Boyden Gray circulated a draft executive order that would forbid quotas in the federal government. The order vanished almost as soon as a hostile bureaucrat leaked it. Williams later advocated reviving the Gray order, with one addition--tripling the budget and staff of those charged with rooting out discrimination within the federal government. Great idea, but it too went nowhere.

We even failed to draw sensible moral lessons from the L.A. riots. At a meeting with the president in Los Angeles, L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley, California Governor Pete Wilson, and Peter Ueberroth all pledged their full support to a comprehensive package of aid and innovation--the kind of "empowerment" package that Jack Kemp has advocated for years. But after Kemp's moment in the spotlight came to an end, the campaign moved on to other things.

Some Republicans remain terminally uncomfortable with issues involving race. One can still find those who regard black Americans as a group apart--poor, exotic, faintly criminal, and not fully equipped for life in polite society. In the grips of remorse, these Republicans act like white liberals: anxious, guilt-besotted, stricken by low self-esteem. They try to expiate their sins by behaving like what Peggy Noonan once called "low-rent Democrats." They try to buy black votes, but at a discount--through welfare funding at slightly reduced values, or pared-down versions of reforms like Kemp's HOPE program.

Conservatives will never win minority votes by masquerading as Democrats. If conservatives wish to regain power, we should point out that politics remains the only arena of American life where people look placidly upon the practice of separate accommodation by race--and we should demand equal accommodation, true inclusion, and common sense. We must return to the Lincoln-King version of civil rights.

This leads to the third failure: the vision thing. The president's politics included everything necessary to pitch a Lee Atwater-style "Big Tent." His conservative proposals on crime, welfare, education, health care, tax regulations, and housing dealt with issues of special concern to blacks, but not exclusively to blacks. More importantly, they placed real power in the hands of individuals, rather than in the mitts of government paper-pushers. School choice would let poor parents choose the schools best for their kids. Welfare reforms would have dismantled the gilded cage that we have constructed for our poor, and eliminate regulations that punish the virtues we normally consider vital for success: hard work, advancement, intact marriage, savings, and property. Housing reforms would give poor people a chance to take the most important step to independence by owning their homes.

Most importantly, the president's agenda treated all people equally. It could have promoted brotherhood instead of a Hobbesian scramble for entitlements and other federal table scraps. Unfortunately, we never pitched the tent. Nor did we draw the proper contrast between our Big Tent and the tent city in which Democrats live--a world of fractions, well-organized, and often mutually exclusive interest groups. This failure was deliberate. Senior advisers argued that we could not win on racial issues, and should just shut up.

So when Bill Clinton snubbed Jesse Jackson, we refused to raise the debate to a higher ground by engaging Clinton on such issues as quotas. A senior official told me, "In politics, you never get in the way when your opponent is destroying himself. Just let Jesse and Clinton carve each other up. Don't get involved, and don't worry. After all, Clinton's dead." Others argued against courting black voters on grounds that it might alienate part of the Republican "base." This stratagem assumed that the "Bubba" vote--Southern, white, male, conservative--still worshipped at the altar of Jim Crow.

Top White House officials repeatedly rejected suggestions that we deliver identical conservative speeches in "white" and "black" venues, so as to demonstrate that we do not pander. They refused before Super Tuesday, after the L.A. riots, and in the waning days of the campaign. Clinton did adopt the tactic, however, during the Illinois primary.

Our reluctance sometimes bordered on the absurd. Early this year, schedulers turned away a visit request by a national championship athletic team from Jackson State University that wanted to pay its way to the White House--a winning golf team. And when the president spoke to his own black appointees during the final month of the campaign, an order from on high decreed that he "say nothing," in order not to interrupt coverage of the day's real news story--automobile insurance reform.

We stayed silent despite the fact that a third of the nation's black population agrees with virtually every item in a typical Republican platform--especially the sections on crime, education, national defense, traditional values, and abortion. More than 90 percent agree with the party's stand on such issues as school choice. Blacks don't reject Republicans because our ideas lack appeal. They reject us because we don't court them, and Democrats do.

This year George Bush gathered a smaller percentage of the black vote than he got in the "Willie Horton" year of 1988, and than Ronald Reagan claimed in 1984. And that was everything: If George Bush had claimed even 20 percent of the black vote, he would be president-reelect today.