What the Clintons Mean to Me (by Corey Robin)
This has everything to do with the primaries for me. It is a reminder of who Hillary Clinton is as much as it is a reminder of who Bill Clinton is. Hillary, after all, makes no bones about bragging about how her time as first lady was an important part of her experience and bragging about the influence she exerted there. And she did!
She lobbied aggressively for many things while she was there and so to pretend that those years do not reflect on her is disingenuous at best.
http://coreyrobin.com/2016/01/25/what-the-clintons-mean-to-me/
Maybe this is a generational thing, but this is what the Clintons will always mean to me: Sister Souljah, Ricky Ray Rector, welfare reform, and the crime bill. And beyond—really, behind—all that, the desperate affirmation to win over white voters by declaring: We are not the Party of Jesse Jackson, We are not the Rainbow Coalition.
People don’t seem to remember just how much the Clintons’ national ascendancy was premised upon the repudiation of black voters and black interests—a move that was both inspired and applauded by a small but influential group of Beltway journalists and party strategists, who believed this was the only path to taking back the White House from the Republicans—but for me, it’s vivid as yesterday. Maybe it’s 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 professor of politics at Princeton University. 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 the now classic Uneasy Alliances—was born in part out of the tremendous frustration and anger many of us felt about the wrenching transformation the Clintons imposed upon the Democratic Party.
I was recently re-reading some of Paul’s book, and it brought that whole sordid moment back in painful detail. Like the fact, according to an article by Andrew Hacker, which Paul cites, that “for the first time in almost half a century, the party’s [1992] platform made no mention of redressing racial injustice.” (I re-read the platform: it does mention affirmative action and civil rights in passing, but it’s cursory.) Or the fact that in their 1992 book, Putting People First, Bill Clinton and Al Gore only mentioned race once. And that was to oppose the idea of racial quotas. Or the fact that their chapter on civil rights was mostly about people with disabilities.
What’s more, white people got the message: according to polls, white voters were more familiar with Clinton’s attack on Sister Souljah than they were with his economic plan. So did black people: though they voted for Clinton, their share of the total voter turnout fell by 20% from 1988, when they cast their ballots for Michael Dukakis (and accounted for 20% of the vote for him and 10% of total turnout), and 1992, when they cast their ballots for Clinton (and accounted for 15% of the vote for him and 8% of total turnout).
About Corey Robin
Corey Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin and Fear: The History of a Political Idea. His articles have appeared in the London Review of Books, Harper’s, The New York Times, The Nation, and the American Political Science Review.
= new reply since forum marked as read
i can't hear you
I could have been talking about any voting block, such as "don't remind labor unions & workers"
about who championed and passed Job-killing NAFTA", or "don't remind ex-felons about who ginned
up the disastrous "War on Drugs", creating mass incarceration of millions who now cannot get jobs or even
vote in many states", or "don't remind Iraq War Vets and their families of who voted to go to war in Iraq".
Black voters are also an important voting block, a fact that I'm often "reminded" of by Hillary supporters, gloating
about how Blacks are leaning more towards supporting Hillary, which admittedly baffles me sometimes; but I
could just as easily have said the same about any the above voting blocks that I mentioned above, and probably
have at one time or another on DU.
The over-riding bottom line is that I deeply believe in the utter sanctity of each & every citizens' right
to come to their own conclusions politically and to vote their conscience on election day, regardless of their voting
block or the color of their skin.
Isn't it just human, the need to be reminded of stuff from time to time? it's a notoriously common foible that many,
including myself, have every so often, so I do feel saddened that my statement was taken as some kind of an insult or
put-down. 
That was not intended at all.
BTW - I personally welcome being likewise 'reminded' about any of our candidate's past actions, or
positions on issues. I may not like it, but I certainly don't want to be shielded from such reminders, provided
they are true.
