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[guillaumeb]

52. Also from the article:

A look at President Bill Clinton's record on issues that impact Black America reveals just how little the Democrats have done in exchange for the overwhelming support they get from African Americans at every election. In fact, Clinton--hailed as the "first Black president" by novelist Toni Morrison--made everyday life for Blacks significantly worse.

Provisions in the two Clinton-era crime bills....put more cops on the street and enforced tougher mandatory sentencing for nonviolent offenses like drug possession, among other things. This kicked the era of mass incarceration, as author Michelle Alexander calls it, into high gear. Larger and larger numbers of poor and working-class people, disproportionately Black and Brown, found themselves under the control of the criminal justice system.

"Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs," Alexander wrote in 2010. "In President Bill Clinton's boastful words, 'I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I'm soft on crime.' The facts bear him out. Clinton's 'tough on crime' policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history."

THE CLINTON administration capitalized on racialized hysteria about crime to push the crime bills, but it also exploited stereotypes to rationalize gutting government spending on social services, like welfare. Using rhetoric about "personal responsibility," Clinton got legislation passed that imposed strict time limits and work rules on welfare recipients--and threw untold numbers of poor people off the rolls.

Similarly, when the right wing went on the attack against affirmative action programs intended to level the playing field for minorities and women in hiring and college admissions, Clinton "defended" affirmative action with the slogan "mend it, don't end it"--and claimed that programs which produced "reverse discrimination" had to be ended.

In fact, the problem wasn't that affirmative action had gone too far, as the Clinton administration claimed, but it hadn't gone far enough. Predictably, affirmative action programs were decimated during the Clinton years, and Black college enrollment plummeted at universities where the programs were banned.

This didn't stop Clinton from posing as a "racial healer" in his second term--though, once again, the reality proved that talk is cheap. His Presidential Initiative on Race initiated little in the form of concrete proposals. As Philip Klinkner put it in an essay for the book Without Justice for All, it "provided an ineffective but benign way for Clinton to play the role of therapist in chief."

Rather than putting forward policies to deal with racial discrimination, Klinkner wrote:

the initiative allowed Clinton a low-cost way to create the impression of concern and action. Yet the costs may not be so low. At worst, the president's race initiative offered a distraction from the fact that he, the Democratic Party and the nation in general have sounded an end to the modern era of civil rights reform.

Clinton repeated in speech after speech that the answer to racial discrimination was in our "hearts," not in government intervention--effectively placing the blame on individuals and their views, not the systemic racism running through U.S. institutions, from the police to the courts to schools and housing.

The policies of the Clinton administration and the "New Democrats" were widely viewed as an attempt to shift the party away from traditional bases of support--or, in conservative-speak, "special interests"--such as African Americans, women, immigrants and union members.

In the process, Democratic politicians helped shred many of the programs and policies that, over the previous century, had won mass Black support for the one-time party of slavery. From proudly championing the New Deal reforms of the 1930s and civil rights legislation of the 1960s, Democratic leaders now talked about putting welfare recipients to work and a "post-racial" America.

But the Democrats never lost Black support in any significant way, since the Republicans alternative always looked much worse.

My comment: Add in welfare reform that was not specifically targeted at black families, but that played well as a follow up to Reagan's comments about "welfare queens", again, no specific stated racial component, and we have Democrats attacking the same people that Reagan did. Clinton played the race card as well as Reagan did, he just did it in an understated way.