Hillary, Bill, and Race
By 
To what extent does Hillary Clinton deserve responsibility for her husband’s policies? How much credit should she get for the good ones? How much should we damn her for the bad ones? How much of the politics of the 1990s matter in the 2010s? These are important questions because Hillary is running in part on her experience working with her husband. I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. My sense is that she should be evaluated based upon what we think she will do in the future, not what her husband did in 1994. But of course those things can’t be separated entirely–Bill signed NAFTA and while Hillary claims to not support the TPP, no one actually believes her. But then that also shows how the move left in the Democratic Party is having an effect. Maybe she wouldn’t sign it in the end if she ran on not signing it? We just can’t know.
This Donna Murch article on how Bill Clinton cynically attacked black people throughout his presidency through his prison policies (and also welfare reform which isn’t really part of this piece for some reason) should make anyone wonder what Hillary has done to earn the vote of African-Americans. I’m not saying anyone should or shouldn’t vote her, but if she is running on her experience and legacy, are her husband’s policies on race and prisons something that means we should not vote for her?
As president, Bill Clinton and his allies embarked on a draconian punishment campaign to outflank the Republicans. “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say that I’m soft on crime,” he bragged. Roughly a year and a half after the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion—the largest civil disturbance in U.S. history in which demonstrators took to the streets for six straight days to protest the acquittal of the officers involved in the Rodney King beating—Clinton passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. At its core, this legislation was a federal “three strikes” bill that established a $30.2 billion Crime Trust Fund to allocate monies for state and municipal police and prison expansion. Like its predecessors, starting with Johnson’s Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, the federal government provided funding to accelerate punitive policies at all levels of governance. Specific provisions included monies for placing 100,000 new police on the streets, the expansion of death penalty eligible crimes, lifetime imprisonment for people who committed a third violent federal felony offense with two prior state or federal felony convictions, gang “enhancements” in sentencing for federal defendants, allowing children as young as 13 to be prosecuted as adults in special cases, and the Violence Against Women Act.
Hillary strongly supported this legislation and stood resolutely behind her husband’s punishment campaign. “We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders,” Hillary declared in 1994. “The ‘three strikes and you’re out’ for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets,” she added. Elsewhere, she remarked, “We will finally be able to say, loudly and clearly, that for repeat, violent, criminal offenders: three strikes and you’re out.”
Like his notorious Republican predecessors, Clinton imposed a toxic mix of punishment and withdrawal of social welfare, but with a difference. The Democratic president actually implemented these policies on a much larger scale than the Republican New Right. According to New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander, “Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system” that Ronald Reagan had codified into law through the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, “Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier.”
At the same time, this bit gives me pause.
As both parties have engaged in a steady march to the right over the past three decades, it is not surprising that the Clintons have done little more than offer half-hearted mea culpas about their role in the drug war and mass incarceration.
The problem with this statement is that it is wrong. The Democratic Party did move right into the 1990s. And then it started moving significantly to the left. Iraq is probably the catalyst. But as we have repeatedly argued on this blog, the Democratic Party has moved dramatically to the left in the last 10 years. How one can argue the Obama administration is to the right of Carter or Clinton is beyond me, and while Murch doesn’t specifically say this, it’s certainly implied. The fact that a self-proclaimed socialist has an actual chance to win the Democratic Party primary against one of the most experienced and qualified candidates the party has ever put up based entirely on the fact that people see her as too conservative demonstrates plenty that her assertion is just not correct about the Democrats.
But whatever, this fallacy doesn’t really move us away from the central question, which is how much should we hold the Clinton’s racial history against Hillary today?