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Will Barak stop "ethnic cleansing" of East Jerusalem?
The fight of a Jerusalem-born Palestinian scholar to keep his residency could prove a key test of the new Israeli government's commitment to peace.
By Ian Williams
[08/10/99]

Why won't Kenneth Starr release the Shaheen report?
Imagine if the White House claimed it was exonerated by an investigation, but wouldn't release the results.
By Joe Conason
[08/10/99]

Did Bush lie under oath in funeral home case?
An SCI attorney says the Texas governor talked to him about a state agency investigation, contradicting Bush's affidavit in the case.
By Robert Bryce and Anthony York
[08/09/99]

Gov. Death
George W. Bush has presided over an execution in Texas almost every two weeks since his election. Why isn't that a campaign issue?
By Christopher Hitchens
[08/07/99]

The thinker
Bill Bradley may have "big ideas," but as a notoriously cautious senator he sat out the big political fights.
By Joshua Micah Marshall
[08/06/99]

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Coming from Morrison, a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner in literature, the "first black president" seemed to be a term of endearment, a way of summarizing the cultural echoes, symbolic gestures and actual achievements by Clinton that won him the support of the black community. The characterization, coming as it did in the middle of the president's impeachment proceedings, was no small boost for him at the time.

But the Clinton legacy, shared by Al Gore, is not without its problems for African-American voters. Bradley could conceivably use Clinton's abandonment of African-American appointees like Lani Guinier and Joycelyn Elders, his rush to execute retarded black death row inmate Rickey Ray Rector when he was running for president, his delay in defending affirmative action, his signing of the controversial welfare reform bill and his failure to frontally attack the remaining embarrassment of black urban poverty to tarnish Gore with black voters and endear himself to them.

But with the exception of criticizing Clinton's welfare reform bill, which Bradley voted against in the Senate, he has not. Bradley has made much of the way his relationships with black people -- a family employee, his black teammates on the New York Knicks -- changed his racial perceptions. But he hasn't described how that's led to a changed agenda for political and racial change (though it should be noted that Bradley says he's not going to issue big policy pronouncements until the fall). Mostly he talks about how the nation's racial problems don't lend themselves to easy answers, rails against separatism of any stripe and preaches good old-fashioned conversation, letting blacks and whites share their views. That's roughly what he told the NAACP convention in New York and a minority journalists convention in Seattle last month.

Bradley blew a golden opportunity to make himself better known among blacks when he made a speech at New York's Cooper Union in April. It was billed as a major address, but again Bradley seemed satisfied with the same old racial homilies about unity and harmony. He could have done something dramatic like joining those peaceably demonstrating in front of police headquarters in lower Manhattan to protest the shooting of Amadou Diallo. An innocent, unarmed African street vendor, Diallo was shot by police who mistook him for a suspected rapist. Bradley mentioned the Diallo incident during the course of his speech, but that's as far as it went. Rather feebly, he said those wishing to please him when he becomes president can do so by showing how their department or agency "furthered tolerance and racial understanding."

The former New Jersey senator was much more animated speaking before the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition/Operation PUSH convention this past weekend in Chicago. He challenged Gore to do more than speak out against racial profiling; he suggested that Gore push Clinton to issue an executive order banning the practice. He also made his most energetic call to date to marshal American resources to reduce child poverty, which afflicts up to a third of African-American children. "Reducing the number of children in poverty should be the North Star for saving our society," he said. The crowd responded warmly, but not nearly as energetically as for Gore.

Next page | Clinton embraced blacks in times of trouble