A ‘Major’ Exercise In Empty Gesturing

Advance publicity said the president’s speech on race would be “major.” It is hard to guess what remains to be said in a “major” vein about race in the United States, so, not surprisingly, after saying it was a major problem, Clinton found himself at a loss for a new idea.

In the absence of a new idea, he endorsed an old one (affirmative action), said he was appointing a committee and called for an “honest dialogue.” What constitutes honesty in a “dialogue” on this subject? The president let the question pass and lapsed into bromides, as politicians are apt to do when expected to orate in the “major” style about matters on which they have nothing to say.

Thus: “Honest dialogue will not be easy at first. We will have to get past defensiveness and fear and political correctness and other barriers to honesty.” And, dipping into the Kennedy-Johnson summons-to-greatness style: “Emotions may be rubbed raw, but we must begin.”

Presidents Kennedy and Johnson usually wanted us to begin something ambitious; Clinton summons us only to a national gabfest. He seems to believe this might result in “concerted action,” which would help “lift the heavy burden of race from our children’s future.” As to what that “concerted action” might be, Clinton did not hazard a guess.

And so, having nothing of consequence to say, he dug into the national cliche anthology. He came up with, among other overworked phrases, “the classic American dilemma,” “a great national effort to perfect the promise of America,” the attempt “to build our more perfect union” and “one America respecting, even celebrating our differences.”

This sounds more like bloviating than the opening of “honest dialogue,” but it is only to be expected in the dead political air in which the country is becalmed. The only subject with which Washington is seriously engaged this year is the balanced-budget exercise.

Clinton had to make a commencement speech, an ancient literary form requiring inspirational rhetoric. A call to balanced-budgetary greatness would hardly fill the bill. Race, on the other hand, always offers excellent rhetorical opportunities.

Well, he was also speaking in California, where people have recently been voting bleak anti-black, anti-immigrant passions. Endorsing affirmative action in this benighted territory, the president could show his critics that there was at least one unpopular issue on which he would take a stand.

The mystery is why the president thinks we lack dialogue on race. A roaring dialogue on race has been going on here for 350 years.

Two hundred years ago the Constitution spoke honestly about the American position on race when it stated that a slave was to be officially considered only three-fifths of a human being. For cruelly honest dialogue on race, it would be hard to improve on the Civil War. Lynchings, riots, murders, corrupt trials, unemployment statistics - dialogue doesn’t get any more honest than these.

Clinton didn’t say how we could enjoy a more civilized dialogue. He seems to think that talking across the racial divide can produce genuine changes in people’s “hearts and minds.”

“Hearts and minds” - the phrase speaks of the old idea that racial hostility is embedded in a part of the human psyche that cannot be changed by the forces of reason, education, politics or law.

The conviction that government action will never be able to change the human heart was President Eisenhower’s reason for not supporting the civil rights movement 40 years ago. Fear that voters would be enraged by an effort to change their hearts and minds accounted for Kennedy’s hands-off policy on the civil rights movement.

When Johnson boldly supported it anyhow, Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” exploited the resulting anger to convert a once solid Democratic South into a now solid Republican South. Now Democrats cannot elect a president without a Southern accent, and even he must be wary when tinkering with hearts and minds.

In California, Clinton was a wary president making a wary speech. A committee will now take over, and may even be heard of again. <,

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