Understanding The Clintons' + Popularity With Black Voters
- jamesallendasher
- Mar 4, 2016
- 2 min read
HILLARY CLINTON
There are a lot of reasons for Hillary Clinton's strength: her name recognition, her record and her politics, for example. But it's not just her; the Clintons are extremely popular among African-Americans.
BILL CLINTON
Bill Clinton enjoyed support from the black community in the 1990s. But as Hillary Clinton seeks the nomination herself, some are raising questions about how good the Clinton presidency was for African-Americans — not to mention whether Hillary Clinton should get credit (or, alternatively, blame) for her husband's legacy.
IS BILL's Legacy Hillary's? DOES HILLARY Deserve the Black Vote?
From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted — and Hillary Clinton supported — decimated black America. >|> MIchelle Alexander
CLINTON's TRUTH: A video produced by the Republican National Committee
entitled “The Clintons Hope You Forget,” shows Americans a litany of ugly, racist attacks which the Clintons waged against Obama. For instance, in 2008, Hillary remarked that Dr. King’s dream was kick-started when President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act.” In other words, Hillary implied “it took a white man to get BLACKS to the mountaintop.”
The Clinton’s racial attacks didn’t stop there. When it was politically convenient for Hillary to paint Obama as the enemy of white Americans, that’s exactly what she did. “Senator Obama’s support among hardworking Americans, white Americans is weakening,” Hillary boasted.
In the book Game Change published in 2010, Bill Clinton was reported to be outraged that Senator Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama as a candidate in 2008 over Hillary. “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” Bill yelled at Kennedy. — Clinton’s message, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, was that the country wasn’t ready to elect an African-American president.
ELEPHANTS IN THE ROOM: A LESS-THAN-PERFECT RECORD
Bill Clinton may have had the support of many African-Americans, but today, some have deemed two of the most famous Clinton-era legislative achievements a failure for black America. Michelle Alexander makes this case in an article for The Nation ("Hillary Clinton Doesn't Deserve The Black Vote"), pointing to the 1994 crime bill and 1996 welfare reform bill as evidence that the Clinton presidency was, in fact, bad for black Americans.
1996 WELFARE REFORM
After reform, the number of poor children whose families received welfare assistance plummeted. Not only that, but some research suggests welfare reform led to an increase in extreme poverty
1994 CRIME BILL
The black population is currently disproportionately incarcerated, with black men six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men, according to the Pew Research Center. — In 1994, Hillary Clinton championed a crime bill during the first term of her husband’s presidency. The 1994 CRIME BILL expanded the use of the death penalty, created new three-strikes rules, and offered funding for states that made it harder for people to get parole.
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