Bean Counting, 2008

The Washington Post
Editorial

Achieving diversity in presidential appointments is a lot easier than it was in 1992.
Thursday, December 11, 2008; A24

ONE OF THE more jarring moments of Bill Clinton's presidential transition came at a Dec. 21, 1992, news conference in Little Rock, when a finger-wagging president-elect lashed out at feminist "bean counters" who, he asserted, were "playing quota games and math games" in assessing the diversity of appointments to a Cabinet he had vowed would "look like America." Fast-forward 16 years, and the atmosphere is gratifyingly different.
Part of that, certainly, stems from the temperamental differences between the two presidents-to-be and the differing styles of their campaigns and transitions. Mr. Clinton was prone to anger, in contrast to President-elect Barack Obama's cool; the Obama campaign and transition have been astonishingly successful at keeping disagreements and tensions private. Behind the scenes, assembling the diverse tableau of appointments made so far has been more difficult than the surface placidity suggests.
Nonetheless, the contrast can also be attributed to the dramatic progress made by women and members of minorities in the intervening years. The Clinton administration itself helped by providing important experience and credentials to many of Mr. Obama's choices; meanwhile, women and minorities have risen in the political ranks of Congress and state governments. Mr. Clinton's push to select the first female attorney general resulted in a tortured search; Eric H. Holder Jr. would be the first African American to serve as the nation's chief law enforcement officer, but, in large part because of his service as the Justice Department's No. 2 official in the Clinton administration, no one questions whether he possesses enough experience. Likewise, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano comes to the top Homeland Security post buttressed by expertise gathered as a prosecutor and a governor of a border state; her gender is icing on the cake. The fact that there has not been a white male secretary of state since Warren Christopher left office in January 1997 offers another data point suggestive of change.
That's not to say that diversity is easily achieved or that it arrives without the kinds of friction that infuriated Mr. Clinton on that winter day so long ago. But it's not only the election of the first African American president that illustrates how much the country has progressed.

Full Editorial: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/10/AR2008121003041.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Obama and Clinton on Affirmative Action

Inside Higher Education
April 17, 2008

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton expressed support for affirmative action in higher education in their Pennsylvania primary debate Wednesday night, but with broader definitions of who should benefit. Obama reiterated his view that economic factors — not just race and ethnicity — should count. Obama said that “the basic principle that should guide discussions not just on affirmative action but how we are admitting young people to college generally is, how do we make sure that we’re providing ladders of opportunity for people?” Asked about minority children like his own, who grow up in relatively advantaged circumstances, Obama said: “So if they look at my child and they say, you know, Malia and Sasha, they’ve had a pretty good deal, then that shouldn’t be factored in. On the other hand, if there’s a young white person who has been working hard, struggling, and has overcome great odds, that’s something that should be taken into account. So I still believe in affirmative action as a means of overcoming both historic and potentially current discrimination, but I think that it can’t be a quota system and it can’t be something that is simply applied without looking at the whole person, whether that person is black or white or Hispanic, male or female.” Clinton, asked if she supported such a view, said: “I think we’ve got to have affirmative action generally to try to give more opportunities to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds — whoever they are.” But she then shifted away from affirmative action to list of her education positions. “That’s why I’m a strong supporter of early childhood education and universal pre-kindergarten,” Clinton said. “That’s why I’m against No Child Left Behind as it is currently operating.... That’s why I’m in favor of much more college aid, not these outrageous predatory student loan rates that are charging people I’ve met, across Pennsylvania, 20, 25, 28 percent interest rates. Let’s make college affordable again. See, I think we have to look at what we’re trying to achieve here somewhat differently. We do have a real gap. We have a gap in achievement. We have a gap in income. But we don’t have a potential gap.” http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/17/qt

Race, gender still matter

Although subtle, Clinton, Obama fight stereotypes, U-M panel says

Tuesday, March 11, 2008
BY DAVE GERSHMAN
The Ann Arbor News

If Sen. Barack Obama becomes the first black man elected president of the United States, it won't be a sign that Americans have moved beyond race, a University of Michigan professor said Monday during a campus discussion of race and gender in presidential politics.
Vince Hutchings, an associate professor of political science at U-M, said Obama's success is helped by his unwillingness to talk about race, which Hutchings called "this thing that divides us the most.'' Black Americans still lag behind whites in indexes of income, wealth and education, indications that racial equality has not been achieved, he said.
By downplaying race, Obama, a Democrat, has fashioned a unique appeal as a candidate, generating support with white voters. Meanwhile, he is able to still generate significant support among black Americans by implying the importance of race without necessarily verbalizing it, said Hutchings.
"His comments with respect to, 'There is no black America, or white America, just the United States of America,' that's a very appealing message - to white Americans, because they're already predisposed to believe it,'' said Hutchings.
Hutchings' comments were part of a panel discussion sponsored by U-M's Institute for Research on Women and Gender and by the Center for Political Studies. The discussion, held at Lane Hall, focused on how Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton are navigating the issues of race and gender, and the stereotypes held by voters, even if those stereotypes are subtle.
For pollsters, it's tough to tease out information voters may not want to share about themselves, panelists said. And voters don't always tell the truth in exit polls, and their answers can be tailored to what they believe the pollster wants them to say.
"It's not whether or not people care about race,'' said Nicholas Valentino, a professor from the University of Texas at Austin, "but whether we can ever ask them and get them to tell us whether race is really important, whether they even know. And if they do know, what are they going to tell us, and the same, though slightly less, for gender.''
Clinton is in a particular bind when it comes to battling stereotypes while still trying to mount a presidential campaign, Valentino said.
"Clinton is stuck between multiple negative gender stereotypes,'' he said. "If she's too tough, then she's not feminine. If she's not tough enough, then she's not competent, so she really has to walk a tightrope.'' [To read the entire article, go to: http://www.mlive.com/news/annarbornews/index.ssf?/base/news-26/1205246437149060.xml&coll=2 ]

I'm a black woman. This is my dream

By Patricia Williams
The Observer UK
Sunday 13 January 2008

The two Democrat candidates have gone through fire to get this far; now they deserve to go further.
The political history of the United States has been crafted by its greatest orators. From Thomas Jefferson to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, the most influential Presidents have anchored their appeal in the democracy of the eloquently spoken word. As the election of November 2008 draws closer, we usher out George W Bush, the most spectacularly dismal exception to that rule. Of course, there are many attributes other than oratory I'll be looking for in candidates running for highest office: he or she must not think war is a 'cakewalk', must be alarmed about global warming, must not think torture is a handy little tool. Nevertheless, I will be listening hard for any future President's ability to string words into unmuddied, coherent thought. I'll be listening for ideas that have been worked through sufficiently to have a beginning, a middle and an end. I'm looking for intelligence. Someone who has real ideas, something more than missiles wrapped in folksy homilies.
Too many people see Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's appeal as rooted in 'identity politics'. It is the cheap political equation of the moment. He's supposed to walk away with the black vote, she's supposed to have women all sewn up. But the diversity of their constituencies and the complexity of their platforms have defied simplistic expectations.
There's a cliché in the American civil rights community: if you're a member of a stigmatised group, you have to be twice as good as everyone else to accomplish half as much. Clinton and Obama have been tested by fire; neither rose to this level of national importance because anyone gave them a pass.
Hillary Clinton was among the first generation of women to attend law school in any numbers. She's about four years older than me and the barriers were enormous back then. Her first political work, as a student advocate for women's rights and minority admissions, opened the door a little wider for people like me. When I arrived at law school, there was still much moaning that women were 'taking over', even though we constituted 8 per cent of law students.
Today, women make up 50 per cent of most law school classes. It took enormous fortitude to succeed in that atmosphere. Indeed, Hillary has stood up to and overcome an onslaught. As Senator Clinton campaigned in Iowa, it was to the snarky drone of shock jock Rush Limbaugh babbling about how no one wants to watch a middle-aged woman grow old. Her detailed and thoughtful ideas for a universal healthcare system have been derided as the dangerous, communist ravings of a radical feminist. The New York Times's Maureen Dowd called Clinton a 'dominatrix ... control freak' who 'whips' her opponents into line.
Not that there's any consistency to prejudice of this sort. There was quite the kerfuffle when someone asked her how she was doing after her loss in Iowa and a tremble shook her voice. If Clinton-haters have got their jollies from painting her as steely and remote, in the mere mist of an eye she became too soft, wavering, choked up, broken down. Headlines implied that Clinton had lost it. Yet look at the video: she speaks of her plans for the country with eloquent emotion and great composure, her voice soft but strong. There were no tears. There was nothing undignified about it.
Meanwhile, Obama walks a fine line of both being 'not black enough' and pandering to 'special interests'. The accusation that he is 'inexperienced' is a cipher for deeper cultural anxieties about race.
Senator Obama is a presidential candidate of profound decency and great eloquence. He was president of the Harvard Law Review, a position that requires not just the highest grades, but also the unanimous acclaim of a band of viciously competitive students and a famously divided faculty.
American identity is best defined as the experience of the willing diaspora, the break by choice that is the heart of the immigrant myth. It is that narrative from which most African-Americans have been exiled. Hence it is precisely his place in that narrative that makes Obama so attractive, so intriguing and yet so strange. Obama's late father migrated from Kenya to the US; his mother was from Kansas. He's managed to fuse the immigrant myth of rapid upward mobility, until then almost exclusively white and European, on to the figure of a black man. Yet there are many for whom his appeal rests not on what he is - smart, full of fresh vision - but on what they imagine he isn't. He's not a whiner. He doesn't hate white people. He doesn't wear his hair like Al Sharpton.
Senator Joseph Biden, like Bush another exemplar of crude oratorical inelegance, expressed it as follows: 'I mean, you got the first sort of mainstream African-American who's articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man.' Such faint, condescending praise.
In the coming months, I expect to see much confusion as the importance of gender, the visibility of race and the commitment to pretend none of it matters is sorted out. The American public is reeling with images of Hillary, our first viable female candidate for President, floating on the endorsements of a raft of black religious leaders, and Obama, our first viable black candidate for President, flanked by a pride of Oprah-watching, white 'soccer moms'. Add a sprinkling of Bill Clinton, popularly caricatured as our 'first black President'. Fold in Michelle Obama, popularly caricatured as an outspoken career woman who doesn't like to stay home and bake cookies any more than Hillary. Turn the pressure cooker to high.
As the right's Rovean spinmeisters kick into action, wrapping both Obama and Clinton in sticky webs of hybridised stereotypes, she will be cast as too 'mannish', he too 'boyish'. She'll be too familiar, he too foreign.
Yet I pray that we Americans can resist the vicious, vacuous, mudslinging mire of malapropisms from which the Bush presidency loped to power. This is an extraordinary moment in American history: we have our first serious black and female presidential candidates and they are, indeed, twice as good as their nearest contenders. I hope that the two of them, in whatever order, will become running mates by November. They must not fall prey to those who would love to see them played against each other in the scramble to be top dog. --------
Patricia Williams is a professor of law at Columbia University and a regular columnist for the Nation.

Thanks to Marshall Rose for sharing this commentary. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2240139,00.html