by Jackson Baker
ossibly because he is enmeshed in the constant task of self-defense
against various investigations and charges concerning his personal
character, President Clinton may have defaulted on some important
obligations to his socially needy constituency.
That seemed to be the consensus of three nationally known political observers who were in Memphis early this week to take part in a conference on children’s social services at the National Civil Rights Museum. In separate private conversations Andrew Young, Taylor Branch, and Marian Wright Edelman all found the president guilty of various degrees of neglect on critical social issues.
Young, the former congressman, Atlanta mayor, and U.S. Ambassador
to the United Nations, was the most vehement on the subject. “America
cannot survive with people isolated on lonely islands of poverty.
Even a so-called ‘liberal’ president like Bill Clinton, who is
a white Southerner, doesn’t seem to give a damn about poor people,
white or black.”
PHOTO BY JOHN LANDRIGAN
Taylor Branch and Marian Wright Edelman
Young’s remarks were a propos of what he saw as a generally falling away of politicians – with the possible exception of the Rev. Jesse Jackson – from the “basic American Christian vision” of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Branch – the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire, the two volumes published so far in his ongoing chronicle of the American civil-rights movement – offered a spirited defense of the president in general, but conceded that Clinton had demonstrated “more passion on race than on poverty per se” and that criticism of his social activism was “probably right” in general.
A longtime friend who in 1972 had co-managed presidential candidate George McGovern’s campaign in Texas with Clinton, Branch said further that Clinton’s presidency may end by having a negative effect on American history. “I told him I thought he would be held accountable for weakening the office. … For the president to be investigated like this for non-impeachable offenses will weaken the presidency forever,” Branch said.
But the historian blamed this consequence more on various adversaries – congressional Republicans, Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, and the media – than on Clinton himself, of whom he said, “I think Americans are blind to an enormous intellectual and personal stature. I have had more noble conversations with him about politics and about ideas than I do with all my journalist friends.”
Edelman, the president and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, sponsor of the conference at the museum, is another longtime Clinton friend, but she had a public parting of the ways with the president in 1996 over his endorsement of the 1996 welfare reform initiative which tended to relegate control of programs to the states.
“That did great damage to the social safety net at a time when we needed his leadership to protect it,” said Edelman, who further charged that Clinton had “not honored his commitment” to shore up funding for the long-running child-development program Head Start.
Like Branch, Edelman felt that the current probes into Clinton’s personal behavior had been potentially ruinous to his historical legacy. “They have diverted an enormous amount of attention away from the problems of this country … away from the jugular issues. And that has been tragic,” Edelman said.
As Young did, Edelman saw an increasing fixation on the private sphere and a corresponding erosion of public concern with social values. “We’ve endured a commodification of America – the antithesis of everything Dr. King was talking about.”
King’s legacy and the continuing controversy over his convicted
assassin, the late James Earl Ray, were subjects of concern to
both Branch and Young, as well. The two men were 180 degrees apart
on the issue of a continued inquiry into the role of Ray, who
for almost 30 years had been trying to recant his original 1969
confession.
Branch said he wouldn’t attempt to judge the motives of Dr. King’s survivors, who joined Ray last year in a call for a new trial, but said, “Had they succeeded in getting a new trial, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that it would have led to all manner of disaster. Ray’s death was the best kind of closure we could get.”
Before his death last month, Ray had become “a tripwire for suspicion,” Branch said. “It’s as plain as the nose on your face that if they’d ordered a new trial for him, he would have been found technically not guilty, and he would have gone very quickly from an assassin to a victim. … Believing things has consequences.”
While conceding that he himself had “for almost 30 years” shied away from embracing conspiracy theories of Dr. King’s assassination, Young said he had decided that the King family – and specifically son Dexter King, who has taken the lead in pursuing a new assassination inquiry – had “a right to get answers.”
Young, who is a member of the board of directors of the Atlanta-based King Center and a longtime family intimate, said that he had got involved in the quest for a new trial for Ray last year when the office of District Attorney General Bill Gibbons sought to frustrate Ray attorney William Pepper’s request for new ballistics tests of the alleged assassination rifle.
“I couldn’t understand the resistance,” said Young, who attributed the D.A.’s actions to “psychological repression of an unpleasant possibility” rather than to conscious suppression of possible evidence. Young added that he had been a virtual “godfather” to Dr. King’s four children after their father’s death and therefore was sympathetic to their concerns.
Noting that the King family and the King Center had both been accused by erstwhile allies within the civil-rights movement of attempting to commercialize the memory of Dr. King, Young said, “Why the vicious attacks on people who have never done anything to anybody? If you run things like a charity and beg, you’re noble. If you run things like a business, they attack your motives. The fact is, Coretta King is living in the same house that Martin Luther King paid $20,000 for 35 years ago.”
Young expressed hope that President Clinton’s recent suggestion for Attorney General Janet Reno to re-examine the evidence in the Ray case would bear fruit, while Branch was equally certain that it would “lead to nothing.”
Branch said that if Ray had been part of a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King, it had been a “truck-stop conspiracy.” Young was critical of the social attitudes he perceived in such allegations. “What bothers me is that people are always trying to blame this on ‘poor white trash.’ Martin Luther King was marching for poor white people as well as poor blacks.”
Gregg Haitley, senior health associate of the Children’s Defense
Fund’s health division, said to reporters that Governor Don Sundquist’s
Families First welfare reform program, enacted two years ago,
was more comprehensive than most state welfare programs but that
the program contained the drawback of requiring stiff insurance
premiums of Tennessee’s indigent population.
Local Political Notes
While most observers were concentrating on the minimal numbers
of voters expected at the polls this week for the Democrats’ and
Republicans’ local countywide primaries, an electoral precedent
with possible long-term implications was being established.
Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout, casting aside the traditional chief executive’s role of non-involvement in his party’s primaries, made a show late in the campaign of endorsing all incumbent Republican members of the County Commission.
Since many were unopposed, the gesture was meaningful in only two races – that of incumbent Morris Fair vs. challenger John Willingham in District 1, Positron 3, and that of incumbent Linda Rendtorff vs. challenger Lyle Tudor in District 1, Position 2. Both Tudor and Rendtorff logged some campaign time in Rout’s own Eastgate headquarters.
Inasmuch as this was the first time a commission primary was being held during the term of a county mayor who himself had been elected via a party label, Rout’s actions will undoubtedly influence future countywide primary elections.
In the course of electioneering, a candidate’s point of view
can sometimes do a turnaround. Two months ago, when the GOP contenders
in contested commission races turned out for a debate in southeast
Memphis, they were all asked about the issue of city/county consolidation.
Only two – Marilyn Loeffel and Rendtorff – expressed opposition to the concept. However, when the conservative organization FLARE issued one of its standard election-year questionnaires and repeated the question, it got some different results.
Commission contender Paul Stanley went from a Yes to a No on the
consolidation question, and Scott McCormick decided not to answer
the questionnaire at all. He was joined in his reluctance by Democrat
Irma Waddell Merrill and independent Charles Burch, both of whom
will oppose the Republicans’ District 1, Position 1 winner in
August. (Indeed, none of the non-Republican commission candidates
answered the FLARE questionnaire.)