Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
Electoral Math
Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
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A note on midnight basketball: The midnight basketball programs, which House Republicans derided as soft-on-crime liberal spending, were a well established success before the Clinton Administration, had existed under previous Republican Presidents, and had the support of Real Republicans, not just "RINOs" like John Chafee. Newt just decided to trash Clinton for them because it was good politics. I guess I can't blame him.
Choice quotes:
"Though the South was completely segregated back then, some level of racial interaction was inevitable in small towns, just as it had always been in the rural South. However, it was rare to find an uneducated rural southerner without a racist bone in his body. That's exactly what my grandfather was. I could see that black people looked different, but because he treated them like he did everybody else, asking after their children and about their work, I thought they were just like me. ... It took me years to learn ... that most white people weren't like my grandfather and grandmother ..." -- on Pappaw Cassidy's good heart.
"The only unpaved streets I saw in Hope, or later in Hot Springs when I moved there, were in black neighborhoods, full of people who worked hard, many of them raising kids like me, and who paid taxes. Odessa deserved better." -- on the Clinton family's housekeeper, who was black.
"Though they never had extra money, they never felt poor as long as they had a neat house, clean clothes, and enough food to feed anyone who came in the front door. They worked to live, not the other way around." -- on family life growing up working class.
Further Reading: There is an entire chapter of Malcom Gladwell's Blink devotes a chapter to the NYPD's shooting of Amadou Diallo. Gladwell examines an experiment conducted by Keith Payne which shows the impact of racial bias on decision making. Payne's research does not attempt to associate success or failure in eliminating racial bias with the social background of the subject. I'm sure there is a PhD thesis waiting to be written on that topic.
Even in this early chapter, which focus on Bill Clinton's early years, chapter two of My Life also gives us the life story that leads to one of Clinton's future political views [emphasis added]:
During the Depression, when nobody had any money, he [Clinton's grandfather] would invite boys to ride the ice truck with him just to get them off the street. They earned twenty-five cents a day.
This must where he became fond of after school programs to reduce youth crime.
In any event, Clinton uses most of chapter two to introduce his grandparents, who raised him for two years while his mother was at nursing school in New Orleans. Pappaw Clinton ran the grocery store in Hope, which put him in the unique position of having to interact with his black customers. After all, Hope was a small town, and you can't let the people you live next door to go hungry. As a result, Bill Clinton's grandparents were surprisingly egalitarian for a pair of rural white Southerners (see choice quotes). This pattern -- the removal of racial prejudice among whites when they are actually exposed to minorities -- is quite common, even today. My impression from canvassing during the election cycle is that working class neighborhoods have largely self-segregated. An all-white or mostly-white trailer park in Florida will likely have very few Democratic voters. But I found plenty of self-identified white Democrats in working-class neighborhoods that were more integrated. This is not to denigrate those who have decided to live in all-white or nearly-all-white neighborhoods--it often takes great courage or dire need to step outside one's comfort zone. But I think it does show how easy it is to assume the worst about people, especially those we don't know.
Bill therefore grew up in a household where it was acceptable for him to play with his black neighbors. Hi also live with a family who did not measure its well-being through material posessions. So long as everyone had a roof over their head, enough to eat, and felt secure in their home life, Bill claims they felt comfortable. An important aspect of this easily lost today--the Great Depression is not even a memory for most people of working age, and anyone under 30 has lived through economic expansion interrupted only by the 1991-1994 recession and the 2001-2002 collapse caused by 9/11. George W. Bush is now the first President since the Depression who grew up entirely immune from it; true, his father was a child in the 1930s, but the Bush family was highly aristocratic, and W. spent his youth at Andover and Yale. It might behoove us all to read this chapter of My Life and remember there was a time when the chase for more did not consume [pun intended] quite so much of everyone's life.
Up Next: Roger Clinton, childhood with Mother in Hope, Arkansas
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updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 08:12 26 February 2005
