NEWS ANALYSIS : Decision Upsets Black Leaders, Political Allies

Some of the storms that have buffeted Bill Clinton’s presidency--the crisis in Bosnia, for example--were forced on him from outside. Some--most notably the battle over higher taxes--have stemmed from deliberate policy decisions.

But, as even Clinton’s own aides concede, the debacle of C. Lani Guinier was an entirely self-inflicted--and entirely unnecessary--wound.

Because of that, the withdrawal of the controversial nomination to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division is certain to hurt Clinton in two of his most vulnerable spots: the public’s faith in the basic competence of the White House and his standing with one of his most loyal constituencies.

Even Clinton’s allies were bewildered by the notion that Clinton, who has prided himself on his hands-on control of senior appointments, could have nominated Guinier without being fully briefed on her writings and that the White House could have put forward the nomination without preparing a plan to defend it.

“You have a lot of very talented people over there who are simply not doing a good job,” said one close Clinton adviser.

Others were even harsher in their assessments.

“It’s another example of weakness, of not having anticipated problems, of not being observant and sharp about what political currents are all about,” said a prominent Democratic lobbyist.

With polls showing the public already worried that Clinton and his aides may be in over their heads, the sight of the President once again standing in the White House briefing room trying to explain yet another fiasco could only further weaken his standing, these observers said.

But if the reaction among members of the Washington policy elite was astonishment, bewilderment and even a sense of pity, the response to the abandonment of Guinier’s nomination among many black leaders was rage.

Roger Wilkins, a Justice Department official during the Administration of former President Lyndon B. Johnson and now a professor at George Mason University, said that Guinier’s nomination had been “nibbled to death by cowardly, anonymous White House aides who wanted to batter her into withdrawing her nomination.”

The bitterness of black leaders was understandable, and its political cost to Clinton potentially great.

They had delivered millions of votes for him in a presidential contest in which the Democratic standard-bearer had squeezed out only a narrow victory. More important, they had muted their voices and given Clinton elbow room to appeal to so-called Reagan Democrats and other white voters who have found previous Democratic candidates too close to minority groups for their tastes.

For their troubles, many of them now believe, one of their own has been publicly humiliated and their views have been spurned.

At daybreak on what turned out to be the last day of the Guinier nomination, a cadre of angry, frustrated and demanding black lawmakers and civil rights activists had mobilized for a last-ditch campaign to dissuade Clinton from pulling the plug. By day’s end, they had lost the battle and were even more angry and frustrated.

No one is certain how Clinton’s failure to face down Guinier’s critics or to allow her an opportunity to defend herself publicly until her nomination already was virtually dead--she was ordered not to speak out during the weeks of controversy leading up to Clinton’s decision to kill the nomination--will resonate among black voters.

But for many among the civil rights leadership, the issue is likely to be used as a rallying cry--”Remember Lani Guinier. Remember Anita Hill”--against black political naivete and complacency when dealing with white leaders, said Ronald Walters, a Howard University political scientist.

Walters said black legislators and civil rights leaders are likely to invoke the imagery of Hill, the Oklahoma University law school professor who accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment at his confirmation hearings in 1991, in attempts to give Guinier similar martyr status in the civil rights community.

There are two politically important reasons for doing that:

First, if Guinier is to become a standard-bearer for the civil rights community, many blacks will have to become better acquainted with who she is.

A scholarly but little known law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Guinier has been virtually invisible to the larger community of professional and working-class blacks. But she is greatly respected within the tight-knit community of lawyers and political activists who compose the civil rights community.

Secondly, Guinier--like Hill--is a black woman, a demographic unit of the black community with increasing political clout, said David Bositis, a senior political analysts at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a liberal think tank that studies black electoral issues.

“Black women were 10% of Clinton’s vote,” he said, noting that black men were only one of every three black voters for Clinton. “That’s not an insignificant thing. If he backs away from Guinier, it’s going to cause him trouble with black women. They will be highly offended, partly because he has appointed so few of them to key jobs.”