True Leadership on Racial Matters Is What Really Matters in Campaign

The presidency, Al Gore now likes to say, “is the only position in our country that is filled by an individual who is assigned the responsibility of fighting not just for one district or one state, not for one group . . . [but] for all our people.”

That’s a noble sentiment. It’s only too bad that Gore, and all of his leading rivals for the presidency, are having so much trouble living up to it in this campaign.

In the last few weeks, on a series of racially polarizing controversies, the leading contenders in both parties have forgotten the simple truth that anyone who would be president must speak for the entire nation. It’s not enough to tell your own side what they want to hear. On issues that threaten to widen racial divides, the president’s job is to affirm the national interest in equal treatment for all, even when that means confronting his own party’s narrow interests. And this, at key moments, the leading candidates have failed to do.

At his best, Texas Gov. George W. Bush can be an impassioned voice for racial inclusion; but he has saluted the flag of expedience in refusing to express a position on South Carolina’s flying of the Confederate flag. In fairness to Bush, he has taken the same let-the-locals-decide position on many other state controversies, including school vouchers in Michigan and taxes in Tennessee.

But, in this instance, that local-control posture ignores the national interest in eradicating symbols of exclusion and prejudice--which is what the flag, whatever its history, has now become for many white and black Americans. (It doesn’t help Bush’s credibility that he has ducked questions about displaying the flag in Texas too.) By remaining silent, Bush is undermining years of work to broaden his appeal among blacks; more importantly, he’s compromising his ability to promote racial reconciliation as president--a cause he seems to genuinely care about.

As former Republican Education Secretary William J. Bennett, an occasional Bush advisor, said last week on CNN: While a president may not decide the issue, “we have a right to know where [candidates] stand on it.” In his reluctance to alienate hard-core South Carolina conservatives, Bush looks more parochial than presidential--as does Arizona Sen. John McCain, who finds virtue with all sides in the dispute and refuses to side with any.

Al Gore and Bill Bradley also appear committed to racial reconciliation. But at last week’s debate before black and Latino activists in Des Moines, they too gave higher priority to party orthodoxy than to the principle of equal treatment upon which any lasting racial progress depends.

Both denounced the Confederate flag. But, incredibly, neither managed a specific word of criticism for Al Sharpton, a controversial African American activist in New York, when they were asked if they would meet with him publicly.

Sharpton is not a one-dimensional figure; at times he has shown a bridge-builder’s instincts. But his record is stained with a history of racial divisiveness, notably his wild and demagogic accusations against white officials during the Tawana Brawley rape hoax (which led to a defamation judgment against Sharpton in 1998). On the very day that his name surfaced in the debate, Sharpton was sponsoring a Martin Luther King Day ceremony in New York City where one of his close allies let loose anti-Semitic comments just before Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke.

Yet Bradley and Gore seemed more eager to chew glass than question Sharpton. Gore wouldn’t commit himself to meeting Sharpton publicly but noted that he had included him in a private session and quickly added: “I was not hesitant to do that.” Bradley, who did give Sharpton the public meeting he craved, offered a response only slightly more nuanced: “I don’t agree with Al Sharpton on everything. But I think he’s got to be given respect.”

It’s not the right of the Democratic presidential candidates to pick the leaders for New York’s African American community. But it is the responsibility of any president to hold all Americans to the same standards. When the two Democrats denounced John Rocker (the retrograde Atlanta Braves pitcher) and Confederate flag supporters but muzzled themselves on Sharpton, they too looked more parochial than presidential.

If anything, the two men were even more abject when the debate turned to crime. Asked an intriguing question about allowing former felons to vote, both Gore and Bradley sweepingly indicted the criminal justice system as racially unfair. “There’s no question there is unequal justice in the United States,” said Bradley, who then called for rolling back mandatory jail sentences for first-time nonviolent drug offenders.

That specific policy idea is a reasonable, if debatable, position: Many experts support alternatives that would reduce the number of young African Americans imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses. More troubling was the overall impression Gore and Bradley conveyed. Neither challenged the implicit premise that a crackdown against crime was unfair to minorities.

But, for years, arguably the greatest inequity in the criminal justice system had been government’s willingness to tolerate intolerably high levels of crime in black communities. The dramatic reduction in crime since 1993 has benefited no one more than the vast number of law-abiding African Americans.

In 1993, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a black American was 40% more likely than a white to be the victim of a violent crime; in 1998, because crime against blacks has fallen faster than crime against whites, the gap was just 15%. Likewise, since 1993, the rate at which African Americans are murdered has dropped by 41%, compared with 28% for whites.

A president willing to challenge the preconceptions of his own party base might have mentioned some of that. And most Americans probably would have applauded, just as they would if Bush or McCain stood up for lowering the Confederate flag. “They might get flak from some of the interest groups, but the public would respond well to someone who said, ‘I am going to be president of all the people, and I am not going to pander to the worst elements,’ ” said Fred Siegel, an historian at Cooper Union, who has written extensively on race and politics.

At the moment, though, none of the candidates looks confident enough to test that proposition. On the biggest issues, all are shrinking.

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See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.