Title: Senator Barack Obama, Race and the New Public Policy Potential: The African American Candidates for the Senate in 2004 and 2006
Abstract: Following the impact and influence of the Martin Luther King, Jr. -led civil rights movement, success came the form of race-specific public policies such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Voting Rights Act, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, and the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Act, all of which seemingly benefitted African Americans. There was a political and media storm on the ideological right, as well as among some inside the Democratic Party who had taken the policy initiative and leadership to gain such achievements. However, it had a cost higher taxes, increased government intervention private affairs, stifled economic growth, and more governmental bureaucracy (Edsall and Edsall, 1991; Murray, 1984). One of the main consequences of the resulting attacks on the Democratic Party was its failure to win presidential elections the 1980s.Emerging out of the relentless criticism from political, media and academic elites on the right was an initial response that the Democratic Party should make a stand and support only race-neutral public policies and governmental programs. Eventually such academic policy suggestions moved to a proposal for the party to embrace universal public policies, while inside the party itself political elites created the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which sought to move the party and its public policies righrward (Weir, 1998; Walton, 2000). Shortly thereafter, 1992, the DLCs leader, Arkansas Governor William J. Clinton, won the presidency and moved the Democratic Party to the center of the political spectrum. He did this by a program of making small public policies.Commenting on these smaller and non-racial Democratic public policies, African American political scientist Linda Williams declared:To some it may have seemed ironic that people of color would give such strong support to a president who restrained the growth of spending on social programs; ended the federal guarantee of a modicum of income security for the nonworking poor; placed new restrictions on both immigration and minority set-aside contracting; supported international trade agreements as unpopular among people of color as they were among organized labor; and engaged other actions that signaled a shift toward a more conservative, businessoriented philosophy within the Democratic party (Williams, 1998, 452).Williams concluded that in light of the available options.. .the black and Latino embrace of Bill Clinton stood not contravention of the best interest of their groups, but as a realistic response to the political circumstances of the times... [because] fact they had nowhere else to turn (Williams, 1998, 452). Although these are very insightful and penetrating remarks, they leave out a major reality about the civil rights movement.The King-led movement, and many of the civil rights efforts that had preceded him, made the presidency the center of public policymaking. Prior attempts had focused on Congress, beginning with the NAACP's anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation of the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s, all of which Congress had failed to pass. This led the leading civil rights organizations to focus upon presidential policymaking. While such an approach failed during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with the exception of the Fair Employment Practice Commission, greater success was had with Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. The achievement of numerous pieces of race-specific legislation under President Johnson caused many to feel that only with presidential policy action could African Americans achieve their goals this society.However, this focus on presidential policymaking overlooked the rising numbers of African Americans Congress and their potential for public policymaking. Even the NAACP itself played down this option when it continually opposed the Adam Clayton Powell Amendment, which the Congressman from Harlem tried to add to every spending bill during the 1940s, 1 950s and early 1 960s, that forbade the spending of federal tax dollars a racially discriminatory fashion (Hamilton, 1991, 226-35; Haygood, 1993, 134). …
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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