Now that we're starting to see the effects of welfare reform, with people being pushed off the rolls, do you think that blacks will start to look at Clinton's decisions differently, if it turns out that a lot people are hurting?

There may be some of that, but for the most part, what Bill Clinton found was that the vast majority of African-Americans agreed with him on welfare reform. But now you're getting to that 10 percent that doesn't like Bill Clinton, overlapping with a few of the people who do.

Who are the 10 percent who don't like him?

They tend, disproportionately, to be academics, social and political activists, many of whom are very bright people and who are on the cutting edge of these political discussions. But the vast majority of African-Americans supported welfare reform. More important, the vast majority of African-Americans feel so strongly about cracking down on criminals that they tended not to feel real strong about the gap in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine -- which is another issue that he was taken to task on. The issues that his critics tend to beat up on him about tend not to be issues that resonate with the rank and file of the African-American community.

Also, he vetoed the first two welfare reform bills and he had a Republican Congress with blue dog Democrats who were going to force a bill down his throat. Increasingly, more and more conservative and moderate Democrats were signing on to the welfare bill. That's the kind of rationale that he offers to his critics.

A lot of people talk about his early missteps -- one of them being withdrawing his nomination of Lani Guinier for assistant attorney general -- but one of the things your book really lays out is his appointments of blacks. He appointed so many more African-Americans than any other president.

It's amazing. It goes so deep. I'm talking about Clinton and blacks, a recent Washington Post story was talking about Bush and minorities. Disproportionately, Bush's appointments are Hispanics. If you simply compare black appointees in the Clinton and Bush administrations, you will find that there is no comparison. You have to go beyond the White House staff, as I did, and look at the whole range of appointments throughout the administration.

The amazing thing about government is that the White House, the president and his staff at best can control about 10 percent of what happens in government. When they send appointees over to Treasury or Agriculture or Labor or wherever, they can focus in on the top two or three issues from the White House. The rest they have to leave to the appointees. When you have a large number of African-Americans in those positions, you can understand why in the Clinton administration, black unemployment went down, black home ownership came up, black business ownership grew. You had so many people in place dealing with a broad range of issues that impacted the ability of African-Americans to achieve in those areas.

Even though Bush did not appoint as many African-Americans, he did appoint more minorities. Did Clinton set a precedent that future presidents will have a hard time reversing?

Oh, absolutely. He broke the mold. The mold from Lyndon Johnson to George Bush I was one black in your cabinet at a time. Every president from LBJ forward had at least one: "OK, we appointed all the important people, now let's find one black who can be secretary of HUD or of HHS." Clinton, on the other hand, had many blacks in major positions in the White House. The chief of White House personnel, his budget director, his director of public outreach, his deputy chief of staff were all African-American. His liaison between the White House and the Congress -- Thurgood Marshall's son -- was African-American.

Was there a sense of sadness in the black community when he left office?

In fact, what I got from the interviews was that there's a sense of great loss more than sadness. The feeling is that we really became players in Washington politics. We weren't in the stands, we were on the playing field. Before, the struggle was to get into the arena. And now, we're back in the stands.

The people you interviewed often talked about Clinton's style vs. his substance. A few mentioned how he knew the words to the song ...

The words to the Negro National Anthem!

Yes, that really blew me away.

I don't know them. Do you?

No. So he knew the words to the Negro National Anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing." And journalist Michael Frisby notes that he talked to him about author Walter Mosley. We know he loves jazz. After reading your book, I was convinced that he knew a lot about African-American culture. But did anyone ever have the sense that he just did his homework? And even so, would that have mattered?

Here's the point of all this. No matter how I answer the question, I don't think black people will give Bill Clinton any demerits. In other words, does he know the words to the Negro National Anthem because he really studied hard? Did he read Walter Mosley because he wanted to be able to say in some convincing way that he's immersed himself in black culture? If the answer is yes, you still get the credit. You have to treat this like a motion picture, not like a snapshot and compare him to that long line of 41 white men who have been presidents of the United States. The answer is, he did it and no one else did. Whether he did it because he was serious in his intent to understand a significant portion of the population of this country, or whether he did it because he saw them as the Democratic Party's most loyal constituency, he did it.

Recent Stories