`I Will Support Affirmative Action,' Lieberman
Assures Blacks `I Will Support Affirmative Action,' Lieberman
Assures Blacks
By Dahleen Glanton Chicago Tribune Staff Writer August 16, 2000
LOS ANGELES -- Attempting to quell an undercurrent of discontent among the Democratic Party's most loyal group of backers, Sen. Joseph Lieberman met with African-American delegates on Tuesday and vowed to firmly support affirmative action. Prominent black Democrats had questioned Lieberman's stance on affirmative action, and the issue had threatened to weaken the strong black support base needed by Vice President Al Gore if he is to win in November.
"I have supported affirmative action, I do support affirmative action, and I will support affirmative action because history and current reality make it necessary," the senator from Connecticut said in a speech to the Congressional Black Caucus on his first day at the Democratic National Convention. Party leaders had rushed to defuse potential problems with blacks by declaring Lieberman a civil rights activist who went to the South in the 1960s and marched with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but the controversy that had been brewing for days came to a head as the convention got under way.
The Gore campaign assigned Labor Secretary Alexis Herman and Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat who is the District of Columbia's non-voting delegate in Congress, to ease concerns about Lieberman's support for anti-affirmative action legislation in California and his support for some state-funded school vouchers. Rep. Maxine Waters of California said Lieberman had been "perceived as someone who supported Proposition 209," the 1996 California proposition that banned state-funded affirmative action programs. "He flirted with vouchers, but I'm confident he's supporting the same issues as we do," Waters said after the meeting.
Lieberman, who said he plans to campaign in black communities and churches, said he only supported testing a school voucher system and that his vote in favor of that test did not draw money away from public schools. But some who heard Lieberman speak Tuesday said they still harbored doubts about his positions. "To say I'm totally satisfied, I'm not," said Bill Lynch, a black New York delegate. "But I'm supportive of him." Dissension among African-Americans, a key voting bloc for the Democratic Party, could cause problems for Democrats in the fall. If black voters fail to turn out in large numbers, Gore would have difficulty getting elected.
While African-Americans make up only 12 percent of the electorate, they stand firmly behind the Democratic Party, and in November about 85 percent of black voters are expected to back Gore, a trend toward the Democrats that has continued since 1964. This year, 20 percent of Democratic convention delegates are black, compared with 4 percent at the GOP convention. Though Texas Gov. George W. Bush, through his use of "compassionate conservatism," has sought to lure African-Americans away from the Democratic Party, opinion polls indicate he has had little success, particularly among older blacks whose loyalty stems from the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
For the most part, blacks dismissed the GOP's diverse showing in Philadelphia as "window dressing" and insist that what is taking place in Los Angeles this week is the real thing. An ABC News-Washington Post poll conducted during the Republican National Convention indicated that 12 percent of African-Americans support Bush while 80 percent support Gore. "The Republican Party has changed, and the dominant wing basically represents white Southerners," said David Bositis, a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "If you want to know which group in the country African-Americans have the most suspicion of, it's conservative white Southerners. "Also, if you look at social and economic indicators under the Clinton administration, especially in the past couple of years, African-Americans feel they have done very well, and they see President Clinton as the cause of it. He is extremely well regarded among African-Americans, and that support will transfer to Gore. The question for Gore, though, is whether there will be a big black voter turnout."
The Gore campaign has failed to generate intense enthusiasm among blacks or any other group, and his selection of Lieberman, the first Jew on a major national ticket, briefly raised the issue of black-Jewish relations, a sensitive subject rarely discussed openly. Black leaders and analysts say the issue is unlikely to have any impact in November. "Within the last 20 years, historians and others have come to the realization that while there was definitely a black/Jewish alliance in the '40s, '50s and '60s around civil rights, there was always a historic underlying tension, specifically economically," said Marshall Stevenson Jr., director of the Dillard University National Center for Black-Jewish Relations. "When blacks moved to the North, they moved into white communities, and there always has been an economic competition between Jewish business people and African-Americans for the black business dollar. And while there has been a strong civil rights alliance, within that alliance there were tensions that are carried over today. They are downplayed somewhat now because of other racial issues," Stevenson said.
Black leaders have sought to downplay those issues and for the most part stand firmly behind the Gore-Lieberman ticket. They also were quick to denounce the comments of Lee Alcorn, who was forced to resign as president of the Dallas branch of the NAACP last week after making anti-Semitic remarks about Lieberman. Though Alcorn's remarks do not represent the feelings of the majority of blacks, anti-Semitism is a serious issue in the black community and America in general, according to Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. In the group's national surveys, he said, white anti-Semitism has dropped from 32 percent in 1964 to 12 percent in 1998.
For blacks, he said, it has remained in the 30 percent range for 34 years. "To put it precisely, one-third of the African-American community in the United States is infected with serious anti-Semitic attitudes," said Foxman, adding that he was pleased black leaders quickly denounced Alcorn's statement. "I don't see it as a problem [for the Democrats]. In fact, [Lieberman] should bring our communities closer together. This has always been a party of both communities." Rev. Jesse Jackson said African-Americans have a long history with Jews, and those bonds remain strong. He called Gore's choice of Lieberman a "bold decision" that brings down another barrier. "The one big tent dream is a step closer to reality and Al Gore brings our nation together according to its highest aspirations," Jackson said. "We have to gird ourselves for a religious bigotry battle and rise to the level of public policy debate and budget priorities. That's the real issue for America today."
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