What have the Clintons actually done for blacks?

Up front, let me reiterate that I support Barack Obama in this presidential race.

I am also aware that Hillary and Bill Clinton are willing to pull out all the stops to assure that she gets the Democratic party's nomination. The Clintons have been playing the power broker game for a long time. They know exactly how it is played and that it can require getting down and dirty with generous doses of hypocrisy to get what you want. Bill Clinton has often been described as the consummate politician, possibly the best in the last half of the twentieth century. Translation: he knows exactly what to do to get people (and corporations) to support him.

Many African Americans have been devoted to Bill Clinton, primarily because he's the first powerful white man (and who's more powerful than the president of the U.S.) to personally treat us like human beings. Few whites in positions of power know any blacks on a personal level, yet Clinton's "first friend," Vernon Jordan, is black. And, of course, Clinton was the first president to appoint more than a token black to a cabinet post other than Housing or Education. These symbolic moves endeared him to black folk to such an extent that they have overlooked the policies he either advocated or ignored that adversely affect blacks.

Apparently, no one remembers that Clinton is the president who presided over the demise of assistance to families with dependent children, thereby contributing to the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. He did nothing to change the harsher prison sentences given to crack users versus the lighter punishment for powder cocaine users. This policy disproportionately affects African Americans. As a matter of fact, while Clinton was in office, the rates of black incarceration increased from around 3,000 per 100,000 to 3,620 per 100,000 more than when Reagan was in office.

Clinton also fired his black surgeon general when she suggested that it wasn't a bad idea to talk about masturbation in sex education classes. Lani Guinier, another black woman tapped by Clinton to run civil rights in the Department of Justice, was unceremoniously dropped from consideration because of her support for cumulative voting, a strategy that would increase black political power.

I could go on and on, but I think I've made my point. Bill Clinton talks the talk, but fails to walk the walk. And black people want more of this?

These are the kinds of cynical say-one-thing-and-do-another politicians that we've had in this country in an almost unbroken line beginning with Richard Nixon in 1968. This is the kind of politics that Barack Obama says he wants to change. He may not be able to, but at least he wants to. And we know for sure that the Clintons don't.