Massaging the Press; Pressing the Flesh
Dear Tamar,
Take it easy there. I did not intend to cast aspersion. But you seemed to be
upset that Bill Bradley appeared in Harlem and tried to feel the American
Negro's pain. I agree that these episodes can be awkward-and, Lord, if they are
awkward for you, how do you think they feel for me. But the fawning often stems
from a naked earnestness like Bill Bradley's. Sometimes it stems from the
candidate's failure to understand that black and brown voters have pretty much
the same interests as white voters. They want: the schools to work; the jobs to
be plentiful; the streets to be safe.
As for George Bush coming to shake hands at Unity in Seattle, perhaps it was
"a throwaway" as you say-but no more so (and quite probably less so)
than shaking hands with farmers in Iowa. The people at the Seattle conference
are opinion makers, many of them. What they do and say could end up being
crucial as the wheels of this campaign grind forward. In short, when things get
tight, many of those Unity-goers will be rendering opinions in cold, hard
print. Bush would have been ill-advised to pass them by.
I remember covering the early Clinton in New England in '92 and thinking, My
Lord, what a shaker of hands and massager of backs! I asked him way back then
what it would take to win. He said, "Give the same speech everywhere. Shake
hands (meaning 'touch') as many as people as possible." I thought, "Boy, this
guy is confident of his power to press the flesh." But flesh-pressing is the
stuff that the trade is made of and Bill did it better than anybody. The issues
are important, Tamar, but the voters tend to make powerful, intestinally based
judgments of a candidate's likability. Which is why George has a chance against
Gore or Bradley-and why his father lost to Clinton.
I apologize for not having read your book. But there is still time.
As for the "hard" issues, I take it that you mean affirmative action. We
will in fact get to that in the campaign, but you cannot blame people for not
rushing to an issue that has been so heavily contaminated with ill will in the
post-Reagan era. In any case, George W. has worked around the problem in
post-Hopwood, Texas. They simply invoked the 10 percent rule, accepting the top
10 percent of high school students into classes at ole Longhorn U. This is less
than optimal but will have to do until we can summon the political will to
improve the quality of schools that serve black and Latino populations. I wrote
a column recently about Ward Connerly (slayer of affirmative action in
California) embracing an ACLU lawsuit that charges California with failing to
provide qualified teachers and advanced-placement courses to poor and rural
students-as required in state law. Mr. Connerly stared right in the face of a
"hard question" and made an honorable choice, don't you think?
