Presidential Rhetoric and Bureaucratic Enforcement: The Clinton Administration and Civil Rights

BILL CLINTON’S ENTIRE LIFE reflects a strong interest in civil rights. He learned the value of racial tolerance as a child in Arkansas, became a longtime supporter of civil rights policies to protect a wide variety of groups, and received solid political backing from racial minorities through the years.1 Understandably, then, Clinton is often portrayed as a leader on a number of civil rights issues during his two terms in the White House.2 As Steven Holmes wrote in 1996 in the New York Times, Clinton “amassed a civil rights record rivaling that of any president in the last 30 years.”3 Clinton exhibited a particular concern for African Americans, leading Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. to conclude that racial justice was apparently the president’s most “authentic concern.”4 Kweisi Mfume of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People went even further: on balance, he argued, Clinton was “a better president for us than anyone who preceded him,” including Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.5