The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

Clinton understood that putting the Democrats back in the business of banging on black dependency would allow his party to reseize the political middle that Democrats had lost when Lyndon Johnson threw the weight of the White House behind the civil rights effort and the War on Poverty. If you dig deeply enough in America, the big political swings always have something to do with race. And Clinton’s vacillating but cleverly packaged campaign to “end welfare as we know it” was a brilliant ploy by the man Toni Morrison called the “first black president” to take back the southern white voters the Democrats had seemingly lost forever when they sent the FBI into Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960s. That, and a little rolled-up-newspaper training session with rapper Sister Souljah, allowed Clinton to take four of the eleven Confederate states, seizing ground no Democrat had won for more than two decades.