Borrowing Bill's 'soul'

LAS VEGAS
THE MOMENT was simultaneously light and laden with Senator Hillary Clinton's desire to show she has soul. In an interview Thursday with the Trotter Group of African-American newspaper columnists, she was asked why she sometimes drops her g's in speeches in the South.

She said it was because "I've lived all those years in Arkansas and, I, you know, I'm in this interracial marriage. . . . "

Husband Bill Clinton's popularity among African-Americans was somewhere between unassailable and delusional. Comedian Chris Rock and Nobel novelist Toni Morrison called Clinton the first black president. Clinton reveled in the free pass. In 1999, Clinton told the Congressional Black Caucus about comedian Chris Tucker's desire to star in a movie about the first black president. Clinton joked, "I didn't have the heart to tell him I had already taken the position."

Now Democratic Senator Clinton of New York is slipping into Bill's cloak of blackness in her bid for the White House. The problem is that her husband too often whipped off the cloak to pull the wool over black people's eyes, letting stand criminal justice laws that apartheid South Africa could have designed. She flashed a sign that she may do it too.

In a speech Thursday before the general body of the National Association of Black Journalists, she decried the "crisis of the 1.4 million young men of color between the ages of 16 and 24 who are out of school and out of work and too often out of hope." She said, "I reject a conversation that paints with a broad brush 1.4 million young men as a threat, as a headache, or as a lost cause."

But afterward with the Trotter Group, she hinted that the headache may be too strong to fully fight for the cause. I asked her what she would do to eliminate the two-decade-old federal cocaine sentencing laws that punish crack possession so severely that you need to be caught with 100 times more powder cocaine to get the same sentence given for crack.

Senator Clinton responded to my question by saying the laws were "unfortunate compromises that really come to symbolize the disparity and treatment and unfairness within the criminal justice sentencing system. So I have been on record a number of years saying that we have to move toward eliminating that disparity."

That sounded promising until she added, "As a matter of practical politics, you might not be able to get from where we are, from 100-to-1 to parity. But we should ought to be able to get to 10-to-1 or something that would move us in the right direction."

That is the cloak. Medical researchers a decade ago found crack and powder to be pharmacologically identical or so close to identical that even 10-to-1 is ridiculous. Crack cocaine is neither 10 times more addictive than powder nor fuels 10 times more violent crime than powder. The majority of both crack and powdered cocaine offenses do not involve weapons.

Some politicians have figured this out. Democratic presidential candidate and Delaware Senator Joe Biden this summer filed legislation to eliminate the disparity.

Senator Clinton's response was nothing more than a 10-year-old rehash of the 10-to-1 ratio President Clinton proposed on the advice of Attorney General Janet Reno and drug policy adviser Barry McCaffrey. Clinton told the Trotter Group in 1997 that the laws were "unfair, unjustifiable, and should be changed." He did not muscle Congress for the change. Even though 55 percent of crack users are white, 82 percent of federal crack prosecutions are black, according to the Sentencing Project, a think tank that advocates for a more thoughtful criminal justice system. One in four African-Americans in state prison, or 140,000, are there for drug offenses.

They are part of the 1.4 million men of color Senator Clinton now says she wants to save. "It's frustrating to hear Hillary Clinton talk about 10-to-1 or anything less than parity when there is no science for it," Kara Gotsch, director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project, said over the telephone yesterday. "Anything gradual is still discriminatory."

Senator Clinton told NABJ "I will call for a national response to this national crisis." She told the Trotter Group that easing crack laws is "at the top of my priority list." Until she takes off the cloak of 10-to-1 and calls for parity, her "interracial marriage" is the new delusion.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.