Why blacks love Bill Clinton
DeWayne Wickham talks about African-Americans' overwhelming support for the 42nd president, and why they like him more than Colin Powell and Jesse Jackson.

A Clinton-hater might say that he just knew how to play the game. But there was something else that many of the people you interviewed touched on, something about his ease, that they could really sense? What was it?

It's what we perceive. Black folk have a built-in radar for B.S., particularly when it's racial B.S. It started with slavery, when the master would turn to the slave and say, "We need to clean this yard." The slave knew that "we" weren't going to clean this yard. That meant, "You better clean this yard." We understood that there was a kind of a false sense of familiarity that many white folks have with black folks. And the key to Clinton was not so much what he sought to do, but how what he did was perceived by African-Americans. For most African-Americans, he was real, and he connected in a way that others didn't

Let's go back to this whole pandering suggestion that comes from a lot of folk: "He was just playing to the black community." OK, let's say that that's the case: Then he's better at it than anyone else in the history of the presidency. If that's all that there was -- and I would argue that that's not the case -- but if that's all that there was, then come on, whatever happened to the Gipper, the Great Communicator? Why couldn't he pull that off?
[read more]

thanks to follow me here...