Less Is More on Race
A good night on the civil-rights front.

Mr. Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity
February 28, 2001 5:15 p.m.

he president's speech last night was about money — the budget, taxes, spending, etc. — so there wasn't a lot in it on civil-rights issues. But where these matters were alluded to, the president's words and instincts should be reassuring to conservatives.

For starters, it would have been easy to shoehorn race into the speech. Indeed, one of the most troubling things about the Democratic party and, more generally, the Left these days is their insistence on viewing every problem through a racial lens. A classic example appeared in a New York Times headline this morning: "California Utility Woes Also Hurt Companies Owned by Minorities." It takes real creativity to find a racial angle to utility deregulation, but the Times did it.

And so President Clinton would surely have found some way to make a racial appeal in a speech about the budget. President Bush did not.

Likewise, consider this line from the president's speech: "And to provide quality care in low-income neighborhoods, over the next five years we will double the number of people served at community health-care centers." President Gore would surely have changed the first part of the sentence to read, "low-income and minority neighborhoods." Of course, the skin pigmentation of the people living in a low-income neighborhood is patently irrelevant, but that doesn't matter to the race-obsessed politician.

Having twisted an economic problem into a racial one, President Gore would also have suggested a different solution. It's not enough to bolster community health care centers; no, what's needed and what would be promised would be more African-American doctors and nurses.

Never mind that there is no sound medical reason for a doctor or nurse to be the same skin color as his or her patient. The politically correct mantra says that the way to ensure better health care for underserved groups is to lower medical-school admission standards for people who share the skin color and national origin of those groups. This is ridiculous, to be sure, but very much in the zeitgeist, as painstakingly demonstrated by Sally Satel in her recent and excellent book PC, M.D..

The president's speech also mentioned his "New Freedom Initiative" for disabled Americans, which he had announced soon after taking office. The Americans with Disabilities Act has created a morass of litigation and has placed enormous burdens on the private sector. Given this, and given his father's and the president's own strong support for the ADA, conservatives were entitled to fear the worst from the new initiative.

But the initiative is largely unobjectionable precisely because it recognizes what the ADA does not — that technological and structural changes to help the disabled should be paid for by the government if the government is requiring them, not by the particular business unfortunate enough to be targeted for the change. If the justification for a ramp is to improve society by making it more accessible to the disabled, it makes sense for society to pay for it — not the Mom and Pop deli that bureaucrats decree should have the ramp.

The only explicit reference to a civil-rights issue in the president's speech was his call on Attorney General John Ashcroft "to develop specific recommendations to end racial profiling." John Derbyshire and I recently debated the issue of racial profiling on this website (and, more briefly, in the hard-copy National Review). I have no doubt that W. was riveted to his laptop throughout, and I am proud to say that my eloquent and brilliant analysis apparently carried the day.

Thus, I think that the president is right to condemn racial profiling, in addition to what he calls the "the stubborn vestiges of racism." Bringing the notion of civil rights back round to actual discrimination — i.e., deliberately treating people differently on account of their skin color — is a welcome move. More often than not, these days, talk of "civil rights" is just code for quotas and income redistribution.

Of course, as Mr. Derbyshire and I discussed, there are good ways and bad ways to address profiling, and President Bush seems to understand this, too. He impressed upon Attorney General Ashcroft that "we will not hinder the work of our nation's brave police officers." Addressing profiling in a principled way will not be easy, mind you, but the president's words last night were reassuring. Clearly he understands the issue's delicacy.

So, all in all, a good night on the civil-rights front. The real tests lie elsewhere, of course, but the president's instincts so far are sound. Sure beats President Gore.