Black Mischief. By now everyone knows the Congressional Black Caucus came out against Clarence Thomas, the lone dissenter being Representative Gary Franks, a newly elected black Republican from Connecticut. Thanks to the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot, we also know that the main topic of conversation in the meeting before the Caucus made its announcement was a USA Today poll showing overwhelming black support for Judge Thomas’s confirmation.
What few people know about, however, is the creative editing that went into the Caucus’s handouts on Judge Thomas’s record, particularly his famous 1987 talk at the Heritage Foundation, “Why Black Americans Should Look to Conservative Policies.” The handout quotes him as follows: “During my first year in the Administration . . . the emphasis in the area of civil rights and social policies was decidedly negative. In the civil-rights area, we began to argue consistently against affirmative action. We attacked welfare and the welfare mentality. These are positions with which I agree.” The handout ends there. But in the very next sentence, Mr. Thomas went on to make the main point of his talk: “But the emphasis was unnecessarily negative.”
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