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Brother Bill: President Clinton and the Politics of Race and Class. By Daryl A. Carter. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2016. Pp. xi, 322. Acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. $54.95, cloth; $26.95, paper.)
During the 1998 impeachment proceedings, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison famously called Bill Clinton "our first black president." She explained that he "displayed almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas" and that the Republicans' obsession with his sexual activities reminded blacks of their own persecution (quoted pp. 1-2). In Brother Bill, Daryl Carter provides a fuller understanding of Clinton's popularity in black communities, especially in the context of the detrimental effects that some of the president's policies-the 1994 crime bill and 1996 welfare reform-had on impoverished segments of the black population. For Carter, Clinton's popularity among African Americans was rooted in his close relationship with the expanding and influential black middle and upper classes. These were Clinton's people, and on most issues they saw eye-to-eye, even on policies that made life more difficult for poor and working-class African Americans.
Like other historians, Carter places Clinton at the center of the movement of some Democratic leaders away from the liberalism of the 1960s. Organized in the mid-1980s around the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), these leaders insisted that the party's association with the welfare state...