Bill Clinton: “Before we go I'd like to just leave you with this thought, just sort of food for thought to keep you churning on this.…”

“Before we go I'd like to just leave you with this thought, just sort of food for thought to keep you churning on this. First, I'll make a request. I would like anything you can do to help us get more things that work in to the commission staff, so we can put it on the Internet and get it out, let people see that there are--people always write or they E-mail us and they say, ``What can we do?'' We'd like to say, here's something that's working somewhere; why don't you do it? That's important. Anything you can do to help us recruit any kind of new leadership to enlist in this cause, we'd like to have your help on that. But anyway, let me finish. Here's the thing I'd like to leave you with, just sort of as food for thought, to continue this discussion and try to narrow it further. And I may be unfairly summarizing someone else's work, so I'll try not to--I hope I'm not being unfair. Bill Raspberry had an interesting column the other day in which he said this race effort is a big deal, and there's three things involved in it, and maybe nobody could ever deal with all three things. He said, first of all, there's the feeling of racial prejudice, how people feel about each other. And secondly, he said, there is the existence of illegal discrimination that our laws prohibit. And thirdly, there is the existence of outcomes which are dramatically different by race; your life chances and education, income, employment, and ownership and health care, among other things, are dramatically different based on your race. He said, ``I once thought we could fight all three of them in the sixties because we had an enemy, the Southern white people, and everybody else was on the same side.'' Now, at least when it comes to-- maybe everybody feels some discrimination towards somebody else or-- he says now the problem is if we're all responsible for all this, it's hard to get enough allies to work on what really counts, which is changing the life experiences of the people, in terms of their outcomes. Most leaders of any group would give anything just to end whatever the disparities are in education, in health care, and in employment, income, and ownership. And I'm sort of amplifying, but I think this is a fair representation of what he said. So he made the suggestion--he said what we need to do is get everybody on the same side, start out, and then see if we can work back to--so the logical extension--this was not in there, but the logical extension of the argument was if you could get everybody working on the same side on what to do about job outcomes, maybe you would come back and have a broader consensus on an affirmative action program than you think, or at least the people who are against it would then recognize their moral responsibility to put something credible in its place. I thought that was an interesting argument, when you deal with--if you just deal with the three things I mentioned. It doesn't get you out of the primary obligation to enforce the laws against discrimination adequately, but it was an interesting way to think about it. If you ask everybody--for example, if you ask everybody who is on both sides of this English-as-a-second-language issue in California to start with the disparate educational outcomes and work back, you might get to a different place. One of the things that always bothers me about all these litmus test issues--and I'm not innocent in this, so I'm not casting a stone--is that depending on which side of the litmus test you're on, once you figure out your crowd's winning, then you go on and worry about something else. Then when you figure out--when you realize your side's losing, you can't worry about anything else; but you can't have an honest conversation, because you're trying too hard to keep from getting killed in the next referendum or whatever. In terms of the affirmative action referendum, all I can tell you is that I made a couple of statements in California in 209, and maybe I could have done more, and I think if the thing had gone on 3 more weeks, it would have come out differently on 209. I'm glad I was asked to be a part of the effort against the repeal in Houston, and it succeeded; it's the only one that has. But the real issue is if you left it alone and no one ever debated it again, we've had enough experience to know that it is insufficient to change the disparate outcomes. So what if we started on trying to figure out how we could close the gaps and work back; we might find that we had a lot more agreement than we thought. Now, in the initial polling--I think this will change a lot, as the referendum is debated. And I confess, I have not read exactly what--the initial polling in California, on the English, the bilingual education initiative, is deeply troubling to defenders of bilingual education because the initial polling has 70 percent of Hispanic voters voting for the initiative. Now, what does that mean? That doesn't necessarily mean that they understand the implications of this initiative and they want to vote for it. But what it does mean is that Hispanic parents are concerned about whether their children stay in the programs for too long, or whether the programs are sufficiently effective to let them learn everything else as well as they need to learn. So instead of getting into the fight, could we at least start with dealing with what people's perception of the problem is, and then work back to the solution; then if you do that, you've got some alternative to put in place if you want to fight the initiative. In other words, you don't have to play their game; you don't have to let it be a wedge issue if you decide to articulate it in a way that forces everybody else to come talk to you about what the real issue is--which is, you want all these children whose first language is not English to be able to learn everything they need to learn, on time as much as possible, and to be English-proficient, if they're going to live in this country, as quickly as they can be. But there are--depending on what age you come here and what your situation is and what your native language is and how difficult it is and what the subject is, it is more or less difficult to learn certain things in English within certain time periods. In other words, it's a complicated issue. But there is a broad perception that the bilingual services have become, if you will, institutionalized in a way that carry kids with them longer than they should be and may make them too dependent on it. So why don't we analyze the facts and find out what they are, and then try to work back to that, instead of immediately joining the issue; but do it quickly enough so that the people of California have some chance of having an honest debate. It isn't just history that people are deprived of; very often they are deprived of what the facts are on the issues they're debating. So all they can do is go on what they think their basic values are and their basic instincts. And we get so caught up--and, believe me, I share the frustration that Dr. Franklin said about what the voters don't know. It's very hard to pierce through the public consciousness and to do a sustained public education campaign in the absence of some great conflict. I'll never forget, 10 days before our congressional debacle in 1994, a man I didn't know very well who was a pollster just spontaneously sent me this survey he did--or at least I wasn't working with him at the time--and I was shocked. He said, ``Here are 10 things that, if all the voters knew them, would change the outcome of this congressional election, which is about to be terrible for you, if they just knew''-- maybe there were eight things on the list. But anyway, there were more than five things that we had done that absolutely nobody knew about. So this is a generic problem in a society as big and complex as ours, being bombarded from all edges. But I just ask you to think about that. Suppose we did that with health care. Suppose we did that with education. For example, on the education issue, some people say, well, maybe this 10 percent solution that Texas adopted would work on the affirmative action. Well, the answer is it might well work in most States for admission to college, but it wouldn't do anything on the graduate school front. So what's your answer on graduate school? There are a lot of these things that I'd just like to see--I'd like to see more, instead of just throwing barricades over the wall at one another, if we could start with what the problem is and work back, I really believe we can make an enormous amount of progress in this country, because most Americans who get caught in the middle on these referendums, where their values are pulling them one way and you're trying to--and the rhetoric is pulling them one way, and you're trying to cram information in as quick as you can before election time comes and all that kind of stuff. Most Americans really don't like the fact that we have disparate outcomes, and most Americans think anybody that's working hard and needs a hand up ought to get it, to have a fair chance. So I think, to go back to what you said about talking to the Speaker on this issue, I think I'm going to try to follow this tack in dealing with our friends who disagree with us on so much. Let's see if we can't start with that and work back and see how much agreement we can make. I think we may do better than people think. Thank you. This was great.”