What a difference a phrase makes.
When President Clinton pulled off to the side from the pre-NAFTA vote wheeling and dealing to deliver what turned out to be a major address on crime, violence and other societal ills to an African-American religious gathering, he punctuated his remarks repeatedly with the shopworn salutation, "My fellow Americans."Looking back over Clinton's address to the 86th Annual Holy Convocation of the Church of God in Christ in Memphis, Tenn., one is led to the conclusion that the judicious use of that cliche contributed in a major way to the success of the presidential oration.
Clinton was actually treading perilous waters when he ventured into the vast Mason Temple Church of God in Christ, where Martin Luther King Jr. uttered his prophetic sermon about not getting to the Promised Land with his followers, shortly before his assassination.
No U.S. president had ever spoken in that church, and Clinton risked comparisons with King, a frightening prospect for any orator. At the same time, the president chose to speak about crime, drugs, violence, unemployment, family breakdown and loss of a sense of community, emphasizing the effects of those phenomena upon lives of African-Americans.
Invoking the memory of King, Clinton decried the violence in the streets and in the schools that is taking such a dreadful toll of the nation's youth, the drugs that are destroying lives, and the promiscuity and irresponsibility that are depriving so many of a chance at the American dream.
He said King did not "live and die" for:
" . . . 13-year-old boys to get automatic weapons and gun down 9-year-olds just for the kick of it.
" . . . young people to destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others.
" . . . children to have children and the fathers of the children to walk away from them and abandon them, as if they don't amount to anything."
Those are themes one can hear enunciated almost any Sunday in African-American churches across the land and in barbershops, beauty shops, restaurants and other places where African-Americans come together every day of the week.
African-Americans, however, get sensitive when other people, even the president of the United States, dare to lecture them about such things. And with some justification. After all, those problems are not unique to African-American neighborhoods.
Moreover, much of the trouble in African-American inner-city neighborhoods is rooted in the dark, lamentable history of past injustices and inequities toward African-Americans. That is not an excuse. It is just a fact.
Clinton, therefore, risked getting a lukewarm or merely polite response to his fervent exhortations from the 5,000 African-American ministers and other civic leaders assembled at the place where King had declaimed so eloquently. But Clinton kept saying, "My fellow Americans," like an old recording out of the New Deal era. And when he didn't use that phrase, he substituted the personal pronoun "we" for it. It became an inclusive thing. By the time he got around to calling for support for his crime bill and cooperation in addressing the underlying causes of crime, drugs and violence, he had his audience on board. Everyone was ready to say "amen" when Clinton declared:
"We will give these children a future. We will take away their guns and give them books. We will take away their despair and give them hope. We will rebuild the families and the neighborhoods and the communities."
Now, just try to imagine how the speech would have gone over if Clinton had made all the same points and addressed his listeners as "You people" or "Your people," the way an erstwhile presidential candidate did last year at the NAACP convention.
To some, Ross Perot's faux pas did not appear to justify the hostile reaction to it. It was just his way of speaking. A regionalism, perhaps. Nevertheless, it did connote a setting apart, and it was widely interpreted as condescending.
The contrast between "My fellow Americans" and "You people," however, is stark. One unifies, the other divides.
Clinton sees a parade forming in this country for doing something definitive about crime and violence. In seeking to jump in front of that parade, the president used his "My fellow Americans" to try to pull all segments of society into it.