Bill Clinton, the latest Harlem contradiction

ROGER FRANKLIN looks at the consummate politician's party day in Harlem.

NEW YORK - It is neither nice nor wise in these politically correct times to look north from the glass towers of midtown Manhattan and wonder aloud why Harlem continues to be, well, the same old, down-at-heel Harlem.

The rest of the Big Apple sports a lustrous shine after these past eight years of booming prosperity. Yet poor Harlem sits and festers, a patchwork of peeling tenements and trash-strewn lots that the scattered patches of renewal do little to obscure. All this Third World charm, mind you, and just a $US5 ($11) cab ride from some of the priciest real estate on the planet.

Along 125th St, the district's pulsing artery, the line preached by "community leaders" like the Rev Al Sharpton (who can afford to live in a leafy, well-heeled pocket of New Jersey across the river) is that Harlem's misery is all the fault of someone else: one week, it is a shadowy conspiracy of Korean deli owners; the next, the ever-malevolent Euro-American Establishment.

And when inspiration runs thin, there are the Jews to be blamed, always the Jews. It seems the white man - white devil if the rhetoric comes from the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan - just won't give his black brother an even break. So Harlem languishes in its low-rent limbo, the Big Apple's homegrown Bantustan. Such is the gospel known to every voice in Harlem's choir of victims and martyrs.

But this week, at least for the space of a summer afternoon, Bill Clinton made everything light and hope. A band brassy with an extra serving of saxophonists blasted away, the Harlem Boys Choir trilled, and actress Cicely Tyson performed a strange and solitary stoop-shouldered shuffle at the corner of a stage that groaned beneath an assembly of New York's political heavyweights.

Uplifting speeches peppered with words like "love" and "respect" elicited forests of high-fives. The 1000-plus crowd cheered, and the stores closest to the epicentre of the afternoon's celebration decked themselves in signs of welcome and bright bunting.

The Sun King had come to da 'hood. Hallelujah! All hail to Bill Clinton, the latest addition to Harlem's long list of contradictions.

To novelist Toni Morrison, also on hand, the fractured family of the former chief executive's early years and irresponsible appetites of his later life make him the "the first black President" - a title she bestowed with admiration rather than irony.

But to the crowd in Harlem, he was the neighbourhood's Great White Hope. "It's a fine, fine wonderful day," enthused Nyemi Hodges, a grandmotherly woman who had topped her candy-pink Sunday suit with a grey chiffon confection of a hat to celebrate the official opening of the ex-President's new suite. "This," she said with passion and conviction, "is Harlem's day of days!"

Even those who reviled Clinton when he was in Washington must have experienced a certain twisted pleasure at seeing the master back in action.

George W. Bush may or may not be as dim as his enemies insist, but there can be no disagreement that he puts on a dull, dull show: no scandals worth mentioning, no hint of appetites that run to sex, cigars and wanton dullards like the celebrated Monica Lewinsky.

Clinton did not disappoint, switching to full-blown lip-biting empathy as he thanked Harlem - and through it, all of Black America - for standing behind him in his times of trouble. "You were there on the darkest days and on the best days, and I want you to know I want to be a good neighbour on the best days and the dark days," he said.

The throng responded with a ragged rendition of Stand By Me and the great white father beamed. When Clinton said he would work to restore "economic opportunities", the politicians sunning themselves in his reflected glory nodded like dashboard dolls. The most conspicuous element of the afternoon, however, was the one that received no attention at all. While the speeches and greetings returned time and again to "the injustice of inadequate opportunity", only a Sharptonian conspiracist - which is to say just about everybody in the crowd - might not have wondered if the leaders on the dais had something to do with it.

Start with Chuck Schumer, New York's senior senator, who has shown his gratitude for donations from the teachers' union by campaigning tirelessly against every reform that might free Harlem's kids from the chaos and hopelessness of the district's public schools. Vouchers that would allow their parents to send the children to parochial schools are "evil" in his view, while a recent proposal that would have seen a for-profit company take charge of one of the neighbourhood's most disgraceful primary schools was "exploitation".

Then there was Charlie Rangel, Harlem's Congressman and reigning lord of its formidable political machine. It was Rangel who first suggested that Hillary run for the Senate, a prospect that he made all the more enticing by promising to put his get-out-the-vote operation at her disposal.

In Harlem, as a recent commission on voter fraud reported, that involves places like a burned-out warehouse on Madison Ave, where more than 160 phantom "voters" were supposed to reside. You can bet they all voted early - and often. Real or not, a phenomenal 96 per cent of votes cast in Harlem helped send Hillary to Washington. It is the sort of figure normally seen only in places like North Korea and Baghdad.

Rangel is very good at extracting federal money for his pet Harlem projects. One audit several years ago found that money which should have gone to the restoration of the famous Apollo Theatre was actually spent on sharp suits and fancy cars for the Congressman's friends. One aide was so grateful, he forked out more than $US700 in grant money every month having his taxpayer-provided Cadillac washed and polished.

And then, of course, there was Clinton, who delighted all present with a series of dewy-eyed whoppers. He recalled how, as a teenager, he had yearned to play his saxophone at the fabled Apollo, which is just down the street from his new HQ.

If so, it must have been during those moments when he wasn't learning the political ropes at the knee of mentor William J. Fulbright, the Arkansas Senator who fought tooth and nail to foil Martin Luther King's crusade for civil rights.

Nor would he have expressed that desire in the presence of stepfather Bud Clinton, the Hot Springs used car dealer whom Partners in Power author Roger Morris discovered had been an energetic Klansman. Brother Roger would not have approved, either. The FBI has a surveillance tape of the former first sibling in which every fifth word is "nigger".

What did Clinton do for Harlem when he had the chance?

Well, apart from shepherding money to Rangel, he also signed the bill that slashed welfare benefits, obliged single mothers to leave their kids at home and go to work, and threatened evictions from public housing if residents were caught doing dope. He also beefed up the drug laws that have made either a defendant or a prisoner of one young black man in four.

Nor was he particularly keen on having blacks in the White House.

So why the move uptown? The answer is vintage Clinton.

The first element is a studied insult to his critics, who raised an awful fuss when he proposed spending $US3 million a year on a palatial suite of offices in midtown. If white folks didn't want him, he'd go where he was appreciated. Secondly, as always with the Clintons, there is the political angle: with Jesse Jackson's romantic and financial scandals still unfolding, he can no longer claim to be the undisputed and unsullied voice of Black America.

And Sharpton is too much of a wild card to be acceptable to the Democratic Party's white elite.

That leaves black voters - the Democrats' largest and most fervent bloc of supporters - with nobody to lead them. Now that mooching free beers from the publicans of Chappaqua is losing its appeal, consummate politician Bill "Black Like Me" Clinton is saying once again that he is ready to serve.