After seven years in office, the Clinton Administration last week unveiled its program to improve the lot of people living in the nation's public-housing projects: Sue the nation's gun manufacturers.
The Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Andrew Cuomo, announced the threat of a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 3,200 public housing authorities around the country. We've come a long way since the days when Jack Kemp was trying to free the residents of these public-housing plantations by making them property owners.
Of course on hearing the Administration's announcement the thought immediately occurred to many that in a perfect world, someone would be filing a class-action suit against HUD for three decades of responsibility for these hellholes.
But set aside the wild swerve around the legislative process or even the fact that the activity being threatened is perfectly legal. The problem behind HUD's actions is real enough: We know that about a third of black men between 18 and 35 are either incarcerated, on parole or on probation. We know that this same group commits a larger proportion of violent crime than any other segment of the population. And we know that a very large number of their victims are black and that they make neighborhoods a nightmare for the law-abiding occupants who lack the means to live elsewhere.
At the same time, we know how best to keep young children from experiencing this fate. Married parents, strong families and quality education are the primary combatants. In short, the culture of the underclass, and the values that shape that culture, ought to be the focus, and it is no longer controversial to hold this view.
But the Clinton Administration wants us to believe that the problem isn't mom and dad; it's Smith & Wesson. This isn't progress. Indeed, a look at where many well-known black leaders have been spending their energies suggests a drift away from the central issues.
While 14% of black kids drop out of school and black 17-year-olds are reading at the level of white 13-year-olds, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume appears more disturbed that those 17-year-olds (who incidentally watch nearly twice as much TV as white kids), don't see more black characters on, say, "Friends." He's threatening to organize a boycott of the television networks.
Seven in 10 black children are born out of wedlock, but Jesse Jackson just now is busy berating a school board for suspending a group of high school toughs caught on video tape starting a brawl at a football game.
The number one cause of death for black men under 35 is homicide, but Rep. Danny Davis is fighting in Congress for the right of prisoners to vote. Meanwhile, his colleague, Rep. John Conyers, is introducing bills calling for slavery reparations. Black SAT scores on average trail white scores by more than 200 points, so the NAACP chooses to deride Supreme Court justices for not hiring more black law clerks. After years of economic growth, the black unemployment rate is double that of whites, but Al Sharpton spends his energies criticizing New York City's efforts to rid the streets of vagrants. And so it goes.
We have noted for several years now how Bill Clinton annually vetoes a bill that would introduce a voucher program for the incompetent District of Columbia school system. Huge numbers of black parents in D.C. want that voucher program for their children. But by and large the Clinton veto is a non-story. Hardly any well-known black leaders will devote real time to the cause of the D.C. parents desperate to rescue their failing children from failing schools. Meanwhile endless attention and energy will go into these quixotic gun lawsuits. Some day, we suspect, a leader is going to emerge from the younger generation of black Americans to say that his elders' fascination with Bill Clinton's and Andrew Cuomo's windmills is getting them nowhere.