The Clintons And African-Americans

A fun blast from the past from P.J. O'Rourke. Money quote:

There could be a more concrete reason for Bill's appeal to black voters. I felt as if I'd been at this gala before, forty or forty-five years ago. The women wore important hats and serious dresses. The men's dinner jackets were shaped at the shoulders and nipped at the waists. Their dress shirts and bow ties were splendid in color and form. This was very different from going to, for instance, a political-wife-in-a-sack and bag-o-tuxedo event on Capitol Hill. But it was not very different from going to a party with a family full of harps. My uncle Mikey-Mike, my cousin Slats, my Aunt Bridget, and her husband, Louie, who once ran the local pinball rackets in Toledo, had more "flava," as they say today, than their egg-salad-sandwich-with-the-crusts-cut-off neighbors. Grandpa J.J. was one generation away from illiteracy and, I suspect, not as distant as that from running booze during Prohibition.

But by 1960 O'Rourkes had marched up the social stairs into the world of "some white Rotary Club." Like contemporary middle-class African-Americans, Irish-Americans had to find a palatable way to edge to the right. Casting ballots for Bill Clinton allowed blacks to vote Republican without throwing up.