On January 25, 1996, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton was campaigning for her husband Bill’s re-election in Keene, New Hampshire. She gave a standard stump speech to the college crowd, talking about health care, the child tax credit, and getting more students into higher education. It’s not the kind of speech you’d think would come back to haunt her own presidential campaign a decade later. Yet in the current cycle, 12 seconds of that speech has become one of the most re-watched moments of 1990s. And it looks bad.
Two-thirds of the way through her talk, Clinton turned to the War on Drugs, using the era’s standard tough-on-crime language. “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called super-predators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.” It’s disgusting, racist language, the kind of thing few politicians in either party would say out loud in 2016. One YouTube clip of just this section has been viewed nearly 600,000 times.
[For more of this story, written by Malcolm Harris, go to https://psmag.com/super-predat...80e9de7c2#.3ae40rk7e]
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