Harlem Deserves Better

Harlem Deserves Better
Clinton's arrival is no sign of respect.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, February 15, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST

So now Bill Clinton is cashing in on Harlem?

Sure. Cashing in is what the Clinton exit from the White House has been all about, with Bill and Hillary racing around these past few weeks on a spree to translate the dignity and power of the leadership of the Free World into maximum personal cash, gifts, paybacks and grounds for future favors.

The raw tonnage of sleaze has kept the ex-first couple so high in the news that humorist Art Buchwald finally suggested this week--in a reference to departing Clinton staffers prying the W's off computer keyboards--that "the only way we can all stop writing about Bill Clinton is to remove the C from our keyboards."

Actually, we might better remove from our keyboards the dollar sign. As in, say, Hillary's $8 million book deal, the $190,000 in Clinton-cargo White House furnishings, the $100,000-a-pop speaking fees demanded by Bill, the $450,000 donated to the Clinton presidential library by the ex-wife of the pardoned fugitive Marc Rich, and the $800,000-a-year penthouse office in midtown Manhattan for which Bill wanted taxpayers to pick up the tab.

And the way the Clintons are going, maybe we should also pry off the letter H--not just for Hillary and her health-care habit, but for Harlem. Because, however down-home cool it might look, Bill's new plan to hang his hat in newly reviving Harlem is no favor to the black community now ready to welcome him there as a former president. For Bill, and by extension for Hillary, who he said "loved" the idea of his setting up shop in Harlem, this is just another variation on the Clintons helping themselves on various levels to what rightfully belongs to others.

That's not how it's playing, of course. For a while there was bad Bill, bereft of his White House cover, doing a public-relations death plunge. Then, earlier this week, he changed his mind about moving into fat-cat midtown and was instantly reborn as a good Bill, a man of the people. For $200,000 a year in taxpayer funds--which sounds small mainly in contrast to his prior $800,000 project--he wants an 8,000-square-foot penthouse office in a high-rise on Harlem's 125th Street. Suddenly he's in midcomeback, all appetite for soul food and jazz at the Apollo.

All this is advertised by none other than Bill himself as a great boon to Harlem--though given Bill's contribution to the image of the Oval Office, it's a little hard to see why his coming to anyone's neighborhood should be hailed as an asset. Yet there he was on Tuesday, outside his coveted new Harlem quarters, smiling for the TV cameras and telling an adoring crowd, "I feel at home." Referring to the neighborhood "empowerment zone," which has received federal aid to help revive the local economy, Bill helped himself to credit for Harlem's recent resurgence, saying, "this is what my presidency was all about."

Yes, Harlem has been enjoying a renaissance. But were Mr. Clinton less prone to regard the known universe as his private larder, he might have mentioned that Harlem's comeback is what Rudy Giuliani's mayoralty and the hard work of Harlem residents themselves has been all about. The chief factor in Harlem's revival has been the dramatic drop in crime, which has coincided most significantly with Mr. Giuliani's tenure and anticrime crusade as mayor.

For New York's 28th Precinct, which is where Mr. Clinton now proposes to hold court, the annual murder rate since 1994 has dropped 80%, according to the New York City Police Department. Robbery is down 74%. For New York City as a whole, since the start of 1994, the major-crime rate is down 71.7%. That's a big enough drop that it simply gets a lot easier to do business, especially in Harlem--though this improvement did not deter Hillary Clinton from tearing into both the mayor and the police department early last year, when it looked as if her opponent in the New York Senate race would be the Republican Mr. Giuliani.

Then there's that enterprise zone for which Mr. Clinton was applauding himself. To whatever extent he believes this has helped promote Harlem's comeback, it would be more gracious to credit Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation and Jack Kemp, the former Republican congressman. They're the folks who about two decades ago introduced and began fighting for such ideas, during the era when the Clintons were still in Arkansas--with Bill allegedly forcing himself upon Juanita Broaddrick in a Little Rock hotel room and his cronies helping Hillary haul in her $100,000 in commodities profits.

Finally, in the midst of Mr. Clinton's latest comeback, there's the problem that the Harlem office where he announced he has "decided to locate . . . if we can work it out," is not, at the moment, up for lease. It was rented this past December by the New York City Administration for Children's Services--something you'd think Senator Hillary "It Takes a Village" Clinton might have taken into account before giving Bill the green light to shove them out. But here, again, who cares, even about kids, when the Clintons see something they want?

At the moment, it suits Bill's needs, both for floor space and image, to horn in on Harlem's comeback and claim it for his own. Harlem deserves more respect. So, for that matter, did the presidency and the entire nation. By now, I wish Bill would spare us the homeboy routine and just stick with the naked greed he flashed us in mid-itch for midtown. It wasn't pretty, but at least for a moment we had a glimpse of something so rare it was almost worth the price: Bill Clinton being honest.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."