








will in all reasonable po -sibility, be what coloured men make of it. 
Article 50
 Ask Not   90s Style
National Service: Newsweek went behind the scenes for 10 months as Clinton's dream smashed against the politics of race, class and selfishness
Steven Waldman
When Bill Clinton thinks of National Service, this is what he sees:
A roomful of earnest young people talking about how, as part of a program called City Year, they have cleaned the apartments of frail seniors, tutored in inner-city schools and fixed up community playgrounds. As Clinton campaigned for the New Hampshire primary in December 1991 and listened to these stories, he was struck by the racial and social mix of the young workers. Yes, there was a former drug dealer from Boston, but alongside him was a prep-school student from Texas and a working-class white from South Boston. One by one they talked about how serving together had forced them to shed prejudices and opened up new worlds. Visibly moved, Clinton told them, "You make a statement every day that there is an American Community."
Here is a reality Clinton must deal with:
Last June the White House launched the Summer of Service to demonstrate what service could do. Seventy-five percent of participants at the training retreat near San Francisco were minorities. By the third day the 1,500 young people from around the country had split into black, Hispanic, Native American and gay/lesbian/bisex-ual caucuses. Some of the African-American groups debated whether whites should even be allowed to attend their meetings. Vegetarians complained that organizers hadn't attended to their needs. Students berated Eli Segal, the head of the White House Office of National Service, about gays in the military, the failures of the federal government and the need for the program to politically organize poor people to demand benefits "I almost thought we were going to have a riot," said one official who helped organize the retreat.
In Bill Clinton's ideal world, all things are possible You can help the middle class and uplift the poor convince blacks and whites to serve side by side, and make govern ment work without wasting the taxpayers' money. But the political reality is that the great liberal ideals of the Democratic Party have been soured by the persistent
From Newsweek, September 20, 1993, pp 46^o   permission.	 	51.  
divisions of race and class. In many precincts, hope idealism have been replaced with cynicism and isola ism. Clinton tried to replace Washington's prevailing mine" attitude with the message he took from Joi Kennedy's "ask not what your country can do for j But the demands of class and race kept intruding int plans. A compromiser at heart, Clinton in the end h settle for less. Last week Congress passed Clinton' tional service plan. Even after all the dealmaking ducking, the president achieved something signifies plan that will ask thousands of young Americar perform some national service in exchange for help their college education. And his program will rely burgeoning collection of successful local service 0 But the program is far from what Clinton once prom Many have noted its modest size. More important, not the engine for social and racial integration th; envisaged as he listened to the young work mates of Year.
Ten months ago Newsweek launched a special pi designed to track the national service initiative's drai but barely reported journey from campaign applause to law. The obstacles Clinton faced along the way s how difficult it will be for "New Democrats" to "reir government" and restore the idealism that moved ton as a young high-school student shaking JFK's hai years ago.
During the early months of the campaign, Clin political advisers rolled their eyes whenever the cand started talking about a national program to encot young people to serve their country. "Every cand has one of these things," James Carville said later, sj ing as if it were a bad habit, like bingeing on Big ft
You humor him and you move on."
The joking stopped once the aides heard the appl< Clintons plan to reward service with a college sch ship was the most consistent crowd-pleaser in his st speeches. Clinton had melded two controversial i into a proposal designed to please everyone. Just as for service would have appealed to a narrow sliver 0 gooders. On the other hand, just offering bundk
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50.  Ask No
college aid would have seemed like profligate "tax and spend" liberalism. But put the two together and Clinton sounded like a New Democrat who preserved the best of his party's past while junking the worst. Yes, Clinton was saying, government does have a role to play in improving society. But people can't just ask for handouts. They should have to give something back.
Crowds loved Clinton's stock speech line about his "domestic GI Bill." There was only one problem: it was wildly expensive. If he really allowed all students to wipe out all of their loans, the program could cost as much as $40 billion. Of course, not everybody would want to serve, but even if just 3 percent of those with loans did  as the campaign predicted it would still cost $8 billion, more than the government now spends on the entire student-loan program.
During the campaign, reality did not intrude. Aides who gingerly asked about the true cost of the program were told to be quiet. But when Clinton as president had to produce his first federal budget, he shrank his promise considerably: $3.4 billion by 1997. That would fund 70,000 students four times as many, Clinton liked to point out, as were enrolled by the Peace Corps during its heyday  but hardly the scholarships-for-all he had initially promised. So before Clinton's plan was even introduced to Congress, it had been radically scaled back. And the real fight, over the true mission of national service, had not yet begun.
At its core, Clinton's proposal changed the government's approach to helping people go to college. For the past 30 years Congress has given out financial aid based almost entirely on who needs it most. Income, not ability, has been the criterion. Attempts to tie aid to academic merit were viewed as anti-democratic. Clinton's national service program contained a new message: the government will still give aid according to need but will give more money to those who serve their country.
A seemingly worthy ideal, but it was deeply worrisome to the colleges and universities that rely on and lobby for federal education aid. The significance of Clinton's shift was not lost on former congressman William Gray III, the president of the United Negro College Fund. Gray believed the approach seriously threatened his schools and their students, many of whom survive on Pell grants, the no-strings attached scholarships for the needy. On March 25, Gray summoned other leaders of higher educa tion to a summit at the American Council on Education offices. "It's American pie, you know, national service, he said dismissively, "doing something for the country, shades of JFK, the whole bit. Wonderful images of Americana et cetera." But the ultimate goal of national service, he warned, was to replace Pell grants, which aid 4.4 million low-income students, in order to give a nice expen-ence to 100,000 middle-class kids.
The New Program at a Glance
Service Jobs: The government will create 20,000 full-time service slots by fall 1994. High-school graduates or anyone working toward an equivalency diploma can apply through local programs.
College Loan Forgiveness: For each year of full-time service, participants will earn a $4,725 scholarship. They can use it for future schooling, including job training, or to pay off past loans. They will receive a stipend (probably minimum wage) and health care.
Flexible Loan Repayment: As of the 1994-95 school year, students can repay loans as a percentage of future income, instead of in fixed payments. The goal: to spur people to take low-paying publicservice jobs by easing burden of debt.
A practicing Baptist minister, Gray pounded the table warning that when members of Congress have to decidi between a middle-class program like national service, o one for the poor like Pell grants, "I can tell you right awai which they're going to pick. They're going to pick the on< for the people who vote! Middle-class Americans. Middl< class vote! Poor folks don't!'
In a private meeting the next day with officials from th< American Council on Education, Bud Blakey, the counse for the United Negro College Fund, turned up the heat "If we end up trading the interests of upper-incom whites for low-income blacks and Latinos ... He didn finish that sentence, adding: "If the race card has to ge played to stop this bull-from happening, then the rao card is going to be played here!"
By making "service" a criterion for aid, the Whit House had backed into the dangerous arena of racu politics. In times of scarcity, giving money to whit middle-class kids-even those who've earned it throug good works-can mean taking money away from poc kids The White House tried to reassure colleges that would support Pell grants but undermined its credibilit by simultaneously cutting millions of dollars from othe ^Until SmSef^f Service awakened them, White Hous negotiators were oblivious to the fact that their notions < race were deemed by some to be naive, antiquated an condescending. Clinton wants to solve racial troubh through aggressive integration-an approach admire when he was memorizing Martin Luther King s I Have Dream" speech but out of touch with sentiment in tl streets today. King and busing to achieve school integi tion are out; Malcolm X and Afrocentric curricula are i Clinton implicitly assumes that low-income blacks v. benefit more from exposure to affluent whites than frc working in their own communities. And affluent whit
9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
are more likely to drop their prejudices if forced to work on an equal footing with blacks than if they watch In the Heat of the Night" in their homogeneous suburbs. National service "is one of the things we have to do, Clinton says, "to re-establish the ability to talk to one another.
But some groups that work with minorities view these assumptions with contempt. Kathleen Selz represents local service corps mostly comprising low-income blacks and Hispanics and believes that racemixing proponents overstate the magical ability of Yuppie whites to transform the lives of the underclass. "These girls from [affluent] Bethesda at the D.C. Service Corps are always saying things like, 'Oh, it opened our horizons!' " says Selz, mimicking the syrupy voice of an earnest suburbanite. "Well, you notice the welfare mother doesn't say much like that."
If money were unlimited, Clinton could give aid to programs that celebrate unifying ethnic groups and minority self-help programs that emphasize separateness. But the White House had to decide: should the legislation favor local programs that share the same vision as C
