I have listened to the phone call in question and, when heard in context, the comments are not troubling. I think his choice of words was based on his experience in studying the issue of crime in predominantly black communities. I base that on his own statement from his follow-up interview on Hannity and Colmes:
HANNITY: And I’m glad to hear you say what you said here. I want you to respond to those democrats that are grandstanding, the same ones that had Robert Bird, the former Klansman as their leader. The ones that didn’t speak out about Congressman Wrangle’s Bull Connor remark.
BENNETT: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let’s see, you got Kennedy. I will — I’ll not take instruction from Teddy Kennedy. A young woman likely drowned because of his negligence. I’ll take no moral instruction with him. That’s much worse than legal gambling what Teddy Kennedy did. He should make no judgments at all about people. He shouldn’t be in the Senate. As far as racist and all this other stuff, I’ll put my record up with Howard Dean, with Harry Reid.
When I was drug czar, you bet, we were working on the issue of black crime, Alan and Sean, because there was a lot of crime in the black community. And you know who most of the victims are? Their black people. Yeah, black violence — black-on-black violence is very serious. I went to about 120 inner city communities. That’s where the senate wanted me to go, that’s where the Senate wanted me to go, that’s where I wanted to go. We went after public housing and we went after the bad guys. And you know what? We got the bad guys. And drug use went down. And we raised the price and lowered the purity of cocaine. And we arrested four of the most powerful drug dealers in the world. And got a lot of these guys off the street. And I am very proud of that. Because when we went into the inner city black community, the people said to me, Mr. Czar, or Czar, or Mr. Benet, you get those people off the street and protect us. And we did our best to do it.
Before that, when I was secretary of education, I took on what I think is one of the great civil rights issues of our time, which is educational opportunity and educational choice. The stupid ghettoized curriculum we have, the fact that these black kids go to lousy schools and aren’t allowed to choose the schools of their choice because they don’t have the money and don’t have the opportunity.
I’ve been at this for 25 years and I have been called everything in the book, but I will stay at what I do because I believe it.
I am disappointed in the White House comments on the matter:
“The president believes the comments were not appropriate,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.
You can also see Bennett’s comments taken out of context and spun hard on Media Matter.org:
Addressing a caller’s suggestion that the “lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years” would be enough to preserve Social Security’s solvency, radio host and former Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett dismissed such “far-reaching, extensive extrapolations” by declaring that if “you wanted to reduce crime … if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” Bennett conceded that aborting all African-American babies “would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do,” then added again, “but the crime rate would go down.”
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