Barbara Mikulski, the diminutive 79-year-old five-term senator, was firing up a noisy crowd at the first rally in Maryland for Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
"We gotta turn it on! We gotta turn it out! We gotta have a blow-out for Hillary," Mikulski told the crowd of about 1,500 at a renovated garage in Baltimore on Sunday afternoon.
As the next speaker, Congressman Elijah Cummings, the last of Maryland's Democrat representatives in the US Congress to come out publicly in support of Clinton, began his endorsement speech, he was interrupted by demonstrators protesting about the criminal justice policies of her husband, former president Bill Clinton.
“Fact-check the reality, not the lies,” shouted one as she was escorted from the hall to chants of “Hillary! Hillary!” from the crowd. There were no further protests at the event.
Last week Bill Clinton was heckled over his 1994 crime Bill and 1996 welfare Bill by Black Lives Matter activists who argue that his policies helped create a culture of mass incarceration of non-violent black offenders and made life tougher for the poorest people.
Welfare law
The 1996 welfare law required recipients to participate in work-related schemes in order to receive financial help from the government, but many who had previously received support fell through the cracks.
The Clintons last year admitted the mistakes in the criminal justice policies of the 1990s, but last week Bill Clinton gave a spirited defence of his policies at the rally in Philadelphia where his speech was interrupted. He talked about his 13-minute clash with protesters the following day at another rally in Philadelphia, saying that he "almost" wanted to say sorry.
Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator trailing Hillary Clinton, called on the former president to apologise "for trying to defend the indefensible".
Clinton and his wife are having to defend policies passed to halt the soaring crime rates of the 1990s in the context of today’s election.
Hillary Clinton did not address her husband’s policies in her speech on Sunday. She said that she particularly wanted, as president, “to pay attention to our cities, like Baltimore. I will focus particularly on communities, neighbourhoods, regions that have been passed by”.
For the most part, in the majority black city of Baltimore – scene of some of the angriest and most violent Black Lives Matter protests following the death of a black man in police custody last year – Hillary Clinton’s supporters are forgiving of her husband’s past policies.
“Back then, people didn’t think that it was going to do what it did to African-Americans, and they have already said that they are sorry for it and they are trying to do things to change it,” said Jennifer McColl (36), who is black, from Reisterstown, outside Baltimore.
“I support Black Lives Matter to bring awareness to issues that are affecting the African-American community, but I think it should be more directed to the GOP [Republican] candidates than the Clintons.”
Other supporters echo the Clinton camp’s defence against Sanders: that the democratic socialist voted for the Bill in the US senate in 1994.
“It is amazing that Hillary is getting more flak about it than he is, and she never signed the Bill,” said Linda Bright (61), a retired department of agriculture worker from Capitol Heights in Maryland, who is attending Hillary Clinton’s rally with her husband. Both are African-American.
Blame
Others place blame at the door of their own community.
“Black folks need to stop doing things to themselves and stop trying to put it on someone else,” said Clifton Savoy, who is black and a trade union official from Calverton, Maryland.
Clinton’s 250-delegate lead over Sanders, which he has been unable to close despite a streak of seven straight victories in the past three weeks, has come as a result of her support among African-Americans and other minorities, particularly in the South – a far more diverse base than Sanders’s core supporters. Her husband’s policies seem not to have hurt her among black voters.
"All criticism is fair," former US congressman Kweisi Mfume, a speaker at Sunday's Baltimore rally, told The Irish Times. As chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, he was one of the lawmakers responsible for rallying a majority of his caucus members to vote for Bill Clinton's 1994 crime Bill. "The question is: is it relevant 25 years later?"
The answer, as far as the majority of black Democratic voters in this presidential election are concerned, appears to be: no, it is not.
