Rep. J.C. Watts, an African-American conservative from Oklahoma, answered President Clinton’s State of the Union address Tuesday by promoting the Republican Party as the champion of personal responsibility and racial healing.
Delivering the official GOP response to Clinton’s speech, the rising star evoked his upbringing in small-town Oklahoma as a foundation of his party’s values.
“I didn’t get my values from Washington,” Watts said. “I got my values growing up in a poor black neighborhood on the east side of the railroad tracks where money was scarce but dreams were plentiful and love was all around.”
Watts’ up-by-the-bootstraps story offered an implicit contrast to President Clinton’s address, with its emphasis on $51 billion in proposed government spending next fiscal year for education programs and development of national standards.
“I think I counted 20 to 23 programs in that speech,” said Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). Only “two or three . . . should be looked at seriously.”
Appropriations Committee member Rep. John Porter (R-Ill.) questioned the cost of the education proposals: “We all agree on the goals. The question I have to worry about is where the resources will come from.”
And while Clinton celebrated America’s ethnic diversity even as he warned of bigotry and racial hatred, Watts stressed the need for an American spiritual revival through church and family.
Republicans, he pledged, would “give those values a bigger place in solving America’s problems.”
In attempting to attract more minorities, Republicans have been eager to showcase Watts, 39. He rose from humble beginnings to become a standout quarterback at the University of Oklahoma in 1979 and 1980, winning election to Congress from a Democratic and majority-white district in 1994.
In combating racism, Watts said the time for affirmative action and other remedial programs has passed. Though he praised the removal of Jim Crow laws from the books in the 1950s and ’60s, he asked, “If legislation is the answer to the racial divide in our nation, then why in God’s name–in our time–has the division grown?”
Watts asserted that Republicans were correct to pass a welfare reform bill last year that moves recipients into jobs after two years, and in most cases terminates all benefits in five.
“For the past 30 years, our nation spent $5 trillion dollars trying to erase poverty. And the result, as you know, is that we didn’t get rid of it at all.”
Watts also outlined specific policy areas where Republicans differ with Clinton, including a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget. Clinton contends it isn’t necessary.
Republicans support the amendment, which is slated for debate in the Senate this week. In 1995, it failed in the Senate by one vote.
Watts said Republicans sent the White House a balanced budget in the last Congress, and the president “opposed us, sometimes harshly,” a reference to Clinton’s veto, which led to two partial government shutdowns last winter.
Clinton also called on Congress not to pass any amendment that “threatens Social Security,” a reference to arguments by some Democrats that the current surplus in the retirement program is being used to mask the true extent of the federal deficit.
“That is just not true,” Watts said.
