Hillary Clinton Not Talking About '92 Clinton-Gore Confederate Campaign Button

It’s unclear if the Clinton-Gore Confederate flag campaign button that has been prominent on social media was an official part of their 1992 presidential campaign.

And Hillary Clinton isn’t clarifying, nor is her team responding to questions about her husband honoring the flag as Arkansas governor in 1987.

Credit: eBay

TheBlaze left phone and email messages with the Clinton campaign Monday inquiring whether the button, and other similar designs sold on eBay, was part of the official campaign of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

TheBlaze also asked if the former Arkansas first lady opposed now or opposed then an act signed by her husband honoring the Confederate flag. The Clinton campaign did not respond to either question.

The Confederate battle flag has become an issue following last week's shooting massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The Confederate flag is still flown on the South Carolina Capitol grounds. After increasing calls for its removal, Gov. Nikki Haley (R) on Monday called for the flag to finally come down.

Republican presidential candidates were reluctant to take a firm stand on the matter over the weekend. Hillary Clinton spoke about race relations on Friday in San Francisco, but did not mention the Confederate flag, according to the campaign’s transcript. Clinton did, however, call for the flag to be removed from the South Carolina capitol in 2007 during her first presidential campaign.

As for the 1992 buttons, the Washington Post speculated on whether they were part of the official 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign.

One indicator that it isn't official is that it lacks a union "bug," the little marker showing that a piece of campaign material was printed in a union shop. If you look at other Clinton-Gore buttons, nearly all — but not all — have a bug somewhere …

The politics then were less complicated than they are now. It's believable that Clinton and Gore might have had a Confederate button, though we don't know for sure that they did. What the reemergence of the buttons now shows, if nothing else, is that the history of the rebellious South continues to resonate and continues to evolve, year by year, as a component of American politics.

In 1987, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton signed Act 116. It had little consequences other than to reaffirm the state’s language that honored the stars on the Arkansas flag as commemorating the Confederate flag. The act specifically says, “The blue star above the word ‘ARKANSAS’ is to commemorate the Confederate States of America.”

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