I suppose Sister Souljah thought she was simply expressing the anger and alienation of young blacks and telling them to stop killing one another. But that’s not what she said. My staff, especially Paul Begala, argued that I had to say something about her remarks. Two of my most important core concerns were combating youth violence and healing the racial divide. After challenging white voters all across America to abandon racism, if I kept silent on Sister Souljah I might look weak or phony. Near the end of my talk, I said of her remarks, “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech. . . . We have an obligation, all of us, to call attention to prejudice whenever we see it.”
The political press reported my comments as a calculated attempt to appeal to moderate and conservative swing voters by standing up to a Democratic core constituency. That’s how Jesse Jackson saw it, too. He thought I had abused his hospitality to make a demagogic pitch to white voters. He said Sister Souljah was a fine person who had done community service work and I owed her an apology. And he threatened not to support me, even suggesting he might back Ross Perot. Actually, I had considered condemning Sister Souljah’s remarks as soon as she made them, when I was in Los Angeles for a meeting of the Show Coalition, an entertainment group. In the end I didn’t do it, because the Show Coalition event was for charity and I didn’t want to politicize it. When the Rainbow Coalition brought us on virtually back to back, I decided I had to speak up.
At the time, I didn’t really understand the rap culture. Over the years, Chelsea often told me it was full of highly intelligent but profoundly alienated young people and urged me to learn more about it. Finally, in 2001, she gave me six rap and hip-hop CDs and made me promise to listen to them. I did. While I still preferred jazz and rock, I enjoyed a lot of the music, and I saw that she was right about the intelligence, and the alienation. But I think I was right to speak out against Sister Souljah’s apparent advocacy of racebased violence, and I believe most African-Americans agreed with what I said. Still, after Jesse criticized me, I resolved to try harder to reach out to inner-city young people who felt left out and left behind.
On June 18, I had my first meeting with Boris Yeltsin, who was in Washington to see President Bush. When foreign leaders visit another country, it is customary for them to meet with the leader of the political opposition. Yeltsin was polite and friendly, but slightly patronizing. I had been a big admirer of his since he stood up on a tank to oppose an attempted coup ten months earlier. On the other hand, he plainly preferred Bush and thought the President was going to be reelected. At the end of our talk, Yeltsin said I had a good future even if I didn’t get elected this time. I thought he was the right man to lead post–Soviet Russia, and I left the meeting convinced I could work with him if I succeeded in disappointing him about the outcome of the election.
I added a needed bit of levity to the campaign that week. Vice President Dan Quayle said he intended to be the “pit bull terrier” of the election campaign. When asked about it, I said Quayle’s claim would strike terror into the heart of every fire hydrant in America.
On June 23, I turned serious again, reissuing my economic plan with minor revisions based on the latest government report that the deficit would be larger than previously estimated. It was risky, because in order to keep my pledge to cut the deficit in half in four years, I had to trim the middle-class tax-cut proposal. The Republicans on Wall Street didn’t like the plan either, because I proposed to raise income taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations; both were paying a much smaller percentage of the total tax load after twelve years of Reagan and Bush. We couldn’t cut the deficit in half with spending cuts only, and I felt that those who had benefited most in the 1980s should pay half the cost. And I was determined not to fall into the “rosy scenarios” trap the Republicans had followed for twelve years, in which they constantly overestimated revenues and underestimated outlays in order to avoid hard choices. The revised economic plan was put together under the supervision of my new economic policy aide, Gene Sperling, who had left the staff of Governor Mario Cuomo in May to join the campaign. He was brilliant, rarely slept, and worked like a demon.
