The Souljah Legacy
By Michael A. Cohen
NYT blog
This post has been updated.
Sixteen years ago, the most influential campaign speech of the last two decades was delivered at a hotel ballroom in Washington. It wasn’t broadcast on television and only a few hundred Americans heard it in its entirety. But when presidential candidate Bill Clinton appeared at the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition on June 13, 1992, and attacked an obscure rapper named Sister Souljah it fundamentally changed the popular perception of the Democratic Party.
Standing only a few feet from Mr. Jackson, Mr. Clinton excoriated the young rapper, who had said: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people.” Mr. Clinton declared, “if you took the words white and black and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.”
His words were crucial in recasting the image of the Democratic Party. For years, Democrats had been perceived as captives to a host of special interest groups, from labor and teachers’ unions to women’s and gay rights groups. But none were seen as more influential, and in many respects, as damaging to the party than African-Americans and their titular leader, Mr. Jackson. Today, as the Republican Party has become increasingly captive to its own collection of conservative special interest groups, the lesson of the Sister Souljah speech is one that the party needs to eagerly embrace.
When Clinton delivered his speech, Democrats were facing a credibility gap with voters: economic liberalism and government activism had become inextricably linked in the minds of millions of Americans to racial liberalism and identity politics — a linkage exploited by a generation of Republican politicians. From Richard Nixon’s law and order campaign in 1968 and Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical attacks on welfare queens to the odious Willie Horton ad in 1988, the G.O.P. had used coded language to exploit the nation’s racial fears and argue that Democrats were more attentive to their compendium of liberal interest groups than the middle class they once championed.
(Continued here.)
NYT blog
This post has been updated.
Sixteen years ago, the most influential campaign speech of the last two decades was delivered at a hotel ballroom in Washington. It wasn’t broadcast on television and only a few hundred Americans heard it in its entirety. But when presidential candidate Bill Clinton appeared at the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition on June 13, 1992, and attacked an obscure rapper named Sister Souljah it fundamentally changed the popular perception of the Democratic Party.
Standing only a few feet from Mr. Jackson, Mr. Clinton excoriated the young rapper, who had said: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people.” Mr. Clinton declared, “if you took the words white and black and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.”
His words were crucial in recasting the image of the Democratic Party. For years, Democrats had been perceived as captives to a host of special interest groups, from labor and teachers’ unions to women’s and gay rights groups. But none were seen as more influential, and in many respects, as damaging to the party than African-Americans and their titular leader, Mr. Jackson. Today, as the Republican Party has become increasingly captive to its own collection of conservative special interest groups, the lesson of the Sister Souljah speech is one that the party needs to eagerly embrace.
When Clinton delivered his speech, Democrats were facing a credibility gap with voters: economic liberalism and government activism had become inextricably linked in the minds of millions of Americans to racial liberalism and identity politics — a linkage exploited by a generation of Republican politicians. From Richard Nixon’s law and order campaign in 1968 and Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical attacks on welfare queens to the odious Willie Horton ad in 1988, the G.O.P. had used coded language to exploit the nation’s racial fears and argue that Democrats were more attentive to their compendium of liberal interest groups than the middle class they once championed.
(Continued here.)
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