Bill Clinton lashed out Saturday at Vice President Dan Quayle for his attacks on the "cultural elite" and apologized in front of Democratic activist Jesse Jackson for golfing at an all-white country club.
But the Arkansas governor once again failed to win an outright endorsement from Jackson, the black civil rights leader and former presidential candidate who has put himself in the role of a broker for the crucial black vote.Clinton, who is expected to win the Democratic nomination on the first ballot at the party's mid-July convention, said Quayle's recent assault on what he called the elite in Hollywood and the media had been aimed at people like himself, Jackson and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.
"I'm tired of people with trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live," Clinton said during a speech to Jackson's National Rainbow Coalition.
He praised Cuomo as a self-made man who "did not get a Wall Street law firm to offer him a job because he was the son of an Italian immigrant grocer who worked his fingers to the bone," and added:
"How dare Dan Quayle talk like that about anybody who knows what it's like to live the American dream and live by family values when there's no food on the table?"
Clinton also took a swing at Bush, saying the Republican president's "ship of state lacks a compass and a vision."
Jackson, who has practically made a game of not endorsing Clinton, praised the governor and some of his policies and introduced him as "the next Democratic nominee for president of the United States."
Clinton, for his part, said it was "a mistake" to have played golf at an all-white country club three months ago in the Arkansas capital of Little Rock.
"We all make mistakes and sometimes we're not as sensitive as we ought to be," Clinton said. "I was rightly criticized for doing it."
Earlier, trying to offset a publicity coup achieved by Ross Perot on Monday, Clinton and several Democratic mayors met Saturday to discuss political strategy and afterward heaped praise on one another.
"The mayors here are supporters of Bill Clinton," Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson told reporters after the closed-door session.
"We did not come to Washington to get to know Bill Clinton. We know Bill Clinton. We want America to see the Bill Clinton we know," added East Orange, N.J., Mayor Cardell Cooper.