"Up against Dukakis and the Democratic party, Jackson set the agenda for the platform debate. And, while many of the demands of his program met with resolute derision, he did succeed in gaining the Democratic party's designation of South Africa as a terrorist state, and he did push Dukakis into a posture of unequivocal opposition to aid to the contras, unequivocal support for child care, and, alas, equivocal support for universal health insurance. He did embarrass the Democrats into public refusal to establish a "no first strike" nuclear policy, and he did force the Democratic Party to reduce by 50 percent the number of "Super-delegates" who will be anointed for the next presidential election campaign. He did, irreversibly, tutor American consciousness about the continuing anti-democratic political structures that block our decisive exercise of the vote, and he did, again, embarrass Dukakis into publicly waffling on Dukakis's own promise to fund a nationwide voter registration drive and to vastly simplify the whole voting registration process. He did lead the reentry of concepts of right and wrong back into the center of political deliberations. He did meet with Israel's ambassador to the United States, August 8, 1988, and Israel's ambassador to the United States did meet, August 8, 1988, for more than two hours, with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and, you know, Jesse just really came really, really close to opening up the White House to the world's best barbecue and general/populist celebration of all time. And as for those millions and millions of us who chose Jesse Jackson as our candidate, we would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to notice how much we scared the currently powerful: literally, we scared them almost to death!"