Democratic Front-Runner Jackson, Somebody’s Nemesis

He is the son of an unwed teen-age mother who was talked out of an abortion by her minister, and a hunger for legitimacy--for “respect”--still drives his famished ambition. “I am somebody! I am somebody! I am somebody!” he tells black audiences, as if in urging them to be, he reinforces that he is.

Beyond cavil, the Rev. Jesse Jackson is somebody. Just now, he is the leading Democratic candidate in the polls; and with Sen. Sam Nunn’s decision not to enter the race, he is likely to dominate the results from the largely Southern Super Tuesday primary.

No doubt Jackson really wants to be President, but just by running, he wins the elixir of respect, not only for himself, but for millions of black Americans who have as their paladin what Time magazine’s William Henry calls “the most exciting personality in American politics.” That so powerful and eloquent a black man should run for the highest office in the land not just as the equal of the white candidates, but in some ways as their superior is a path-breaking social fact worth cheering, no matter what one thinks of Jackson.

Brilliant and charismatic, Jesse Jackson is also a political atavism, a throwback to an earlier type of ethnic politician: the James Michael Curley leader who not only acts out the hopes of his hard-pressed ethnic constituents, but their resentments, too, and whose faults are as emblematic as his virtues.

Like Curley, the legendary Boston Irish pol, Jesse Jackson is at least three-quarters rogue. He burst upon the national scene in a blaze of misrepresentation, claiming that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had died in his arms and displaying a shirt that had been stained by the martyr’s blood. Both assertions were false (as he later admitted), a bald attempt to seize the leadership of the civil-rights movement. Like Huey Long, who flaunted a munificent life for the vicarious satisfaction of his redneck constituents, Jackson has pulled down a six-figure income while running his Operation Push into bankruptcy. Like George Wallace, who gave bitter voice to the class resentments and racism of alienated white voters, Jackson has given vent to the racism of many alienated blacks. Wallace, though, changed his tune when by an irony of history he needed black votes to win office in an Alabama where the civil-rights revolution had wrought a great change. The same thing is happening to Jackson, now that he is trying to move beyond his racial base and gather in white support.

“If in my low moments,” he said in his mesmeric speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention, “in word, deed, attitude, through some error of temper, taste or tone, I have caused anyone discomfort, created pain, or revived someone’s fears, that was not my truest self.” That apology may not be enough to wipe Jackson’s slate clean with Jewish-Americans and many others who remain appalled at Jackson’s continued failure to repudiate Louis Farrakhan and his anti-Semitic ravings. Still, to judge by the respectful attention that Jackson is getting in such unlikely places as Iowa, apparently many other white Americans are willing to concede that Jackson’s dalliance with Farrakhan and his “Hymietown” remark did not reveal his “truest self.” Jackson, in short, is getting what no white candidate who uttered ethnic slurs or refused to disavow a KKK leader would ever get: a second hearing.

What is he making of it? Among other causes, he is advocating: that a debt moratorium be granted to struggling farmers; that some of the $2 trillion held in workers’ pension funds be invested in “the four Rs”--research, reinvestment, retraining and reindustrialization, and that legislation be passed making the repression of workers’ rights abroad an unfair trade practice. Though Jackson denies that he is a protectionist, this last measure would tie imports from South Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere to improvements in the way those countries treat their workers, including raises in their wages.

These and other Jackson positions amount to a radical populist economic program. Can they win the nomination for Jackson? Almost certainly not.

To begin with, there remains the formidable barrier of race prejudice. As Fred Barnes reports in the New Republic, surveys have found that any black candidate for President faces a 23% handicap (that is the percentage of whites who say flat out that they would not vote for a black or who all but say so). Then there are the particular voters Jackson is hoping to attract: poor and blue-collar whites, whose low turnout at the polls is a lamentable fact of American politics, and who, unfortunately for Jackson, bulk larger in that 23% than, say, more affluent whites who are sure to be repelled by Jackson’s populist economics. Finally, there is Jackson’s pro-Third World foreign policy, symbolized by his embrace of Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro. Jackson’s challenge, a shrewd Republican political consultant told Barnes, is to come across as anti-Establishment but not anti-American. To do that, Jackson will have to abandon his impolitic enthusiasms for terrorists and dictators; and if he does, one hopes that his Democratic opponents will confront him on his earlier views, as Mondale and Hart failed to do. Patronizing Jesse Jackson is not just craven; it’s insulting.

Jackson has assured Democratic leaders that if he fails the nomination he will not run as an independent in November. A similar promise won him few concessions from the party in 1984. This time, though, things could be different, what with the possibility of a brokered convention. In such circumstances--Jackson with a bloc of delegates that could make one of several candidates the presidential nominee--what would his price be?

Jackson has hinted that he wouldn’t mind being vice president. But the Democrats don’t have to make special gestures toward blacks; they are the base of the party, the only group the Democrats can take for granted. The party’s troubles are with Southern whites and blue-collar workers generally. Given these political realities, nominating Jackson for the vice presidency would be suicidal.

Assume, then, that Jackson is not tripped up a la Gary Hart. (But can we? “Back to what we were talking about, you digging around in my personal life,” Jackson told a black reporter in 1975, “no white reporter tells it all and neither should you.” After Hart, all reporters have a license to tell all.) Assume, second, that Jackson wins enough delegates to put in a strong bid for the second spot on the ticket, that he is publicly turned down, and that he can’t disguise his hurt. Would such a rebuff be enough to cause 20% of black voters to sit on their hands in November? If it should, Jackson’s 1984 refrain, “Hands that picked cotton will now pick the President,” will come true. And he will be a Republican.