Brown Looks to ‘Bleeding Hearts’ for $1 Million for Jackson Campaign

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, national chairman of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential organization, said Wednesday that he must “extract” $1 million from California “bleeding hearts” for the financially strapped Jackson campaign.

Clearly revved up by Jackson’s strong showing in the South in the Super Tuesday primaries, Brown told a press conference: “I need to sell more participation to the bleeding hearts who normally would come through with the dough but have not for Jesse Jackson.”

The San Francisco Democrat, himself a premier fund raiser for Assembly candidates, said he had not yet identified the “bleeding hearts” but said they do not all necessarily reside in the affluent and liberal West Side of Los Angeles. Nor did he offer an explanation of why such contributors were holding back.

“Bleeding hearts live in places other than West Los Angeles,” he said, saying he wanted to “extract” $1 million from them. “Some of them live in San Francisco and some of them in Sacramento.”

Some Feel Discomfort

The West Side traditionally provides a treasure-trove of campaign contributions for Democratic candidates. But many of its regular liberal givers are Jewish, and Jackson’s past association with Louis Farrakhan, a black Muslim minister who has been accused of being racist and anti-Semitic, has given discomfort to many of them.

Jackson captured five states Tuesday (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia), although he spent less than $100,000 on television advertising, Brown said--far less than his three principal rivals. Jackson, he said, would have finished even better if “all those reluctant types out there who ought to be helping the Jackson movement” had donated $1 million to finance more paid advertising in the South.

Brown, who described himself to reporters as “probably the No. 1 strategist” for the national Jackson campaign, also said that the Democratic contender’s “money troubles that have plagued him in other parts of the country will be lessened somewhat in California.”

He disclosed that the Jackson organization is attempting to put together a series of concerts both in California and elsewhere to raise money to help finance the campaign.