White Votes for a Black Preacher ‘Jacksonize’ the Nomination Battle

Let’s be candid: Jesse Jackson’s 1988 political success in no way makes him a plausible presidential nominee. In foreign policy terms, the idea of Jackson presiding over the National Security Council is potential monologue material, and his hugging Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro reveals only slightly better judgment than Gary Hart hugging Donna Rice. The national media’s disinclination to spotlight Jackson’s controversial political and personal record reveals the underlying double-double standard: Jackson is black, so he can’t be criticized, but that doesn’t matter because he also can’t be elected.

All of which has left the charismatic, persuasive and underscrutinized Jackson free to do something enormously significant for the 1988 debate--begin radicalizing Democratic economic policies away from the Yuppie, neo-liberal, BMW-aspiring centrism of the mid-’80s toward a growing communion with agrarian populism, Ralph Nader-like big-business-baiting and attacks on Wall Street fast-buckery. Rival presidential contenders are already beginning to “Jacksonize” their messages.

The electoral outcome is still unclear, of course. Jackson may be doing his party a great favor by pushing it back toward its dominant heritage of “common man” economics put into the history books by Presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Andrew Jackson. Public opinion shows signs of receptivity. Yet there’s also a chance the one-time activist organizer is setting his side up for a reckless flirtation with Third World economics, pension fund quackery and the sort of tax-hike speculation that sends shivers up suburban spines.

There’s no doubt about the dynamics of the policy transition. Throughout most of 1987, the economic platforms of most Democratic presidential candidates were bland stuff built on hesitancy to take issue with the tax-reducing, enterprise-boosting and budget-paring spirit of the Reagan Revolution. Jackson alone stood out for his relentless inveighing against farm foreclosures, merger moguls, corporate job-shifts to low-wage Asian and Latin American nations and what he called “reverse Robin Hood” Reagan policies of robbing the poor to help the rich. By December, 1987, just before Hart decided to jump back into the race, a funny thing had happened: Most national polls showed that Jackson had become far and away the leader in the race--and a few surveys even showed him leading (with 10%-13% support) among white Democratic voters.

Centrist Democrats observing this phenomenon took pause. If so many white voters in Missouri farm counties, Maine paper-mill regions and even shut-down Dixie textile towns were backing a black preacher--and doing so (nobody doubted) largely for economic reasons--then maybe there was a populist sentiment out there other candidates could tap. Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri was first off the mark, escalating his attack not only on unfair foreign trade practices--his famous $48,000 K-car ad on TV, bashing South Korea’s Hyundai--but also on the alleged willingness of U.S. financial elites to profiteer from America’s decline. Gephardt swung a broad rhetorical ax, aiming at everything from trade lawyers to Wall Street arbitragers and corporate leaders spending more time on mergers than on customers.

So armed, Gephardt won Iowa’s Feb. 8 caucuses and South Dakota’s late-February primary. And as Gephardt’s combination of populism and economic nationalism threatened to spread into Dixie for Super Tuesday’s mega-primaries on March 8, yet another Democratic contender--Sen. Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee--raced for work boots and barbecue sauce. Numerous news reports have told the early March tale: How Ivy League Gore, with chameleon-like finesse, turned his campaign away from talk about strong defense to a new series of TV ads presenting himself as the champion of “the woman behind the word processor, the man on the assembly line, the small farmer.” In the Carolinas, he boasted of supporting protection for textile workers, and another TV spot showed Gore telling a group of oil workers, “It’s time to put people back to work in the United States and have the rigs in Libya and Iran stand idle for a change.” To supplement the petro-jingoism, two other ads showed Gore--the son of a U.S. senator-turned-coal-company-president--bashing “big corporate interests.”

It worked. The strategic baton passed. What had been a Michael S. Dukakis-Jackson-Gephardt race going into Super Tuesday because a Dukakis-Jackson-Gore race coming out. Gephardt supporters complained about their message being stolen. But Jackson knew whose outsider themes were at the heart of it all: “You keep hearing them use little Jesse Jacksonisms,” he said.

And if his message is growing, so is his voter appeal and potential clout at July’s Democratic convention. As of mid-March, Jackson has taken the 25% of the white vote he won in Maine and Vermont and added some equally impressive Super Tuesday numbers: 15%-20% of the white vote in Massachusetts, across Dixie about 97% of the black vote and 8%-12% of the Southern white vote. While more Democratic Party economic rhetoric is being Jacksonized, the question is where things go from here:

Will front-runner Dukakis be forced to set aside painless Yuppieisms about “the Massachusetts Miracle” to confront the pain of rural Nebraska, the squalor of the South Bronx and the un-miracle of Ohio’s Mahoning Valley? Will Democratic 16-inch guns begin firing on corporate structures with multinational or supra-national labels and loyalties? Will Jackson have enough leverage at the Atlanta convention to put his imprint on the trade, tax, investment and merger sections of the Democratic platform?

A leftward trend seems to be in the air. And politically, the key is probably not “whether” but “how much.” More “little Jesse Jacksonisms” in rival candidates’ rhetoric are not the only sign of the times. Three or four different sets of public-opinion polls also suggest that a new economic policy agenda could be coming together for the Democrats.

Take the corporate merger and takeover issue. Public indignation could hardly be clearer. Poll after poll shows 60%-65% of Americans convinced that takeovers are bad for the country and that legislation to block hostile takeovers is in order. One February survey profiled corporate America as a bunch of short-term thinkers worried about short-term results--forced into that mold by financial raiders. It’s worth remembering that post-October crash polls found the citizenry describing Wall Street in casino-like terms.

Public concerns about foreign policy dovetail. Surveys repeatedly turn up 50%-75% majorities for a harder U.S. line on trade. Even while Gephardt was losing his populist theme to Gore in Dixie, pre-campaign NBC News polling found 71% of Democratic voters saying they’d look more favorably on a candidate who called for a tougher trade approach, while just 15% would be less favorable. Still another national survey charted increasing negative public reaction to the foreign investment flooding in as the United States slides deeper into debt. About 78% expressed support for a law to limit the extent of foreign investment in U.S. business and real estate, while 74% worried that “foreign investment causes Americans to have less control over our economy.”

“Losing control” seems to be a central part of public concern--the sense that the average American is powerless (and quite possibly hurting) as a financial, corporate, media and intellectual elite pockets lucrative commissions, golden parachutes, book royalties, capital gains, foundation grants and Japanese finders’ fees from the internationalization and restructuring of the U.S. economy. Jackson and Gephardt alike have been speaking to these fears, honing and politicizing them. This is a politics the United States has seen before: classic populism, and it has the potential to be powerful stuff just as it was in prior episodes of American history, when Andrew Jackson roused the electorate against Eastern financiers and the Bank of the United States and when William Jennings Bryan ran for President in 1896 by attacking corporate trusts and Wall Street. Whether it could win the 1988 election is another question; certainly not if overplayed, and probably not without an economic downturn.

So far, then, the 1988 resurgence of this kind of politics is more rhetoric than near-term reality. Public nervousness may ebb. So may Jackson’s appeal. And the charismatic black leader’s role at the Democratic convention may turn out to be less fiery and demanding than his past would indicate. For the moment, however, the extent to which Jackson may be slowly pulling the Democratic Party toward a newer and hotter economics is one of the more interesting phenomena in a relatively dull political ideas-market.