POLITICS 88 : Jackson Passes the Plate--From Church to Mansion : He Talks Poor as Cash Rolls In

The next line is going to be a joke.

One can tell, because the Rev. Jesse Jackson is leaning over the microphone and grinning his high-school wise guy grin.

He has just asked the assembled, as he does at most campaign stops, to stand up, walk to the front of the Park Congregational Church and give him money. People are lining up near the pulpit, most of them offering checks of $25 or less.

“They tell me it ain’t presidential to beg, so I appeal,” Jackson says, and then pauses for the laugh to die. “But I ain’t too proud to beg, and I do know how.”

It is startling to hear a major presidential candidate begging in a church for dollar bills, being collected in Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets, from black women in their Sunday best, or college kids. But Jackson does it at nearly every stop, and he tells the people he wants the media to see them giving.

Pay-as-You-Go Effort

It leaves the impression for local television cameras that Jesse Jackson’s campaign for President is a pay-as-you-go operation, seemingly gathering the funds to keep going (to the next stop) on the church collection plate.

“We got the poorest campaign. But the richest message, and the most popular votes,” Jackson says in his stump speech.

Increasingly, however, the image of the Jackson campaign as the poor relative of presidential politics is not as accurate as it once was.

Jackson will raise $1 million this month, his campaign now says. That puts him in the same fund-raising league as any Democrat.

In the last week alone, Jackson has raised more than $400,000, not from the collection plate passing conducted in front of the cameras, but in a series of more traditional celebrity fund-raisers in Los Angeles, in lush Detroit hotels and restaurants, and from direct mail.

“We should out-raise Gephardt and Simon and maybe even Gore,” in March, Jackson campaign manager Gerald Austin said.

Money-Raising Momentum

It is a sign of the growing money-raising momentum of the Jackson campaign. Yet officials are increasingly secretive about the figures, and on the campaign stump, Jackson’s standard speech is laced with imagery of the poor grass-roots effort, roaring across the country on $5 bills.

“I don’t have the big boulder rocks. Like David, I only have a small rock. But I shoot straight,” Jackson intones. The crowd of 1,000 at Walter P. Reuther Auditorium, UAW Local 600, near the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn hoots enthusiastically.

“I don’t have a Rolls Royce,” he tells 4,000 at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. “But I know the road better.”

In reality, more than half of Jackson’s money comes from a direct mail effort “equal in sophistication to anything any of the other candidates are doing,” said Mal Warwick, Jackson’s direct mail consultant.

Since Jackson began making an impressive showing among voters, “the results have filled out to an extraordinary degree,” said Warwick who handled direct mail for Gary Hart until Hart’s first dropout last spring. “The response has continued to climb.”

February Funds Compared

In February, for instance, Jackson raised $776,791. His rivals, Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, Illinois Sen. Paul Simon and Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr., each raised $1 million in February, while Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis led Democratic fund-raising efforts with $1.2 million.

Of Jackson’s funds, roughly $400,000 came from his direct mail effort, which did not get going until Christmas.

After Super Tuesday March 8, Jackson’s fund-raising momentum accelerated with the mailing of a million appeals seeking to capitalize on Jackson’s success in the Southern primaries.

Since then, donations have been coming in at a rate of $39,000 a day, Jackson’s press people say, which would mean about $1 million in March.

With the money, Jackson is considering hiring such conventional campaign operations as a national advance team to help organize events.

And in Michigan, Jackson is buying at least $100,000 worth of media, $70,000 of that for television ads. For all 20 Super Tuesday contests, Jackson spent only $100,000.

Raises $200,000

In Michigan alone, Jackson has raised at least $200,000, roughly half of that coming from a string of five fund-raisers in one day.

And in California last weekend, Jackson raised roughly $140,000, primarily through three events in Los Angeles, including a $100-a-ticket cocktail party in Baldwin Hills, and another at the Beverly Hills home of Zev Braun. Attending were such Hollywood figures as actors Kris Kristoferson, Tony Franciosa, Tim Reid and Burgess Meredith, director Spike Lee and TV personality Jayne Kennedy.

On the stump, however, the image remains unchanged.

“I was outspent on Super Tuesday 50-to-1, but I got the most popular votes,” Jackson tells audiences at virtually every stop.

“Money is power. But in a democracy, ‘We the People’ is more powerful.”

And then he appeals for money much like a preacher squeezing the flock to repaint the parish basement.

Instructs Reporters

As the collection plates fill, Jackson often eyes the press, telling reporters to take note.

At a religious rally in City Hall Plaza in Oakland, California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown passed the plate for Jackson.

“Go into your pockets, take out the money. I want the national media to see Oakland in green,” Brown screamed at the crowd.

“You been waitin’ a long time in the station. Well, now it’s comin’. It’s comin’ in the form of a man from South Carolina. It’s comin’ in a Baptist preacher. It’s comin’ to all America. . . . But we got to pay. We got to put something down. We got to keep him moving. That message has got to get out.”

It is good stuff, and dramatizes well the emotion of the Jackson candidacy as the poor relative of the Democratic primary.

It also has another more tangible impact.

According to the lore of grass-roots political campaigning, getting people to give money is a way of getting them to commit. Donors, goes the thinking, are likely to come out and vote for their investment.

Often, the money gathered hardly seems worth the time it takes Jackson to do the collecting.

It’s ‘for Support’

And even Jackson conceded Thursday, “It’s more for support than money.”

The Jackson campaign is far less revealing when it comes to more sophisticated and mainstream fund raising. For instance, a fund-raiser in New York last month that collected $100,000 was closed to the media.

Initially, the campaign also had intended to close the fund-raisers in Los Angeles, as well, but later changed its mind.

And officials are increasingly secretive about how much is coming in.

“It doesn’t do me any good to brag about it at this point,” Austin said.

Jackson officials declined to say where they have had the best success in raising their money, but Jackson’s direct mail consultant, Warwick, a veteran Berkeley-based fund-raiser for liberal causes, provided some details about the operation.

Biggest Creditor

Jackson borrowed $500,000 in February to pay for direct mail and Federal Election Commission records show Warwick’s company was paid $248,820 the same month and was owed another $105,624, making Warwick by far Jackson’s biggest creditor.

“We are using lists that are composed overwhelmingly of white people” and liberals, Warwick said, noting that the lists they have are traditional national fund-raising lists on which blacks have always been a relatively small minority. Early on, he said, they ran some tests and found to their surprise that lists with relatively large percentages of Jewish names did as well as lists with smaller percentages of Jewish names, indicating that at least among donors to liberal causes, Jackson has sharply reduced his “Jewish problem.”

“We suspected that because of all the controversy, there would be a tendency on the part of Jews not to contribute,” Warwick said.

Staff writer David Lauter contributed to this story.