Jesse Jackson Breaking Back of a Prejudice

President Jesse Jackson? It is unlikely--but not preposterous. Last week, the Wall Street Journal, no less, had a front-page analysis of Jackson’s impressive campaign and a back-page report noting that he was the only candidate with an anti-drug program.

Still, I am perfectly aware that in all likelihood Jesse Jackson will not become President. The political professionals, including the press, treat him as a second- class candidate on the assumption that no matter what he does or says, there is a huge voting block that will not support him simply because of his race.

Is there no alternative to that conventional wisdom? I propose to imagine one.

I begin with a fact. In the 1880s, white Southerners united with ex-slaves in an interracial Populist movement that put economic common interest above color. Farmers of both races joined together in fighting plantation aristocrats. The movement was eventually split because the poor whites were conned into accepting racial superiority instead of pork chops. But the point is, it can happen here, because it did. And it is conceivable that events might set a similar trend in motion once again.

Economics is the key. If there were to be a crash of 1988 to sneak up on America like the stock market meltdown last October, it would become utterly obvious that George Bush’s warmed-over supply-side nostrums are irrelevant. It would also become clear that that all of the other Democratic candidates’ affirmations harkening back to New Deal loyalty to working men and women are much less substantial than the Jackson platform.

Jackson has a very specific program for mobilizing pension funds and savings for full employment planning. With the jobless rate heading up, the color of his skin would become much less important than the quality of his ideas. It wouldn’t take an economic nose dive to get that scenario working. Once the unemployment figures go up by a couple of tenths of a point, everyone with a job rightly gets nervous.

Remember the shock on one fine day in August, 1982, when Mexico announced it couldn’t pay its bills? The repeat of such a crisis would point toward Jackson’s strength: that his international economic policies are much more serious than Third World-bashing. He doesn’t scapegoat poor exploited South Koreans and Mexicans as the enemies of the American worker. Rather, he points out that a genuine American commitment to economic justice in the southern part of the globe could, like Marshall plan, create jobs and incomes right here. Jackson understands that it is not cheap labor, but American multi-national profiteering from cheap labor, that is the problem. That is why he stresses an American commitment to unionism in places like South Korea. Solidarity with those workers is profoundly in the self-interest of the United States.

Another reason for considering the possibility of President Jesse Jackson is--Jesse Jackson. When Andrew Young, not a Jackson supporter, told a television reporter that “Martin would be proud of Jesse’s campaign,” he was recognizing a new factor in the political equation. Jackson has won a real “rainbow” campaign in 1988, much more than in 1984. He is not relying on events but actively building an interracial coalition. It is a long, long shot--but no more ridiculous than an aging second-rate actor becoming President in 1980.

But suppose Jackson doesn’t succeed, which is still likely. That leads to an even more futuristic scenario: That he is this generation’s Al Smith. Smith was defeated for the presidency in 1928, in part because he was a Catholic (one of my first political lessons as a child was to learn that “we” could not be President). But we now know that his campaign was the first mobilization of what was to become the New Deal majority as he prepared the way for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He also opened up the possibility that John F. Kennedy was to realize more than 30 years later, that a Catholic could be President.

The not-so-improbable truth is that, at worst, Jesse Jackson may be one presidential campaign away from breaking down the deepest political prejudice in American society. It is hard to imagine a less quixotic campaign.