Struggling to Come to Terms With Michigan Victory : Jackson Camp Slightly Awe-Struck by Success

The Rev. Jesse Jackson looked exhausted, even in shock. He was making his way to the back of the plane early Sunday as his campaign headed to Connecticut. He had risen early to appear on NBC television.

A reporter asked if he were tired and Jackson stopped for a moment to chat, the words coming almost in a whisper.

“I’m leading the party now,” he said, almost in disbelief.

The morning after his startling victory in Michigan, his first upset in a major Northern industrial state, Democratic presidential candidate Jackson seemed unprepared to reap what he had sown.

He had defeated the purported front-runner, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, 2 to 1 in the popular vote in a blue-collar-labor state, and had nearly tied him in delegates nationally.

Publicly, Jackson and his staff were trying to contain themselves, avoiding any characterization of Michigan as a turning point.

‘Just Another Win’

“Just another win. We take them one at a time,” Jackson later told CBS correspondent Bruce Morton, who had joined the campaign bus in Connecticut along with several other reporters.

“But a big win, an important win,” Morton told Jackson.

Jackson was even being asked by reporters now if he were the front-runner.

It was a question a few weeks ago many Jackson aides never seriously anticipated hearing. Even some of his staff privately allow they have never truly thought of him in the White House.

This campaign exists on many levels, not the least--perhaps until now--being its historical significance, rather than its strategic chances for victory.

But Jackson’s campaign now seemed imbued with a momentum beyond even its own expectations and, perhaps, its preparations.

“We thought it might be close, but we never expected this kind of blowout,” campaign manager Gerald F. Austin said Saturday night of the Michigan victory.

On Sunday, Jackson, campaigning in Connecticut for the state’s Tuesday primary, seemed moved by the turn of events.

At the Yerwood Community Center in Stamford, one of the day’s six stops after leaving Wisconsin, he raised his usual emotional delivery to a new level.

In his stump speech, Jackson likes to recount that 23 years ago he fought with police in Selma, Ala., for the right to vote. And this month, 23 years later, he won the presidential primary there.

Wept Silently

As she listened at Yerwood, Carol Braghman, a middle-aged black woman from Stamford, wept silently.

Jackson concluded by noting that Rosa Parks, whose quiet refusal to sit in the back of a bus 33 years ago ignited the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, on Saturday had voted for him for President in Michigan.

As he told the story, the candidate himself seemed overcome with emotion and exhaustion, his eyes welling for a moment with tears. He turned from the podium and embraced Frank Savage, a black member of the Stamford Board of Finance.

Jackson normally maintains total control at the podium. Yet he also mentioned privately that he had came close to tears at Fellowship Chapel in Detroit a day earlier.

“I never thought I’d live to see a black man run for President,” said Lurlean Scroggins, a black domestic worker, who left Arkansas for New England as a teen-ager in 1940.

“I’m glad to be alive to see it,” Scroggins added.

“In some real sense,” Jackson said of his campaign at a press conference in White Plains, N.Y., “it represents the highest and best of the American dream.”

Political Realities

Political realities, however, are becoming ever more important as Jackson enjoys more success. Frank Watkins, Jackson’s national political director, conceded, for instance, that it was “probably to our disadvantage” if the race winnows down to a contest between Jackson and Dukakis.

Austin said the campaign, which heretofore ran TV spots only in small media markets, ran them in Detroit, the major city in Michigan, and now plans to run ads in every major city from here on if fund raising continues at the current pace.

The campaign is studying using professional advance staff, and Watkins said it is also actively lobbying super delegates, the 645 party luminaries who automatically serve as delegates.

And at Yerwood, someone had written lyrics to a gospel melody, performed by a duet of singers, that spoke of the reverence Jackson can inspire:

“Open the door, let Jesse in,” they sang. “Open the door, he’s heaven sent.”