GOP Could Be Drawn In by Jackson’s Left Leanings

In the wake of Jesse Jackson’s primary successes, especially his big victory in Michigan, the battle for the Democratic nomination suggests the following comparison: After passage of the Civil Rights Act, some restaurant owners didn’t want blacks in their establishments--not because they were racists but because they were afraid that their regular customers would stay home. With Jackson now at the door, the Democratic Party is in much the same position as those restaurant owners.

There is a good chance that the party won’t be able to keep him out, however, any more than those business-minded restaurateurs could keep blacks out. Despite his second-place finish on Tuesday to Michael S. Dukakis in Connecticut, Jackson continues to do better than polls or pols have predicted. His crowds are larger, his following more intense. He could win the California primary. He could win the Democratic nomination.

Some of my Republican friends are jubilant about all this, believing that the Republicans are again almost sure to win in November. In effect they are saying: Jesse Jackson will be the savior of George Bush.

Jackson may indeed prove unstoppable. But I don’t share in the widespread Republican enthusiasm. The prospect of a Bush-Jackson race should give us all pause.

In the first place, the center of gravity of American politics will have moved considerably to the left. Faced with that prospect, Bush’s advisers are likely to conclude that Bush, too, could safely shift a little to the left in an attempt to pick up the votes of disaffected centrist Democrats. The instinct of moderate Republicans is always to minimize differences between them and the Democrats, whom they perceive as enjoying greater legitimacy in the policy arena. One Bush campaign worker tells me that such a strategy is right now under active consideration by Bush’s advisers.

The implications for the country are potentially serious. Right now, for example, the United States has on the arms-control bargaining table at Geneva an extreme proposal to reduce our nuclear arsenal by 50%. This is worrisome because there is no guarantee that the Soviets will comply with any promise that they may make to implement similar reductions. Normally in an election year such a proposal would go nowhere because the Republicans would appreciate the possibility that the Democrats could move to their right on the national-security issue. That was how the Democrats captured the White House in 1960, after all, when John F. Kennedy played up the “missile gap.”

A possible nomination of Richard A. Gephardt or Albert Gore Jr. would have stirred such fears in GOP breasts, and we could be sure that Ronald Reagan’s risky arms-cut proposal would be stillborn. But with Jackson as his potential adversary (and I suspect that the same reasoning may apply to Dukakis), Bush is likely to embrace the Reagan position without fear of a rightward Democratic response. In fact, the Reagan-Bush arms-reduction proposal, which to date has received little attention, is more dramatic--because it is more concrete--than anything that even Jackson has offered. Half of our nuclear submarines could be dismantled, for example.

This is not to suggest that Jackson is anything other than a candidate of the left. His foreign-policy and defense advisers include Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-Calif.) and Robert Borosage of the leftist Institute for Policy Studies. Jackson campaigns against the Strategic Defense Initiative and the MX missile. He opposes U.S. aid not only to the Contras in Nicaragua but also to the freedom fighters in Afghanistan. He promises to bring an end to what he calls “economic violence” in this country--one method being to bring back higher tax rates on both individuals and businesses.

Jackson recently told the Bay Area Reporter, a gay newspaper in San Francisco, that his “strong support for the gay and lesbian community” (as the paper characterized it) had not so far hurt him. Jackson supports “lesbian/gay rights to child custody and the right of individuals to designate non-traditional family members as beneficiaries in insurance policies, wills and federal benefit programs,” the paper reported.

Jackson is also hostile to Israel. “Zionism is a poisonous weed,” he told Newsday in 1984. A year earlier he was quoted by the New York Times as saying: “I’m sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust.” He has referred to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York as “Hymietown.” It should also be noted that Jackson’s campaign this year has received extensive and highly enthusiastic coverage from the People’s Daily World, a communist newspaper published in New York.

Taking all this into account, I believe it highly unlikely that, if nominated, Jackson would be elected. But I also believe that his nomination would disrupt the normal forces of competition that operate healthily in U.S. politics. Therefore, it would be not just in the Democrats’ interest but also in the national interest if the nomination went to one of his rivals.