Beyond the Campaign Rhetoric : Jackson Stance on Issues Starts to Come Into Focus

On the campaign trail the Rev. Jesse Jackson speaks in epigrams, addressing the issues of the day with all the subtlety of an automobile bumper sticker.

“Stop Drugs! Save Jobs!” Jackson roars from the stump, exhorting audiences to repeat slogans that encapsulate the priorities of his presidential campaign.

That message has won wide approval from voters across the country, placing Jackson at the top of the Democratic race.

Away from the stump speech and beyond the epigrams, however, the candidate and his campaign have often remained vague about Jackson’s positions on the issues of the day, providing only a sketchy outline of what Jackson would do if he were President.

His theme is to roll back the Reagan Revolution: raising taxes on the rich, slashing defense spending and expanding the social programs that the campaign says will restore “people-led growth” to the American economy.

But there is much to suggest that a Jackson Administration might represent a revolution of its own, one that would seek to implement foreign and economic policies that differ sharply from those advocated by even the liberal mainstream.

Jackson, arguing that national security considerations must reflect the importance of economic vitality over military might, would halt modernization of all nuclear weapons systems--a position held by few others. It is at “the extreme end of the spectrum” in current defense thinking, one expert said.

His self-declared Jackson Doctrine calls for foreign policy restraint where Reagan threatened intervention--in Nicaragua, for example. At the same time, Jackson says he would guarantee the security of South Africa’s neighbors, most of which are Marxist, against a South African incursion, an interventionist stance that he acknowledges might make necessary the presence of U.S. military advisers in Africa.

At home, Jackson would raise taxes on individuals making more than $192,000 a year, at the least restoring these tax rates to levels prevailing before the Reagan-backed tax overhaul of 1986 and perhaps increasing corporate taxes to far higher rates.

Whether a Jackson Administration could implement all that appears in the candidate’s position papers and statements is an open question. As President, Jackson would almost surely meet resistance in a number of areas, even from a Democratic-controlled Congress.

Moreover, Jackson’s recent efforts to move away from his more extreme statements of the past--including his public embraces of PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and his private characterization of Jews as “Hymies”--raise questions about how firmly he would hold to current positions.

And discerning exactly what some positions are remains in part a matter of guesswork. The candidate is unwilling--one campaign aide says unable--to deliver formal policy speeches, and his campaign acknowledges that it is reluctant to set forth his sometimes controversial positions with all possible clarity.

“A lot of people may not believe what we have to say,” said Frank Clemente, the campaign’s issues director. “So why set yourself up?”

Jackson himself, while enthusiastic about discussing his policy positions in campaign-plane interviews, inevitably reverts even there to the well-crafted phrases from his campaign speeches. He rejects the suggestion that the electorate might demand more detail.

“Voters don’t deal in numbers,” Jackson said in a recent conversation. “They deal in affection for the candidate. Trust in the person. Belief in the leader. Ultimately they vote because they believe you will seek to protect them, that you are standing for them when they are asleep.”

However, in interviews with Jackson, his staff, and experts outside the campaign, a picture of Jackson’s positions, some more specific than others, begins to emerge:

THE ECONOMY: The Jackson campaign has not released a detailed budget plan. “We don’t want a budget that will serve as a target for people to aim at,” said Robert Borosage, a top issues adviser to Jackson. But what statements they have made paint a picture of tax and spending priorities sharply different from those practiced for the last eight years.

To counter what Jackson calls the “reverse Robin Hood” tax policies of the Reagan Administration--”they take from the poor and give to the rich,” he says--he would restore the top tax rate, imposed on families making more than $192,000, from the 28% in effect this year to the 38.5% that prevailed in 1987.

He would also restore the corporate tax burden to its 1980 level--and higher still, if some of his advisers have their way.

That approach is applauded by liberals such as Robert McIntyre, who heads the reformist Citizens for Tax Justice in Washington. “Those who have been getting tax cuts for the past decade can afford to pay more,” McIntyre said.

But it is anathema to Michael Boskin, a conservative Stanford economist and sometime adviser to Vice President George Bush, who suggested that Jackson’s tax proposals would cripple economic growth and “wind up doing more harm than good to the people he’s trying to help.”

Jackson would also drastically reduce defense spending, cutting $30 billion--about 10%--in the first year alone and making further sharp cuts in the following years, his advisers say.

Combined tax revenue and defense cuts would reduce the federal deficit by $50 billion a year, and aides say Jackson would save an additional $5 billion by slashing some agricultural subsidies.

But he would also boost many spending programs. Although aides refuse to be specific on how much they would cost, Jackson’s emphasis on the need for a rash of domestic programs--improved education, health care, day care and housing as well as the beefed-up anti-drug budget--suggests that the number would be considerable.

If a Jackson Administration concluded that its deficit reduction plan imperiled the economy, issues adviser Borosage said, Jackson would increase domestic spending rather than moderate his tax increases or defense reductions.

“We’re pretty happy with the taxes on the rich,” Borosage said. “And we’re pretty happy with the cuts in the defense budget.”

NEW INVESTMENT: Jackson has put considerable emphasis on gradually investing 10% of the money held by public employee pension funds--about $6 billion a year for 10 years--in projects ranging from low-income housing to bridges. The federal government would guarantee that the pension fund investments would be repaid and earn a market-rate return.

If the projects fail to generate anticipated return, then the government would be on the hook to repay the pension plans. Jackson concedes that guaranteeing the investments would entail risk. “The federal government must assume some risk to rebuild America,” he told reporters recently. “That’s its responsibility.”

Some experts say that a government willing to provide such a guarantee could more easily raise investment funds by issuing bonds of its own.

“The political imagery is appealing,” said Robert Z. Lawrence, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “I guess we’re telling big investment institutions to do something socially worthwhile. But the more you look at it, the more having the pension funds in there seems an obfuscation.”

DRUGS: He would boost federal funding by 71% to combat the drug problem, increasing expenditures most sharply for programs that would provide treatment on demand for addicts, but also providing new funds for Coast Guard and Customs Service interdiction programs.

Jackson’s emphasis on the drug issue is acclaimed by figures as diverse as New York Mayor Edward I. Koch and Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates. It also illustrates the conviction within the campaign that Jackson’s hard-line rhetoric serves an effective political purpose.

“It is an opportunity for him to put his foreign policy in a different context, where his position is not anathema to conservative people but is supported by them,” Clemente said.

But Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation, suggests that Jackson’s approach is incomplete unless he stiffens criminal penalties for drug users--a step Jackson has said is unnecessary.

In his campaign speeches, Jackson puts greater emphasis on stopping drugs at the border. That puts him at odds with analysts including Peter Reuter of the RAND Corp., who have concluded that interdiction does not work.

“As far as I can tell,” added Mark A. H. Kleiman, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard, “Jackson would simply repeat” the mistakes of Vice President George Bush’s task force on drugs, which sought to stem the tide with stepped-up interdiction efforts.

In an interview, Jackson said he believed “international drug cartels” with “sinister” intentions are supplying drugs to the United States. Kleiman, voicing the sentiment of other drug experts, called Jackson’s argument “overblown.”

“I haven’t seen any evidence that there is a group of people involved in getting drugs into the United States,” Kleiman said.

His battle against drugs provides him with an effective way to fend off questions about defense policy, about which he speaks little unless asked.

“We have the Russians in check,” Jackson says, “but we don’t have drugs in check.”

DEFENSE: That premise about the Soviet Union is reflected in defense cutbacks that go further than those of his rivals.

Jackson has said he would cancel all nuclear modernization programs--halting the MX missile, the Midgetman missile, the stealth bomber and the Trident D-5 missile--and calls for reducing the Strategic Defense Initiative to pre-Reagan levels of anti-ballistic missile research.

The campaign contends that such cuts would not be unilateral in practice since the Soviets would surely respond with significant cuts of their own. “We have more than enough nuclear weapons and we don’t need any more,” Borosage said.

The approach is endorsed by Alice Tepper Marlin, whose Council on Economic Priorities advocates a sharp shift away from defense spending. “Modernization is the greatest threat to arms control,” Marlin said.

But to Joshua Epstein, a Brookings Institution expert on the defense budget, Jackson’s proposals represent “the extreme end of the spectrum” of current defense thinking.

And Harvard arms control expert Albert Carnesdale labeled Jackson’s approach “dangerous. . . . I agree that the situation now is very robust and stable, and I want to keep it that way. But keeping it that way requires some effort.”

FOREIGN POLICY: Jackson, straying from the traditional U.S. preoccupation with Soviet relations, focuses instead on the Third World. Clemente, his issues adviser, said the candidate’s approach stems from his own background.

As a black, Jackson feels a “commonality with the Third World” and an “identification with the oppressed,” Clemente said. As a disciple of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he added, Jackson has applied King’s teachings on nonviolence to international relations.

The “Jackson Doctrine” outlines a model of international restraint diametrically opposed to the Reagan Doctrine, which offers support for anti-communist insurgencies in Third World countries. Jackson, who would cancel U.S. aid to rebels in Nicaragua, Angola and Cambodia, argues that U.S. policy should be guided by respect for international law, self-determination and economic development.

In the case of South Africa, however, Jackson abandons his nonviolent strategy. Not only would he impose comprehensive economic sanctions until there is a “date certain for free and fair elections” in that country, but he also insists that South Africa’s neighbors “must be provided the military security to defend themselves against South African invasion and terrorism.”

Jackson would provide U.S.-backed sanctuary to the African National Congress, the anti-South African force whose bases across national borders from South Africa are the nominal targets of recent South African border incursions.

For the most part, however, Jackson argues that U.S. foreign aid should give priority to “economic development over military assistance.” He calls on Japan and Germany to foot most of the bill for a Marshall Plan to boost the Third World economy. He would reduce U.S. aid to Israel and Egypt, which now receive the bulk of such assistance.

He has toned down his rhetoric on the Middle East, which frequently was sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Nine years ago in a trip to Lebanon, he said: “We are concerned about justice for the Palestinian people. We support them in their quest for justice, freedom, and a homeland. . . .” Now he couples calls for Israel to negotiate directly with the Palestine Liberation Organization with calls for Palestinians to recognize Israel’s right to exist

TRADE: To an extent unusual among politicians, Jackson conceives of international relations less in terms of national boundaries than according to economic distinctions. He condemns U.S.-based multinational corporations for transferring American jobs abroad, where they are performed by “slave labor.”

He has been far less critical of the trade practices of foreign countries. Among his approaches to trimming the U.S. trade deficit are reducing the value of the dollar against the currencies of the East Asian nations that run large surpluses with the United States and increasing wages in those countries “to level the international playing field.”

ENERGY: He would exempt Canada, Mexico and other oil-producing countries in the Western Hemisphere from the stiff $5-a-barrel tariff he has said he might impose on imported oil, an approach he says would help create a “Pan-American” energy alliance that would shore up U.S. energy security.

But critics say the selectively applied oil import fee would greatly complicate U.S. relations with friendly oil-producing countries. “Nigeria would say, ‘Well, why are you excluding us?’ and Egypt would say, ‘Why us, we’re your buddies?’ ” said Edward R. Fried, an oil analyst at the Brookings Institution.

“This is another form of protectionism under a different name,” added James L. Sweeney, a professor of engineering and economic systems at Stanford University.