Rapid Pace Snarls Jackson Agenda

It was 10 o’clock in the morning as a crowd of reporters huddled in wind-lashed rain on the steps of City Hall, awaiting the kickoff of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s New York primary campaign.

Symbolically, at least, this was no small event. With the Democratic race reduced to three men, the No. 2 contender was starting the final lap of the long primary season as the campaign turned to the major industrial states of the North and West.

Just one thing was missing from the otherwise textbook media event--crafted to give Jackson a starting burst of free television exposure in the nation’s largest and priciest media market--the candidate himself.

Jackson was still winging his way from Indianapolis. Jackson’s national campaign staff, realizing that he could never make the City Hall event in time, had called it off hours before. But his campaign staff on the ground in New York had not told the folks waiting in the rain, including Jackson’s own press relations people.

First Reports Negative

Result: The first news reports of Jackson’s crucial campaign for Tuesday’s New York primary portrayed him as off on the wrong foot, the no-show candidate.

There is a striking contrast between the quasi-military precision of the campaigns being run by Democratic front-runner Michael S. Dukakis and Republican nominee-apparent George Bush, and the frenzied, freewheeling style of Jackson.

Almost invariably, Jackson runs an hour late and sometimes two, though it rarely seems to make much difference to his patient, cheering throngs.

Events are sometimes canceled at the last minute, disappointing crowds that would make most politicians’ day. In New York’s mostly black Bedford-Stuyvesant district last Saturday, more than 1,000 supporters waited in vain for as long as seven hours to see Jackson, only to be told finally that the event had been dropped.

Often key aides do not know Jackson’s schedule even a day ahead, and in New York, aides said privately, staff members are up sometimes hours past midnight finalizing the next day’s plans.

By far the hardest campaigner running, Jackson usually starts his day with a jam-packed agenda of six to nine events, each calling for a full-throttle delivery of his rousing stump speech, then adds still more.

The time allotted for his motorcade to move from one site to another would stretch the skills of a New York cabdriver. Time out for food and rest are not a high priority, either, on the Jackson campaign. Running on what his traveling press corps has long since dubbed “JST--Jesse Standard Time,” a typical campaign day drags to the edge of midnight, then begins again at 7:30 or 8 the next morning.

The Jackson organization’s standing explanation for its erratic logistics is a lack of money to hire the kind of professional staff found in legion in the Bush and Dukakis campaigns. “Poorest campaign, richest message,” Jackson used to say.

But with $60,000 a day now rolling into campaign headquarters in Chicago, Jackson has modified this line to call it the “least expensive, most cost-efficient campaign,” and, in one of the season’s higher flights of hyperbole: “the best managed campaign.”

Among Jackson’s staff, the view prevails that it might better be described as the most effervescent, least managed campaign--weak at the center and powerful in the provinces.

Some of this may reflect on Jackson as a manager. Jackson’s organizational style is open and he relies on his own formidable political instincts and media savvy to make many detail decisions.

Two top aides run the campaign with Jackson: campaign manager Gerald F. Austin, who manages the campaign day to day and directs spending, and longtime aide Frank Watkins, who plots longer-term political strategy. But Jackson has no single person functioning as a chief of staff, telling him where to go when or guarding his time.

The result is refreshing and maddening. Jackson is free to trust his own instincts, which is one reason Jackson’s campaign so accurately reflects his personality and, in his words, his “authenticity.”

Accessible to Staff

But it also means that Jackson remains accessible, press spokesman Pam Smith said, to any number of his staff who want his time. Jackson personally approves the daily schedule and sometimes the last-minute changes occur, aides said, when local staff get to him at the end of the day or early morning to persuade him to do something unexpected.

Money and staff, however, are probably not the main determinants of the Jackson campaign’s frenetic style. Jackson sets a grueling pace for himself that is markedly harder than any other candidate’s on the circuit this year.

To all appearances, Jackson pushes himself day after day to near exhaustion.

In part because Jackson’s pace is so unceasing, staff work can fall behind. In Michigan, for instance, Jackson spent nearly a day denouncing George Bush for remaining silent on the Civil Rights Restoration Act when, in fact, the lead story in the New York Times that morning was about Bush’s endorsement of a presidential veto of the act.

Jackson has hired a professional advance team but staffers complain that it is not enough to do the job fully.

In other campaigns, staff arrive on the scene of a prospective event two or three days in advance. In the Jackson campaign, the lead time is more like 12 hours, said one member of his New York advance team, which first arrived in New York only two weeks ago. Not surprisingly, unforeseen glitches develop.

Last Saturday, for instance, a promised bank of telephones for the traveling press turned out to be a still-unfinished spaghetti tangle of wire on the floor of the First Baptist Church of Coney Island.

Although the tangles may seem trivial, they do hurt the candidate. Often, as in West Memphis, Ark., the news media just give up. The number of television cameras to cover Jackson’s appearance there at a church rally dropped from seven to one by the time the candidate arrived, three hours late.

At an Irish-American forum in New York last week, angry Irish leader Jack Irwin, when informed that Jackson had canceled at the last minute, told the crowd: “We are not only disappointed, but outraged at this affront.”

Jackson’s advance work still has some distance to go. Consider Jackson’s brief swing through Arizona last week, pitching for the state’s caucuses today.

Having landed at Flagstaff for a rally of 1,500 people at Northern Arizona University before hopping on to Tempe for another rally of 3,000 at Arizona State University, Jackson’s staff discovered that Flagstaff’s mountain air was too thin, and the runway too short, for a fully loaded DC-9 to take off.

Finally, much of the luggage and a dozen passengers were bumped to a commuter flight so Jackson’s chartered jet could clear the trees at the end of the runway, and the Rainbow Campaign was off and running and late again.

Staff writer Douglas Jehl contributed to this story.

Jackson battles Gov. Michael S. Dukakis in today’s Arizona caucuses. Page 26.