Jackson Sees His 7 Million Supporters as New Power for Party to Heed

Winging his way eastward Saturday to make yet another speech in the run-up to a convention certain to nominate Gov. Michael S. Dukakis for President, the Rev. Jesse Jackson had reciprocity on his mind.

He had hinted at the concept before, but he latched onto it Saturday morning in Illinois after state Treasurer Jerry Cosentino, elected as a delegate for Sen. Paul Simon, publicly threw his support to Jackson.

Cosentino had made clear that his reason was purely pragmatic: He needed support from black voters. But that bothered Jackson not at all: “That’s the new math,” the candidate told reporters on his campaign plane. “That’s the new equation.”

It is a model that Jackson hopes Dukakis will heed in deciding how much to incorporate Jackson and the issues he champions into his own campaign.

‘Two-Way Street’

“It simply means . . . a two-way street as opposed to a one-way street. It means if I take you in my neighborhood and ask them to vote for you, then you should take me into your neighborhood and ask them to vote for me.”

Despite the implication, Jackson showed little interest in talking about a campaign for the vice presidency, or even in the role he might play in a Dukakis campaign. Nor did he want to talk about what might happen in November if the Democrats did not practice “reciprocity politics.”

What he wanted to talk about, as he leaned back in his airplane seat and spoke to a national press corps whose numbers had dwindled to three, were the 7 million voters who supported him and the issues they had championed. Neither, he argued, could be wisely neglected in the fall.

“Once the idea is turned loose,” Jackson said, “you can’t put the genie back into the bottle.”

Jackson said that his “Jackson Democrat” constituency should not necessarily be assumed to vote loyally unless their interests were taken into account.

Blacks and Latinos, he said, were still “independent constituencies loosely affiliated with the Democratic Party.” Jackson touched on the reciprocity theme again later Saturday in a speech to the National Conference of Black Mayors, an event that Dukakis did not attend.

“We should not take anyone for granted,” he said in the talk with reporters. “We should encourage voter turnout by offering support, not narrowing options.”

Voicing confidence that “we’ll get the rewards without a lot of rancor,” Jackson nevertheless made clear that he would fight for party commitments to taxes on the wealthy, a military spending freeze, and sharp budgetary increases for education and Head Start--proposals opposed by the Dukakis campaign.

He suggested also that his supporters might well seek changes in the leadership of the Democratic National Committee, whose chairman, Paul G. Kirk Jr., is a strong Dukakis supporter and is regarded by Jackson as hostile to his campaign.

And with an intensity that seemed to suggest an additional item on his convention agenda, Jackson argued with fervor about the need to establish “universal same-day, on-site voter registration”--a proposal that would well serve his future political interests.

Points to Michigan

Such a system, Jackson said, would ensure that “when people get aroused, they also could vote when they get aroused,” instead of being shut out of the polls because they had not registered in advance. He said that his overwhelming victory in the Michigan primary, one of the few states where such a system is in place, had shown how decisive a role same-day registration could play.

Jackson acknowledged that that reform, as well as the others he sought, might well be controversial.

But politicians, he argued, “are quite capable of both counting and adjusting. That’s what they do for a living is count. They adjust to a new reality every day. And when it happens in a process this orderly, it’s not traumatic.”