Defense of Liberals Becomes a Jackson Crusade

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has long styled himself the defender of the downtrodden and the out-of-favor, has taken up the cause of another breed of underdog: that endangered political species, the liberal.

Virtually every other national Democratic Party leader flinches at the mention of the word, and Jackson himself has always preferred to describe his brand of politics as “progressive.” But in recent days, he has turned to making unabashed liberalism his rallying cry.

“You win some games and you lose some games, but it should never be because you don’t know what side you’re on,” the defeated presidential candidate told the Black American Political Assn. of California convention here last Saturday night. “I am a progressive liberal.”

On Sunday, Jackson gave a rousing defense of liberalism at a fund-raiser in Beverly Hills, put on by the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee.

Some of those in the audience have been wary of Jackson in the past because of his controversial statements about Jews and the United States’ policy on the Middle East. But by the end of his remarks, most of the more than 500 people in attendance were on their feet cheering him.

“Liberty is broader than politics, bigger than politics, and we cannot bear the burden of another attack on civil liberties and American liberties,” Jackson said in an allusion to GOP presidential nominee George Bush’s attacks on the American Civil Liberties Union.

“It was liberals who got women the vote, who got black people the vote, who gave us rural electrification and better health care,” he said.

In the two months after the Democratic convention that ended his presidential campaign, Jackson’s critics said he was petulant, and unwilling to face his new supporting role in national politics. But in recent days, Jackson appears to have regained his energy, confidence and powerful eloquence.

“Leaders deliver. Leaders go to work. Leaders don’t pout,” he said in an interview last week.

Jackson’s fiery new defense of liberalism, though nominally focused on the November election, actually looks beyond it, to what promises to be months and years of turbulence for the Democratic Party.

Particularly if Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis loses and hands the White House to the Republicans for the third time in a row, Democrats will again find themselves in an intense and painful search for their ideological souls.

Jackson warned that unless liberalism is defended, “we are about to have a generation of children who’ve grown up thinking that to be liberal is to be dirty, inadequate, subversive.”

It is this generation that is the focus of Jackson’s new liberal evangelism. In the last week alone, he has made his pitch to thousands of students on college campuses in Portland, Ore., Boulder, Colo., Seattle and Los Angeles.

At a rally at UCLA last Friday, he described conservatives as “those who would conserve America for the few, for themselves.”

“They want to keep us narrow. They want to keep us small. They would glorify our past and misread our future,” Jackson said. “This is not the land of the rich and the home of the scared. It’s the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Staff writer Keith Love contributed to this story.