COLUMN LEFT : A Mover Without a Movement : Jesse Jackson has his ambition, a big distinction from what Nelson Mandela stands for.

The crowd at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was ready for politics, no doubt about it. From where I was sitting, high in the end tier facing the stage at a distance of about a thousand feet, one could feel a lot of political energy with nowhere much to go beyond honoring the hero of the evening--Nelson Mandela.

Probably for a chunk of the 80,000-strong gathering, it was enough to turn out, children brushed and neat, to witness a hero. But at least in the section I was sitting in, where the mix was about 65% black and Latino, 35% white, everyone jumped on the political connections and cheered them lustily.

There was thunderous applause for an American Indian speaker who described with spare eloquence the miseries and deprivations of indigenous peoples, with fearsome percentages of their numbers unemployed, addicted, imprisoned or stranded on Skid Row not so many blocks from where we all sat.

Any time someone struck a strong political theme the crowd came alive. Since an exhausted Mandela confined himself to formalities and the basic message that sanctions be maintained against South Africa, the strongest rhetoric came from Dick Gregory and Jesse Jackson.

What the excited crowd got from Gregory was the news that he is going to abjure all nourishment save fruit and liquids till one person/one vote prevails in South Africa. And from Jackson came the injunction to use the privilege of all Americans--the right to vote. As a couple of political prescriptions, Gregory’s and Jackson’s did not seem much to take home from this enormous and potentially exciting rally.

Jackson spoke far longer and more substantively than Gregory--and indeed than Mandela himself. I found myself listening to him with increasing gloom. He was eloquent as always and made some strong points, as he almost always does. He reminded the crowd of the moral squalor and hypocrisy of George Bush lecturing Mandela on the need to avoid violence, even as the U.S. government sends military supplies to Jonas Savimbi and the UNITA cutthroats in Angola.

The crowd cheered Jackson on this, as they cheered everything he said. But when he talked directly to young black Americans in the crowd, what did Jackson single out in Mandela as moral and political precept? Mandela, shouted the reverend, had studied hard, taken his bar exams and not smoked crack. William Bennett could have said that. It’s like saying that the meaning of Mao is that he didn’t smoke opium.

When Jackson told his audience to use the right to vote, he presumably meant they should vote for the Democrats and no doubt himself when he starts running again for the Democratic nomination.

While Jackson was gesturing at this program of political action, the leaders of the Democratic Party were about to hunker down in Washington with the Republicans in a bipartisan conspiracy to raise taxes and cut social spending.

Jackson has now run twice for the Democratic nomination. In his campaigns, he showed conclusively that if you lay out a clear program for economic justice and speak to it eloquently, millions of Americans will rally to your cause.

By now, it seems to me that he has shown he is not interested in building a political movement capable of acting in any way independent of his own personal political ambition, whether this ambition be to capture the party nomination or urge statehood for the District of Columbia so he can be one of its new senators. A political movement is more than the destiny of one man, and its organizing rhetoric should have more substance than “keep the dream alive” or “hope not dope” or “I love you all very much.” Mandela is not just a courageous individual but one of the expressions of the organized energies of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.

It is all very well to talk, as Jackson did that night in the Coliseum, of the tradition of Martin Luther King and the civil-rights movement, but that man and that movement made headway only because of profoundly radical struggles a generation earlier by organizations such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations and yes, the Communist Party, in labor and fair employment struggles in places such as Winston-Salem and Detroit.

Mandela has a movement. Jackson has himself and the Democratic Party, which will do nothing but sell out the hopes of those Jackson lures into its fold unless it is threatened by an organized political movement to its left. That’s what Jackson should be helping to build.