COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : The Stupidity of Believing in Nothing : Clinton’s utterly calculated slap at Jesse Jackson cost him many votes and gained none.

Just under four years ago, Michael Dukakis, presidential nominee of his party, stood at the rostrum in Atlanta and clasped the hand of Jesse Jackson. The hall still echoed with Jackson’s impassioned appeal for unity, made 24 hours earlier.

Dukakis then dried his eyes, packed his bags and headed into the deep South, to the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, where he very conspicuously failed to remind his all-white audience that, 20 years earlier, three civil rights workers had given their lives for racial justice not so far from that same Neshoba County Fair.

There was the usual rush by political savants to praise this cynical performance on the part of Dukakis, this speedy demonstration that he was in no way the bond-slave or client of Jesse Jackson. But it turned out to be one of those supposedly smart moves that helped leave Dukakis beached as one of the most derided political candidates in recent memory.

Nothing much has changed, at least inside the decision-making apparatus of the Democratic candidate. The same sort of political strategists who counseled Dukakis to head for the Neshoba County Fair advised Bill Clinton that the time was meet to give Jesse Jackson the back of his hand, thereby demonstrating backbone, independence and other desirable features.

In fact, the Clinton-Jackson meeting in Washington had been carefully brokered, which helps explain the subsequent incandescent fury of the Jackson camp. The script called for Jackson to make “generous” remarks about Clinton, then for Clinton to come to the rostrum and make reciprocally “generous” remarks about Jackson. Clinton would thus validate Jackson as a power within the Democratic Party and Jackson would give Clinton an endorsement more glowing than he had managed thus far.

Clinton duly performed his famous double-cross, issuing his denunciation of the rap singer Sister Souljah, and by direct and unmistakable implication putting Jackson firmly in his place, announcing that Clinton’s party regarded the inner-city black vote and, more widely, the “rainbow” vote as dispensable.

Whether or not Sister Souljah was advocating racist violence or merely replicating a gangbanger’s inner thoughts is entirely beside the point. Having made his decision to strike aside Jackson’s outstretched hand, Clinton would have used any pretext. If the house orchestra had been playing Mozart, he would have denounced it for advocating Freemasonry and black separatism. The question is whether he played a sensible hand.

He was as dumb as Dukakis. Political campaigning is supposed to be the amassing of political constituencies. Thus far Clinton, surely the least regarded Democratic nominee of the postwar period, has done a wonderful job of peeling away potential layers of support. Having given his carefully aimed kick in the teeth to the leading political representative of black America, Clinton went to a convention of public employees and issued vague threats in the Reagan manner about firing bureaucrats. And any time anyone on the left-liberal end of the spectrum nerves themselves to work for Clinton, he makes haste to sign another Arkansas death sentence, announce unswerving support for the Cuban-exile lobby in Miami and lament that George Bush didn’t flatten Baghdad.

All this is intended to lure people who will never vote for Clinton anyway. A man so visibly ready to say or do anything for a vote or a campaign dollar in the end forfeits both votes and dollars. Recently Clinton, his campaign on the edge of bankruptcy, had to return to his original backers in Arkansas for an emergency transfusion of cash. By one account, what unnerved these hard-faced men was not Clinton’s insistence on some core points of principle in his campaign platform, but his alacrity in junking anything that they didn’t care for. Like Jackson, albeit from a different perspective, they saw a vulgar opportunist in action.

For progressives, Clinton has nothing to offer. He has stirred no constituency, forged no coalitions, articulated no program. His campaign is a vacuum in which all the usual special interests have taken up residence. To say that he would be “better” than George Bush or Ross Perot is absurd, since his political project is so clearly to demonstrate that he would not be better in the sense of more liberal or progressive, but somehow a smarter bet. But he’s persuaded few people that this is the case. Ross Perot has a slightly different problem, which is that has still to attract any significant section of the American Establishment to his side. In sum, it’s still George Bush’s race to lose.