Jackson Gets Recharged on Rural South Voting Circuit : Politics: He makes speeches and signs up Democratic voters during a two-day, seven-city tour through Mississippi.

The procession of men and women who were called up from the audience to stand before the Rev. Jesse Jackson in a steamy gym on Sunday wore the woeful look of sinners seeking absolution.

The 20 or so residents of this rural community who were cajoled into a public confession had committed what for Jackson is an almost unpardonable sin: They were eligible voters who had failed to register to vote.

But Jackson, an ordained minister and two-time presidential candidate, offered quick and effective redemption. Accompanied by voter-registration officials everywhere he went on a two-day, seven-city swing through rural Mississippi, he simply signed up the new voters and closed out another packed-house rally with songs and prayers before moving on to the next town.

Jackson, feeling somewhat battered and overlooked after the Democratic National Convention and his public feuds with presidential nominee Bill Clinton, is getting recharged. He is doing it the best way he knows how: in church pulpits and crowded gyms, in finding new voters to register, in schmoozing and charming ministers, local politicians and members of the choir and reliving old political and civil rights fights.

“I’m not sure what all of them who came got out of it,” Jackson said as he drove away from the packed gym at Mary Holmes College in West Point. “I know that what I got out of it was fulfillment. That was exactly the right place for me to be at exactly the right time.”

In southern Mississippi, a Jackson visit is front-page news, an event worthy of police escorts and cause for celebration and feasts of country cooking put out by the women of the churches the political leader visits. His appearances are part revival meeting, part political rally.

He feels a need to make regular visits to the rural South, “the circuit,” as he calls it. He has built his National Rainbow Coalition into a political institution in Mississippi. Proud of his efforts, he claimed during one speech, “I’ve registered more Democrats than any Democrat alive.”

Looking out a car window between stops on the political tour, he took in the deep green fields and woods and the small houses, part of what he calls “the richest soil and poorest people in America.”

“Madison Square Garden was a space ship,” he said. “This is back to the Earth. For me, it is a recycling.”

As for the future, Jackson said he will spend the rest of the year registering voters, working to elect Clinton and pressing his personal campaign for statehood for Washington, D.C. “If that comes through, there will be two new U.S. senators,” he said. “I expect to be one of them.”