Following in His Father’s Footsteps : Jesse Jackson Jr., who’s running for Congress, appears poised to launch a national political dynasty.

He is known here as Junior. And when he announced he would run for the U.S. House in a special election, the overture was a song written for the occasion: “Jesse Jackson Jr., he’s the one, the reverend’s son, to be a congressman.”

At 30, having moved just a year ago from Washington to an affluent South Side neighborhood near Lake Michigan, Jesse the Younger appears poised to launch a national political dynasty.

“If the Daleys can do it, if the Kennedys can do it, then why can’t the Jacksons?” Democratic political consultant Don Rose asked rhetorically.

Jackson’s famous father--the civil rights activist, two-time presidential candidate and shadow senator for the District of Columbia--also is back on hand, having decided to return to the helm of Operation PUSH in the city where he first made his mark.

The combination has some on Chicago’s political scene wondering if the unraveled coalition that elected Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor can be stitched back together by a pair of Jacksons.

Already, the magic of the name and its connections are apparent. A celebrity-laden list of contributors--from Aretha Franklin to Bill Cosby, from David N. Dinkins to Johnnie L. Cochran--helped fund the son’s $500,000 primary campaign to fill the 2nd Congressional District seat. Rep. Mel Reynolds resigned after his conviction on charges that he had sex with an underage campaign worker and obstructed the subsequent investigation.

The money helped lift Jackson Jr.--in his first bid for public office--decisively over a formidable field, which included the Democratic organization candidate, a powerful Illinois state senator.

In a district with few Republicans, Jackson Jr. is expected to handily beat Chicago Heights lawyer T. J. Somer in today’s special election. But he has taken no chances. Vice President Al Gore campaigned with him Monday, following a weekend of appearances with Democratic National Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard L. Trumka.

“I inherit my family’s friends and my family’s detractors,” Jackson Jr. said, smiling during an interview, “neither of which I have earned.”

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If he wins, the son, whose only job experience is as field director for his father’s National Rainbow Coalition, will have to move quickly to establish a reputation of his own. He would almost immediately face the regular primary in March. Another general contest follows in November for a full two-year term.

Jackson Jr. speaks publicly of making a splash, taking on House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and speaking for a new generation of leaders.

He will certainly get that chance if he returns to Washington as an elected official. “He will be courted, with many, many 15 minutes of media fame,” predicted Rose, once a speech writer for Jesse Jackson Sr. “And then it’s up to him.”

Jackson Jr. says that no master life plan got him where he is today.

“A year and a half ago, no one could have told me I’d be running for political office,” he said, seated on a folding chair in the community room of an apartment complex where he had spent an hour greeting residents.

He attributes his decision to concern over recent Supreme Court rulings barring specially drawn minority congressional districts and over the fate of Medicare, personalized by his family’s conclusion that his grandmother must have full-time nursing care.

Others point to the vacuum created by Reynolds’ troubles. Jackson Jr. and his wife, Sandra, bought their first home within months of Reynolds’ indictment.

It just happened to lie in the 2nd District, which takes in some of the nation’s worst urban poverty and also large swaths of middle-class and downright wealthy territory. About two-thirds of the residents are black.

Although Jackson’s education took him to an Indiana military academy, an elite prep boarding school in Washington and college at his father’s alma mater, North Carolina A & T, “I always considered Chicago home,” he said. “I grew up on picket lines here.”

He has earned $35,000 a year at the coalition. He established local chapters, edited the weekly faxed newsletter, computerized operations and coordinated staff training sessions. He put together a political action guide.

And he worked on many campaigns, from his father’s presidential quests to House races for Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.). And that, Jackson Jr. said, is the real reason he steamrollered three veteran state lawmakers in the primary here. “I have more experience campaigning than they do,” he said.