Up, Down and Around With Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jackson’s two runs, in 1984 and 1988, were the last Democratic presidential campaigns I had any interest in joining. Those campaigns, which, among other things, warned about the coming neoliberal takeover of the Democratic Party, spawned dozens of great activists, including my late buddy Kevin Alexander Gray, who would later play vital roles in the movements that followed Jackson’s political campaign: anti-World Bank and WTO protests, the Nader campaigns, the Occupy Movement, the Sanders campaign, BLM, and the migrant rights movement.

The Democratic Party, in league with the Israel lobby, deployed every trick in the book, and some found only the apocrypha, to not only destroy his campaigns but to try to destroy Jackson both as a force in the Party and personally. (RFK and J. Edgar Hoover conspired to do the same with MLK.) Yet, even with the entire party apparatus working viciously against him, Jesse still crushed party stalwarts Joe Biden, Al Gore and Dick Gephardt. His ultimate loss to Michael Dukakis was preordained.

To watch Jesse Jackson speak in 1984 was to be struck, and often mesmerized, by a voice few Americans had heard before: the fluid, rolling cadences, the urgent tone, the piercing anecdotes, a voice that didn’t shout but summoned, that didn’t sermonize but called for action. His speeches gave voice to the voiceless, to the destitute, the abandoned and stigmatized, the oppressed and the imprisoned.

The libertarian political satirist PJ O’Rourke was an unlikely admirer of Jackson’s oratorical skills:

I did, however, want to hear Jesse Jackson speak. He’s the only living American politician with a mastery of classical rhetoric. Assonance, alliteration, litotes, pleonasm, parallelism, exclamation, climax and epigram–to listen to Jesse Jackson is to hear everything mankind has learned about public speaking since Demosthenes. Thus, Jackson, the advocate for people who believe themselves to be excluded from Western culture, was the only 1988 presidential candidate to exhibit any of it.

Of course, being PJ O’Rourke, he followed up, as Daniel Falcone pointed out, by slamming Jackson as “a moral bully.” Of course, in the 80s, a time of covert wars, rising homelessness, and the AIDS epidemic, the country’s political and business leaders richly deserved some moral bullying.

Obviously, Jackson was a great orator. But he was also a compassionate listener. People opened up to him. He would even listen to the racists, who confronted him at nearly every campaign stop. He would approach people who called him “nigger” at rallies or when he visited factories. He would call them over and hear them out. He didn’t patronize them or try to embarrass them. And if he didn’t win them over, he usually succeeded in shutting them up.

I was with Jackson twice during his campaign trips in Indiana in the spring of 1988. Once for meetings with factories workers in Lafayette, Elkhart and Kokomo, a city where, as late as the mid-1930s, at least half the population was reputed to be members of the Klan. Jackson shook every hand, even as some workers spat at him. But Jesse was there to deliver a message about the forces driving industrial decline in the US, neoliberal economics, globalization and the never-ending assaults on organized labor. It was a message that resonated then and still does, even as the power of unions has continued to wane.

A week later, I was with Jackson in central Indiana, meeting with a group of soybean and corn farmers, who were fighting a natural gas pipeline and declining prices and markets for their crops. All of them were white. Many were skeptical. Most of them were being squeezed by the big banks. But Jackson won most of them over. He knew their struggles and the agents of their despair. He listened. He aptly summarized their concerns and promised to fight with them. He was one of the few politicians who took the time to understand the dynamics of the farm crisis that was eviscerating the family farms of the Midwest. After the elections, Jackson returned to central Indiana and met again with several of the same farmers, proving to them that they hadn’t been a political prop.

CounterPuncher Michael Donnelly, a native of Flint, relayed this encounter in Portland with Jackson:

I met Jesse when he was running for president in 1984. We literally ran into each other in the lobby of a Portland hotel where he was staying and where I was headed to make a Forest Protection presentation and lost in thought, not paying attention to where I was walking. He stopped for a short chat and asked right off about why I was there, carrying (and dropping) a pack of visual displays. I explained and he fully agreed on the forests.

When I told him I grew up in Flint, he let me know how much Flint meant to him and how many friends he had in Flint. Come to find out, he had met and liked my dad! We shared a great laugh when I told him that up in Eastern Washington, the first time he ran for president, people had supported my “Jackson for President” bumpersticker, thinking it referred to Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson!

The racism Jackson faced, usually head-on, was both palpable and insidious. And much of it came from within his own party. He seemed surprised by this, but I doubt he was. Jackson was from South Carolina. He was a southern Democrat. But not the kind of southern Democrat the new panjandrums of the party were looking for. It took the Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988 to reveal the institutional racism of the Democratic Party, showing vividly that it really was, as Kevin Gray put it, “ a political plantation house,” where Blacks needed to know their place and stay there.

He was smeared as a huckster, a con man, a phony, usually by people who were all of the above. But most hucksters don’t stand for hours in freezing rain to protest a plant closure. Most conmen don’t march in broiling desert heat against the persecution of immigrants in El Paso. Most phonies don’t visit death row.

After the rout of Mondale in 1984, who ran a listless and confused campaign against the Reagan machine, the powerbrokers of the Democratic Party decided to reshape the party in Reagan’s image. The DLC was born, a reactionary movement within the Democratic Party led by the likes of Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden that pushed for a retreat from the New Deal and Great Society programs that had defined, in theory if not in practice, the party for the previous five decades, replacing it with neoliberal austerity economics, corporate-driven slashing of regulations, gutting the social safety net and a more belligerent foreign policy.

The Party leadership reconfigured the primary process so that they could engineer wins for party favorites and stifle insurgent candidates, like Eugene McCarthy, Jerry Brown, Jackson and Gary Hart, before their campaigns caught fire. One of the innovations was Super Tuesday, frontloading a host of primaries early in the race, making it nearly impossible for grassroots campaigns to spend much (or any) time in each state. But Jackson shocked the establishment by winning five states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia) and coming in second in Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington. He beat Gore in the South and Gephardt all over the place, except his home state of Missouri.

In March 1988, a poll showed Jackson leading the Democratic field of big shots, whose pockets were flush with corporate campaign cash. This sent shivers through the party elites, who coalesced to derail his campaign, just as they would Bernie Sanders’s two decades later. Gephardt, Gore and the others obediently dropped out, engineering a Dukakis primary victory. But leaving the Party with a candidate so uninspiring that he would lose to the equally uninspiring George Bush. It could have been different.

The spirit of Jackson’s ‘88 campaign would only resurface again in 2016 with Bernie’s campaign, but Jesse had built a multi-racial/ethnic campaign aimed at poor and working-class people that Bernie, for whatever reason, couldn’t replicate. Still, the Democrats’ strategy for rigging the primaries and personal demonization remained much the same. If the party had changed in the intervening 18 years, it was only for the worse.

Of course, Jackson made his own blunders, one of them hiring the Democratic operative Ron Brown to run his campaign. Brown was a corporate fixer at the notorious lobby shop of Patton, Boggs, where he represented corporate polluters, arms merchants and drug companies and ran interference on the Hill for the butcherous dictator of Haiti, Baby Doc Duvalier. Brown was no economic populist and had no interest in evicting the political elites from the sinecures in DC.  In retrospect, Brown managed Jackson’s campaign to go only so far, but never really threatened Dukakis’s nomination.

Four years later, Brown migrated seamlessly into the Clinton administration and, as Commerce Secretary, began furiously brokering deals for the same villainous transnational corporations that Jackson had fulminated against in his campaigns.

Jackson seemed lost during the Clinton years, a cautious critic, as Clinton and his neoliberal ur-DOGE crew slashed social welfare programs for the poor, incarcerated blacks, terrorized Haitians and reinstituted a Bracero system for migrant farmworkers. He should have challenged Clinton in ’96, either in the primaries (as The Nation urged) or as a Green. But Jackson just couldn’t shake off the Democratic Party, believing, wrongly, that it could be revolutionized from within. (Of course, Bernie Sanders has shown the same perverse allegiance to the Democratic Party and he’s never identified himself as a member.)

In 2008, Clinton, who made a political career out of race-baiting, would disparage both Jackson and Obama, after Obama defeated HRC in South Carolina, by implying it was a black state that “even Jesse Jackson had won.” When Clinton got in political trouble, he often sought to squirm out of it by attacking blacks: Rickey Ray Rector, Sister Souljah, Lani Guinier, and Jocelyn Elders. But Jackson stayed in their orbit and Obama invited the Clintonoids to run his administration for him.

I remember the tears streaming down Jackson’s face as he stood on the steps of the Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, the night Obama defeated McCain. The tears were authentic and it was a genuinely moving sight. But he was probably crying very different kinds of tears a few months later as Obama morphed into a hipper version of Hillary Clinton and professed his admiration for Ronald Reagan as a “transformative figure” in American politics.

This isn’t to say that Jackson didn’t shake down corporations from time to time or even occasionally take money to do their bidding. In 1997, I wrote an investigative piece for CounterPunch on GM’s abusive treatment of black GM dealers, where Jackson played an unsavory role in cutting a deal with the company that benefited his own Operation PUSH but left the black dealers to fend for themselves. The story, which garnered some national attention, pissed off Jackson and his entourage and our relationship cooled for several years. But Jackson’s people should have been pissed at Jesse, not me. The ceaseless pursuit of money to sustain a large organization, such as Operation PUSH, especially when under Democratic administrations, the money dries up for progressive groups, is fraught with perils and temptations. It’s disappointing, but hardly surprising, that over the course of 50 years, he occasionally sold his services to the highest bidder. (Many of which we documented here at CounterPunch.)

But in the wake of 9/11, we spoke at the same rally against the Afghan war, a real sign of your bona fides as an antiwar activist and later Jackson’s people started sending CounterPunch his weekly columns and got peeved when we failed to publish one, usually because of my negligence.

Fifteen years after King’s murder, Jackson stood forth as the most articulate voice against Reaganism. Jackson expanded on King’s late vision that civil rights included economic rights. The Rainbow Coalition was born from that idea, an acknowledgement that all of us, blacks, whites, Hispanics, tribal people, Asians were oppressed, and thus united, by the same merciless economic forces.

Here’s Jesse Jackson dissecting Reaganomics during his spellbinding 1984 DNC Convention speech: “Mr. Reagan curbed inflation by cutting consumer demand. He cut consumer demand with conscious and callous fiscal and monetary policies…Mr. Reagan brought inflation down by destabilizing our economy and disrupting family life.”

If there was a war, or rumors of war, Jackson was there to try to stop it. If Americans were held hostage in some nation the US was hostile towards, Jackson would try to win their release. If there was a strike, Jackson could usually be found on the picket line. If there was a mass shooting, Jackson was often there to console the families of the victims. He befriended Fidel Castro. He denounced the Contras. He worked to free Mandela and end Apartheid in South Africa (and American support for it). He ministered to AIDS patients, when many feared being in their presence.  He seemed kinder and more approachable than his mentor. He seemed more fallible (on the surface, you don’t want to look too closely at MLK’s private life), more human. He wasn’t seeking martyrdom.

Carol Miller, a nurse and Green Party activist in New Mexico, offers this telling anecdote about Jackson: “In 1994. I was sitting behind Jesse Jackson at a Congressional hearing. As a lobbyist for rural healthcare, I had a very early mobile phone; in fact, it was a bag phone.  As I left the Rayburn building, Jesse’s aide came running after me and asked, “Can Jesse borrow your phone? There is a coup underway in Haiti and he needs to call President Aristide right now.” My phone was the connection for Jesse speaking to Aristide, heading to the plane that took him out of the country. Jesse and I spoke one-on-one several other times through the years, but Jesse’s support for democracy in Haiti is my most powerful personal memory.”

More prophetically, he was a Jeremiah inside his own party against its Mephistophelian bargain with the neoliberals. He demanded that the Democrats stop treating Blacks and Hispanics and Native people as tokens. He refused to be paternalized. He made Blacks a political force in electoral politics. And unlike Gene McCarthy and Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson used his political campaigns to build, energize and grow a political movement of the very people the Democratic Party claimed to represent but habitually abandoned with the first corporate lobbyist call or PAC donation.

Of course, Jesse Jackson was flawed. Who isn’t? He paid a heavy price for some of these mistakes, heavier than the offenses warranted. Jackson had an ego. So did Mandela, King and Malcolm. It’s hard build, lead and sustain a radical political movement without one. Jackson wasn’t “pure.” Good. That’s a big reason why people could relate to him. He never presented himself as a saint or a martyr. His struggle was the struggle of the downtrodden. A struggle to make marginal lives better. He understood it was a long haul featuring pitfalls and detours, roadblocks and dead ends. There were no quick fixes for injustice, institutional racism or equality under the lash of globalized capitalism.  He had his failings, but consider the odds against him, the consolidated forces seeking to savage his reputation and bring him down.

But even after the manufactured hysteria over the “hymietown” episode, where Jackson used an antisemitic slur in a private conversation, Jackson didn’t abandon his support for Palestinian rights or mute his criticism of Israeli atrocities, human rights crimes or land grabs, in an attempt to redeem himself to his critics.

Let’s note that Jackson’s offensive quips were said in private. He never made any derogatory comments toward Jews in public and often spoke admiringly of Jewish support for the Civil Rights Movement. Jackson never proposed any anti-Jewish policies and many Jews played active roles in his campaigns and in the Rainbow Coalition before and after the “Hymietown” incident. Yet five years later, Lou Reed released an unhinged song called “Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim,” where he slanderously compared Jackson to the former Nazi and compared Jackson’s tenuous relationship with Louis Farrakhan to being a member of the KKK.

Good evening, Mr. Waldheim and Pontiff, how are you?
You have so much in common in the things you do
And here comes Jesse Jackson, he talks of common ground
Does that common ground include me, or is it just a sound?
A sound that shakes, oh Jesse, you must watch the sounds you make
A sound that quakes, there are fears that still reverberate
Jesse, you say common ground, does that include the PLO?
What about people right here right now who fought for you not so long ago?
And the words that flow so freely falling, dancing from your lips
I hope that you don’t cheapen them with a racist slip, oh, common ground
Is common ground a word or just a sound?
Common ground, remember those civil rights workers buried in the ground
If I ran for President and once was a member of the Klan
Wouldn’t you call me on it the way I call you on Farrakhan?

Few politicians in modern American history have been able to withstand this kind of unrelenting barrage from the Israel lobby. But Jackson did.

In one of his more grandiose moments, Jackson announced that his goal was to “transform the mind of America.” Talk about a mission impossible. This is a country with myriad mindsets, some more rotten and incurable than others. But he did transform the minds of many Americans. We can forgive Jackson his vaulting ambition, in part, because even in the face of slanders and setbacks, he never lost his optimism or muted his formidable voice, assuring us that collective action from below can forge radical changes in a corrupt system and move us closer to a more just and equal society.

In the end, Jesse Jackson’s movement outgrew and outlived him. It moved beyond the Democratic Party, when he couldn’t. It abandoned the idea that you could cut deals with corporations to reform their predatory practices. It moved forward and adapted to circumstances without relying on the commands of charismatic leaders. By the end, I imagine Jackson would have approved. You can see the resurgence and evolution of that movement in practice out on the streets of Minneapolis, DC, Portland, Chicago and LA today.

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