[Veterans of his remarkable insurgent 1988 campaign gather to pay
tribute.]
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JESSE JACKSON IS KEEPING HOPE ALIVE  
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Robert L. Borosage
July 13, 2023
The Nation
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_ Veterans of his remarkable insurgent 1988 campaign gather to pay
tribute. _

The Rev. Jesse Jackson., Cynthia Johnson / Getty Images

 

I did not start with the money, the ads, the polling or the
endorsements. I started with a message and a mission.” As the
now-grizzled veterans of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign
gather in Chicago this weekend to pay tribute to their ailing leader,
Jackson’s words summarize well the historic insurgency he led 35
years ago.

The Jackson presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 were a forceful
response to Ronald Reagan’s conservative movement presidency. In the
face of soaring interest rates, Reagan doubled the military budget in
peacetime, cut taxes on the rich and corporations, drove deregulation
and privatization that savaged working and poor people, while wielding
Old Glory patriotism and Old Dixie race bait politics to attract
Reagan Democrats.

The mainstream Democratic response reflected the rightward drift of
the party over 15 years, particularly on economic questions.
Technocratic “Atari Democrats”—led by the likes of Gary
Hart—scorned unions and brandished their embrace of markets.
Southern Democrats formed the Democratic Leadership Council
(DLC)—which Jackson indelibly labeled “Democrats for the Leisure
Class
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Democrats to be more bellicose on national security, more conservative
on social programs, while distancing themselves from New Deal and
Great Society liberalism.

Against this, Jackson launched his campaign to salvage the soul of the
Democratic Party and to break open a new era for American politics. In
1984, his campaign focused on consolidating support in the Black
community, often against the resistance of traditional leaders. He
helped register 2 million new voters
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unleashing the energy that helped Democrats take back the Senate by
1986. That majority, catering to the concerns 
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what Alabama Senator Howell Heflin called the “new votah,” voted
to block the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.

In 1988, Jackson was aiming higher. Standing with working people at
the “point of challenge
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he walked picket lines, stood with family farmers facing foreclosure,
reached out to progressive peace, women’s, gay and lesbian and
environmental activists. He would stun the mainstream political world
when they saw white workers and farmers not only give Jackson a
hearing but also begin to vote for him in ever-greater numbers.

The mission, in Jackson’s words, was to build a “progressive
rainbow coalition—across ancient boundaries of race, religion,
region, and sex,” moving millions of Americans from “racial
battlegrounds to economic common ground and on to moral higher
ground.”

The campaign naturally started with little money and big debts. But
Jackson and campaign chair Willy Brown hired a skilled campaign
manager, Jerry Austin, and put together a small but effective team of
strategists like Steve Cobble, researchers like Frank Clemente,
political operatives like Minyon Moore and Ron Brown. Austin
relaunched a mail program that eventually raised $27–28 million,
counting the $14 million match.

The campaign’s greatest asset was its candidate. With little money
for paid advertising, Jackson relied on generating free media and
drawing big crowds. Among the Democratic contenders, he was by far the
best orator, the best on the debate stage, and the best at rousing a
crowd. _Washington Post_ columnist David Broder wrote that comparing
the oratory of Jackson with that of other Democratic presidential
candidates is “like comparing a mighty organ with a kazoo band.”

To paraphrase New York Governor Mario Cuomo, Jackson campaigned in
poetry while the others droned in prose. The poetry, however, had a
purpose. Jackson’s genius was in presenting a complicated message
and agenda in language that, as William Greider put it, “had a beat
so strong that even white folks can dance to it.”

While mainstream politicians focused on law and order, Jackson’s
focus was economic violence—the violence done to working and poor
people in an economy that worked for the few and not the many. While
his opponents were trying on ideas to see what fit, Jackson’s
message drove the debate and made the most sense.

“The cost of welfare and jail care on the back side of life is so
much greater than the cost of Head Start and day care on the front
side of life,” he argued
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a plan to fund Head Start, prenatal care, and daycare while doubling
the education budget.

“A bridge falls every other day,” he noted, calling for a major
initiative to rebuild America, paid for in part by using public
pension funds with full government guarantees.

He pushed for empowering workers—raise the minimum wage and index it
to medium incomes, card check to make organizing unions easier, equal
pay and comparable worth, family leave—and for holding corporations
accountable with a corporate code of conduct, notice and reparations
for plant closings, and more.

He railed against an economy that had drugs and guns flowing in and
jobs going out. The Chinese did not take our jobs from us, he argued;
American corporations took the jobs to them, seeking low wage labor
abroad. His focus on drugs was central to his continued call for
personal responsibility supported by public policy.

Challenging Reagan’s lies directly, he educated: “Most poor people
are not lazy. They’re not Black. They’re not brown. They’re
mostly white, female and young… Most poor people are not on
welfare…. They work every day. They catch the early bus. They work
every day. They raise other people’s children. They work in
hospitals.… They wipe the bodies of those who are sick.… They
empty their bedpans…and yet when they get sick, they cannot lie in
the bed they made up everyday.” So Jackson argued the case for a
National Health Care Plan, what now would be called Medicare for All.

Warning of the dangers of having guided missiles and misguided
leaders, Jackson put forth the Jackson Doctrine in foreign policy,
founded on four principles: support for international law;
self-determination; human rights; and the promotion of international
economic justice. He called for working with Mikhail Gorbachev to end
the arms race with the USSR, while implementing a no-first-use policy.
He denounced Reagan’s Central America wars. At a time when the US
considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist and South Africa’s apartheid
government an ally, he condemned that government as terrorist and
embraced Mandela as a freedom fighter, demanding a boycott of South
Africa. He earned praise even in _The Des Moines Register_ as the
only candidate willing to speak clearly about Middle East violence,
arguing that “Israeli security and Palestinian justice are two sides
of the same coin.”

Unlike his opponents, Jackson put out a budget to prove that he could
pay for his dreams, calling for raising taxes on the rich and
corporations, freezing the military budget, creating an infrastructure
bank and more. “Jackson,” _Newsweek _reported, “is saying more
than any other candidate for president and saying it better” on
everything from domestic to foreign policy.

The Jackson campaign, _The Nation_ editorialized
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“offers hope against cynicism, power against prejudice, and
solidarity against division. It is the specific antitheses to
Reaganism and reaction which, with the shameful acquiescence of the
Democratic center, have held America in their thrall for most of this
decade.”

In the end, Jackson garnered
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popular votes, over 30 percent of the total cast. He won in 100
congressional districts. In the 54 primary contests, he came in first
or second in 46, winning 13. He amassed 1,218 delegates. His opponents
paid him the tribute of recycling parts of his message, as he dragged
the party toward what he termed the “moral center.”

The insurgent campaign generated energy. Candidates like Paul
Wellstone and Carol Mosely Braun built on that to win election to the
US Senate; David Dinkins won the mayor’s race in New York. A
generation of progressive activists were inspired, creating new
organizations and candidacies. Savvy politicians like Bill Clinton
borrowed from the Jackson gospel—with Clinton making public
investment, tax hikes on the rich, and national health care the
centerpieces of his 1992 campaign, if not his administration. Barak
Obama said Jackson’s campaign awakened him to what was possible, and
the rule changes forced by Jackson—requiring that delegates be
allocated proportionally to votes—were crucial to Obama’s victory
in the primary.

At the 1988 Atlanta Convention, Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis
for the presidency. Dukakis chose the conservative Southern bourbon
Senator Lloyd Bentsen as his vice president. Dukakis fatefully thought
the election was more about competence than direction. Spurned,
Jackson chose to stay in the party and build rather than bolt and
divide. He suffered no small number of insults and indignities that
would not have been inflicted on a white, traditional candidate. But
he always saw the Democratic Party as the vehicle—and
battleground—for progressive change.

As Jackson and, more recently, Bernie Sanders have shown, insurgent
presidential candidates can have dramatic effect. Such a campaign
provides a national megaphone to inform and inspire, to mobilize the
young and forge new leaders and activists. It can force the party
establishment to embrace far bolder reforms.

The limits of these insurgencies are also apparent. When Jackson chose
not to run in 1992, no one took his place. That opened the way for
Bill Clinton, who ran as a progressive but governed, as he put it,
like an Eisenhower Republican, consolidating the conservative era
rather than challenging it. Similarly, when Sanders chose not to run
in 2020, Joe Biden, a lifetime centrist, won the call. While he
surprised by adopting more of the Sanders agenda than was expected, he
remains wedded to an interventionist foreign policy that undermines
our real security. Neither the Jackson campaigns nor the Sanders
campaigns found a way to sustain and build the progressive energy
after the election. That remains a task for the next generation.

One thing is clear. In 1984 and 1988, Jesse Jackson challenged the
country to move beyond racial division and find common ground. His was
the first campaign of what would now be called intersectionality.
He called it a quilt
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making the point in union halls in Georgia, to family farms in Iowa,
to gay and women activists that “your patch isn’t big enough.”
He recalled his grandmother taking pieces of old cloth, with different
colors and textures and binding them together with a common thread to
make a quilt, a thing of beauty, a source of warmth. He challenged all
to make as much sense. He showed the way—and will always be
remembered for it. 

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without__ permission_
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Distributed by__ _PARS International Corp
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ROBERT L. BOROSAGE is a leading progressive writer and activist.

_THE NATION [[link removed]] Founded
by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the breadth and
depth of political and cultural life, from the debut of the telegraph
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* Jesse Jackson
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* Rainbow Coalition
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* progressive politics
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* African American history
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* Presidential campaigns
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* Intersectionality
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