This story was originally published in the March 24, 1988 issue of Rolling Stone.
Every seat in the high-school auditorium in Hibbing, Minnesota, was filled, and all the white faces strained forward, caught up in the black preacher’s melodramatic cadences: “Save the family,” the preacher intoned. “Save the farms … Save the environment … Save our jobs in America.”
The Reverend Jesse Jackson‘s audience picked up the beat and cheered. Jackson was addressing a group of hearty and hard-working Midwesterners, iron miners and their wives and their glowingly blond children — not exactly a funky audience. But as Jerry Garcia once said about disco music, Jesse Jackson’s beat is so strong that even white folks can dance to it.
“If a mother has two pork chops and three children, she doesn’t get rid of one child,” Jackson thundered. “She cuts up the pork chops and makes gravy.”
Nobody in Hibbing had trouble understanding what pork chops and gravy meant. The iron range of northern Minnesota is one of those places where the lives of working people have been devastated in the 1980s. Jackson was speaking to their pain and anger and fears — bills piling up from long layoffs, kids who can’t afford to go to college or are messed up on drugs, old people terrified by hospital bills.
Above all, Jackson left these people with hope born of his analysis of what’s wrong with the American economy and his agenda for halting the deterioration — restoring growth, jobs and equity. Jackson’s plan, in brief, would reverse the priorities of the Reagan Eighties — shifting scarce capital from the production of useless defense weapons to productive industries; shifting income through taxation and spending from the luxurious top to the broad middle class as well as to the neglected bottom.
“Together we cannot be defeated;’ Jackson concluded. “I stood with you! I want you to stand with me!” The white audience was on its feet at the end, fired up by Jackson’s exhortations.
This is an extraordinary show, probably the most compelling spectacle of the 1988 campaign. Jesse Jackson has learned how to do crossover politics. In 1984 he played mostly black venues. This time he is talking to white working-class audiences in a language that speaks to their distress. When I followed his zigzag trail across the Midwest recently — a paper workers’ strike in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a Teamsters hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a crammed college gym in Duluth, Minnesota — everywhere the response to him was stunning. The same show has played to raves across the white South and in northern industrial cities.
But does any of this matter, really? Jackson is entertaining, sure, but will white people actually vote for him? He’s not really electable or qualified, is he? Some people are scared of him, some doubt his character, and others dismiss him as a diverting sideshow. As he himself jokes to reporters, “You’re traveling with the B team.”
Regardless of how you respond to his candidacy, Jesse Jackson matters, perhaps profoundly, to our future. Put aside for the moment prejudice and oft-heard complaints about his shortcomings. Even put aside the question of whether he can win, much less serve effectively in the White House, and recognize what he is already achieving, not just for himself but for the country. Jesse Jackson is engaged in a profound struggle to restore the soul of the Democratic party, to break open a new era for American politics.
Jackson is connecting with voters who are bread-and-butter Democrats, many of them workers who have become alienated from the party in the last twenty years. Their values are traditional; they are naturally resentful of “limousine liberals.” Many of them fell in love with Ronald Reagan’s Old Glory patriotism and voted for him in 1980 and 1984. And these are many of the same voters who supported George Wallace’s angry populism. Wallace told his working-class audiences to send the Washington establishment a message — and they did.
This is the essence of Jackson’s campaign, too — a protest against the power centers of America — and he is forcing the Democratic party to take a more progressive direction. Two ingredients of Jackson’s message are fundamentally different from Wallace’s: Jackson is playing against racial prejudice instead of feeding off it, and Jackson does have a substantive economic program designed to redress workers’ grievances. It’s a strategy for high growth and full employment, which is really what the Democratic party used to stand for. Jesse Jackson wants redevelopment of American manufacturing instead of destructive takeover games. He wants to stop multinational corporations from shifting jobs to low-wage countries and then selling the goods in the United States. George Wallace simply lived on slogans and resentment.
Jackson has forged a powerful position inside the rank and file of organized labor, which makes some union leaders nervous. In polls of their members’ presidential preferences, union officials find Jackson running first or second, even in unions, such as the machinists, that have few black members. It is not just that Jackson shows up to march on wintry picket lines. It’s that his gut-level talk is the kind labor audiences seldom hear from politicians or even from their own leaders.
Jackson does not tailor his positions to please these white blue-collar folks. They are supposed to be hawkish, but in fact he brings them to their feet with his call for converting our militaristic economy to the service of human needs, like housing and jobs. They even applaud his courage when he cites his solidarity with gays in the fight against AIDS. In other words, Jackson has found a way to make palatable the tough issues that have alienated these voters from the Democratic party.
“Hurting doesn’t know color,” says Jimmy Carter’s one-time budget director, Bert Lance, who is now close to Jackson. “I think what the country is looking for is someone who speaks to the people who are hurting, and there are lots of them, white and black. Question is, why isn’t the rest of the Democratic party speaking more directly to what Jesse has been talking about?”
In fact, it appears that the other Democratic candidates are getting the message and are adjusting their campaign rhetoric accordingly. Representative Richard Gephardt won the Iowa caucuses by turning up the populist heat in his speeches and TV ads. His campaign manager, Gerald Austin, notes, “If you listen to what the Democratic candidates were saying a year ago and what they’re saying now, they’re all sounding a lot more like Jesse Jackson.”
Jackson finished fourth in Iowa with eleven percent of the vote, but those were essentially white voters responding to his appeals. If he can pull that many white votes elsewhere and combine them with his natural support from blacks, he is going to head to the convention in Atlanta with a substantial chunk of delegates. One example of Jackson’s strength: a Chicago Tribune poll in late January found him running a strong second to Illinois’s Senator Paul Simon in what is both candidates’ home state. The Trib poll projected that if Simon were to drop out before the March 15th Illinois primary, Jackson would pick up lots of Simon’s white support — and win.
But the stakes are much larger than mere vote getting. The Democratic party has been drifting rightward for the last fifteen years, especially on economic questions. Many Democrats have grown ambivalent about the party’s traditional core constituencies — labor, racial minorities and activists who demand social change and economic reform. A lot of the younger, suburban Democrats would like theirs to be a “cool” party of technocrats, positioned in the comfortable middle and avoiding conflicts over class and the power concentrated at the top.
Jackson’s “hot” campaign is a rebuke to the bland neo-liberals — and his popularity is a warning to the party. If the Democrats expect to regain their dominance in Washington, they’re not going to do it by running away from the issues they have always raised or the interests they have always espoused. The “little guy,” whether white or black, farmer or factory worker, was always the backbone of the old New Deal coalition. The underlying assumption of Jackson’s campaign is that given the dismal economic circumstances in so many parts of the country today, it is possible to bring the old coalition together once again and elect a Democratic president.
It’s too early to know how all of this will play out. But my hunch is that regardless of who wins the nomination, the pivotal debate within the Democratic party this year will be this: Do the Democrats get “hot,” or do they try to play it “cool”? In other words, what is their strategy for running the economy? Basically this is an argument between slow-down austerity and faster growth. A new Democratic administration could embrace a conservative slow-growth approach that imposes declining living standards on middle-class families. Or it could plunge forward aggressively with an optimistic liberal strategy to restimulate the global economy. Do the Democrats still believe in a rising tide that lifts all boats?
Jesse Jackson certainly does, and it is likely that most rank-and-file Democrats do, too. But the party establishment — the economists, policy advisers, media leaders, Wall Street financiers and Washington lobbyists who always circle around the nominee — is inclined in the opposite direction. So is a substantial portion of the Democrats in Congress. All that the next president can do, they say privately, is raise taxes, balance accounts and guide the American people through a wrenching retrenchment. Jackson is challenging that dour mindset in a contest over the hearts and minds of voters. Anyway, if all people want is more austerity, then they should stick with the Republicans, who are better at playing that game.
In a less obvious way, Jackson is also having a profound influence on the GOP, helping Republicans get over their nasty preoccupation with race. It’s no secret that for twenty years — since Richard Nixon’s campaign in 1968 — the party of Lincoln has played an ugly but effective game of race politics, winking at white segregationists in the South and playing to racial fears among white working-class families in the North. As long as they used code words that were not blatantly racist, this strategy paid off for GOP candidates at the state and national level. Racial polarization drew millions of white Democrats to the Republican banner, especially in the South, despite the fact that those voters were to be injured by the conservative economic policies they inadvertently helped make a reality.
Jackson is turning that game around, raising the cost of race politics for Republicans. Across the South he has worked relentlessly since 1984 to register more black voters — 2 million of them by his own estimate — and nothing gets blacks into the voting booths like a race-baiting Republican candidate. The 1986 Senate contest, when Democrats swept the South on the strength of black votes, was dramatic proof of Jackson’s power to influence the process. Now that he is building bridges to whites in the North, Jackson is diluting further the Republicans’ opportunity to exploit race as a political issue. Note that this year Republicans are no longer mocking Jackson as they did with relish four years ago.
Regardless of how well he scores as a candidate, Jesse Jackson is, I think, moving this country forward. His political legacy may well be a renewed Democratic party, but even if he falls short of that goal, he is changing the racial sensibilities that underlie so much of politics. As one who struggled upward himself, Jackson understands the desires and fears of working-class whites better than most other politicians.
“Obviously,” he told me, “these are people who have been very cold and distant to me, but there are a lot of things that bring us together. One of them is twenty-five years of acculturation on racial equality by the civil-rights movement and sports. After all that was said about Ar-chie Bunker, Archie Bunker has grown a lot more than the guy he works for.”
The writer Roger Wilkins, who is a friend and adviser to Jackson, offers an affectionate metaphor to describe his man: “Jesse is like a wedge buster on special teams in pro football. He’s one of those guys who flies down the field on the kickoff, running like a crazy man at full speed, and throws his body at the wedge blockers. That’s what he’s doing in American politics — breaking up the wedge, Just think of a black guy going out in this racist country and saying to white people, ‘I’m going to lead you.’ Think of the blows the guy is taking, think of the risks. You have to be a person with a huge ego — and a huge heart — to take that on and think that you can do it.”
