CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Up, Down and Around With Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jackson’s campaign in Española, New Mexico, in 1988. Photo courtesy of Carol Miller.

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.

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........

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