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The Job of Being Jesse Jackson

Jackson’s lessons for today’s Democrats.

In 2000, I got to spend some intense hours with Jesse Jackson, when he and his son Jesse Jackson Jr., then in Congress, collaborated with me on a book about capital punishment. Commitments across the country kept the elder Jackson constantly on the road, so I would grab writing time with him in hotel rooms, airport lounges, breakfast joints.

It was the Bush-Gore presidential election year, and virtually every time I arrived Jesse was working the phone. I got to overhear a strikingly different style of persuasion from that of the stentorian public orator I’d intermittently covered. Jesse’s off-camera political voice was generally forbearing: quietly connecting, humorously cajoling, deal-making with the artful rhythm and grace of a choreographer. Jesse held in his head a map of the nationwide grassroots Democratic Party: Which clergy could turn out the church buses in East St. Louis? Which banker could arrange a campaign donation in Des Moines? Which union local could swing Maryland? Jesse knew all the players, knew the tone and the particular words that would stir each one to action. He was the great Democratic national chairman we never had.

Following Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump, I thought often of Jesse’s relentlessly........

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