Rev. Jesse Jackson`s announcement this month that he is moving his legal residence back to Chicago foreshadows a role in Mayor Harold Washington`s re- election campaign and is an early signal of his 1988 presidential intentions, say several political observers and Jackson associates.
They stress the significance of Chicago and Illinois in any presidential bid as well as the impact the re-election of Washington would have on a second presidential candidacy by Jackson. At the 1984 Democratic National Convention, all 35 delegates under Washington`s control voted for Jackson on the first ballot.
”I`m sure he has a direct interest in keeping Harold Washington in the mayor`s seat,” said Hycel Taylor, to whom Jackson turned over direction of Operation PUSH–People United to Serve Humanity–in February, nearly two years after he took a leave to run for president.
Shortly after losing the Democratic nomination in 1984, Jackson established legal residency in South Carolina, where he bought his mother`s Greenville home and apparently considered running against Sen. Strom Thurmond (R., S.C.).
Jackson denies that was his intention. But low black voter registration may have helped dissuade him from considering South Carolina a political base. He has since shown little interest publicly in any office but the presidency. Last year, he shunned requests by black political groups in Illinois to run for governor or for the U.S. Senate seat held by Alan Dixon, a Democrat.
But Jackson has a strong interest in seeing that Washington gets re-elected, associates say.
”It will have national implications. People will be watching, especially in the Democratic Party,” said Joseph Gardner, an official with the Chicago Housing Authority and a former PUSH official.
”The momentum and the ripple effect from Harold Washington`s re-election will strengthen the Rainbow Coalition as a national political movement,”
Gardner said.
Voter registration, to which Jackson has devoted much time in the South over the last two years, will be his focus this fall and winter in Chicago on behalf of Washington`s campaign.
In a telephone interview Friday from Washington, Jackson described his role in the campaign as a supportive one ”designed to enhance the mayor`s advantages.”
”I will be doing some things directly, if he asks me to, and some things indirectly,” Jackson said. ”But he must call the shots on the role he wants his people to play.”
As to his own political future, Jackson said he would decide by April whether to run again for the presidency.
Jackson was a prime mover in the 1983 voter registration drive that added 250,000 Chicago blacks to the city`s rolls. Its success was a key factor in Washington`s decision to run for mayor.
But in the time between the mayoral primary and the Democratic National Convention, it appeared to many that Washington had distanced himself from Jackson. It began at Washington`s victory party with Jackson`s ”We want it all” cry, a remark that Jackson spokesmen say was misinterpreted.
Nevertheless, it alienated many white voters in Chicago.
Jackson assumed an uncharacteristic low profile after the primary celebration. Little was heard from him until he announced his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. ”I was determined not to allow the enemy to take the focus away from the mayor,” Jackson said.
Both Jackson and his spokesmen say the move back to Chicago was motivated by personal considerations. ”I get my mail here. My family is here,” Jackson said in a press conference Sept. 6. ”I own property here . . . so I wanted to reconnect with Chicago.”
But his family is scattered. His wife, Jacqueline, is in Chicago, as is his youngest child, Jacqueline, 11. Two of his sons, Jonathan, 20, and Jesse Jr., 21, attend his alma mater, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. His daughter, Santita, 23, is a pre-med student at Howard University in Washington, and his son Yusef, 15, attends St. Alban`s School there.
He owns a spacious, comfortable home on Chicago`s South Side, but he also owns a Washington home, which he purchased this year from Howard University.
But the biggest piece of property with which Jackson is associated is the East 50th Street headquarters of Operation PUSH, the civil rights group Jackson founded 15 years ago. The headquarters, a former synagogue, has a large auditorium that PUSH hopes to refurbish and equip with a ”world class” television studio, Jackson says.
The headquarters provides Jackson with the kind of forum he does not have in Washington: a building he regards as a national civil rights landmark, with ample space to receive heads of state, such as the visit this summer by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
Jackson plans to receive similar visits this fall and winter from leaders of African nations he met on his recent 17-day tour there.
On that trip, which began in late August, Jackson was accompanied by a wide variety of academics, businessmen, union leaders, farming officials and reporters. The journey was supported by a patchwork of financing, including the loan of a Boeing 707 by Nigeria`s President Ibrahim Babangida. The plane took the entourage from New York to Africa, to the eight nations on the agenda and then back to New York.
The Rainbow Coalition, the political organization Jackson formed after the presidential race, paid the way for many of those invited, including several public relations people and a small television crew. But several African nations picked up hotel and food bills, say members of the entourage. In the poorer African nations, several said, they felt obliged to pay their own way.
Those close to Jackson say the address change is largely symbolic. They say it will cause little change in his travel plans and his constant commuting between Chicago, where PUSH is based, and Washington, where the Rainbow Coalition makes its headquarters.
”His organizational base is in Washington, and it will stay there,”
said Frank Watkins, a Jackson spokesman.
But if Jackson has a political base, it is Chicago, a city with which he has something of a love-hate relationship.
”Chicago remains important as a city for presidential politics,” said Ronald Walters, a Howard University political scientist who accompanied Jackson on the African tour. ”It is wise for someone like Rev. Jackson, who may or may not aspire to the presidency, to have a base in Chicago.”
But Jackson has had his biggest problems with the media and Democratic Party in Chicago. Watkins regards the Chicago press as ”the most hostile in the country” to Jackson. And because of his independence, he is essentially persona non grata with the state`s regular Democratic organization.
Jackson has worked to keep independent of the party, to the point that he assumed responsibility for retiring his $500,000 campaign debt without party help.
The city has also been the locale for some of his biggest problems with white voters, whose memory of his days as an aggressive young civil rights boycott leader may not have been dimmed by the more statesman-like role he has assumed in recent years as freelance diplomat-without-portfolio.
Jackson writes off the low-key response he receives from the major Chicago news outlets to his long history in the city. ”I grew up there politically,” he said. ”Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt.”
But associates say his changed standing nationally in the last three years likely extends to perceptions in Chicago as well. They point to a January, 1985, nationwide Gallup poll that placed Jackson third, after President Reagan and Pope John Paul II, among men Americans most admire. A July Gallup poll pitting him against other possible Democratic presidential contenders placed him fourth after Gary Hart, Lee Iaccoca and Mario Cuomo, with 17 percent.
”He can afford to come home,” Gardner said. ”He now has credibility and name recognition. People don`t look upon him as just president of Operation PUSH anymore.”
