It was 8 a.m. Sunday, a week after the convention, and Jackson was talking on the telephone, his umbilical to the political world.
In a T-shirt, blue jeans and sandals, he sat on the porch of his South Side home and talked about the convention, himself, Harold Washington and how what he called ”my new career track”-two runs for the White House-began.
Jackson had led the boycott of Chicagofest, prompted by Mayor Jane Byrne`s appointment of whites to two key agencies with large black clientele. That led to a huge voter registration drive that was the first effective measure of the strength of black votes.
It meant that Harold Washington had a real chance at becoming Chicago`s first black mayor, basing his hopes on a strong black turnout in the 1983 primary contest with Byrne and Richard Daley.
”We had had this great breakthrough with Harold here in Chicago, and we looked up one day and we had (Sen. Edward) Kennedy and (Walter) Mondale coming in for Jane Byrne and Daley. I got 50 top black leaders to write a telegram appealing for them not to come in here, because we were thinking Harold`s victory would be the ultimate breakthrough, here in Chicago, with all of its history.
”They said they had to come anyhow. Had to come. I said we got a city 2 percent Irish with two Irish people running and 40 percent black and we got a chance to win this three-person race. They said they had to come in. `We made commitments to Daley. We made commitments to Byrne.`
”We said, `Well, we made commitments to you.` I mean, it was a very interesting little crucible going on there, and it was among friends, people who had been related together as allies. But now, it really came down to Chicago.”
Washington went on to win. Jackson was still upset about the Mondale and Kennedy visits, and thought it was time to work for a change in the relationship between black and white Democrats.
”So I said, well, the only way we are going to change this equation is to begin to see them as peers. . . . We`re going to redefine our relationship, which really was a tremendous upheaval, because we had gotten used to a certain angle, and they had gotten used to a certain angle, and never did the two meet.”
The 1984 presidential election was approaching, and Jackson was trying to play the same broker`s role he had cast for himself in Washington`s Chicago campaign.
He said he tried three times to convince Maynard Jackson, an attorney with a good public service record, to run for the White House. He was one of the most successful black political figures of the era and had the credentials Jackson lacked, public office among them, to make his candidacy viable.
But the former Atlanta mayor, who had returned to law practice, wanted to get his own family stabilized and wasn`t sure he wanted to run for office again soon.
Jackson said he talked to Andrew Young, then the newly elected Atlanta mayor, but Young had just moved into his Atlanta job and wasn`t interested.
The others had all shifted into different positions that precluded a run. John Lewis, one of King`s closest allies, was busy in Atlanta politics. Julian Bond, one of the brightest early figures on the black political scene, was in the Georgia legislature.
”It was the right question to ask. People were saying, well, why not? It boiled down to a racial argument. Like, should a black run? Could a black run? If you do, you could just mess up a good white guy. They were all throwbacks to old arguments. Beyond the race of the matter is the idea of the matter,”
Jackson said.
”At some point, and I don`t know where it was, `Run, Jesse, Run`
started, and then there was a point of no return.”
It was a tough campaign, troubled by strategic mistakes from the beginning. Ultimately, it was dragged to the ground by Jackson`s remarks about Jews in New York and his refusal to repudiate Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who had incited the Jewish community with rabidly anti-Semitic remarks.
Even with those problems, Jackson was able to draw more than 70 percent of black primary votes, a big enough response to give him the sign he needed for his next contest. He gave a great speech at the San Francisco convention, apologizing for his mistakes.
And, in a move that would ultimately help bring him to the podium in Atlanta, he chipped away at party rules that he said were unfair to his candidacy and the candidacies of other minorities.
He knew what he was doing. Jackson had been among the many forces wrestling with Democratic Party rules since 1968, a contest that over time has made ”rules fight” and ”Democrat” synonymous. Over time, he said, the battles had a practical effect for his campaigns.
”Fighting the rules was the right thing to do,” Jackson said. ”So by 1988, we were a lot freer to focus on direction. We were able to move a step higher. People`s consciousness had grown to a new level of expectation. People who won enjoyed it. And people who lost didn`t want to lose no more, arguing an idea that had already come and gone.
”But I must say 1986-87 was a period when there was a great reluctance on the part of leadership to try this again, great personal reluctance, real personal reluctance. We didn`t have anything really going.
”We knew there was going to be much more resistance this year. I had watched people going through the trauma of change in `84 and `85, and I was getting feedback on their fears. We had to do a lot of internal groundwork with leaders around the country, getting a common understanding. At any rate, we finally decided to do it.”
And on he rolled, coming out of the vast Super Tuesday southern regional primary with a big bloc of delegates-and momentum, too. He manipulated the Michigan caucus system so well that it delivered what appeared to be a tremendous victory, significant at the time only because the media labeled it a triumph.
”What does Jesse want?” was the question of the week.
”That was the wrong question,” Jackson said. ”The question should have been, `What has Jesse built?` ”
His own assessment: ”We had built a movement of people, multicultural, from Puerto Rico to Alaska and from Maine to Mississippi, who had either dropped out of the process altogether or who had never been in the process.” At the end of the primary season, the numbers told a similar story, but a little different in a few important ways. Jackson succeeded in winning more than 90 percent of the expanded black primary vote, which gave him victories in low-turnout states with big black populations, and many liberal white votes, too.
He built his blue-collar support, too, but not by much. He was very much the candidate of young, well-educated white liberals and people who were voting for the first time.
But most of all, he was a black man who used one of the oldest of political tools, ethnic bloc voting, to build his strength.
Almost every conceivable stripe of politician had used the tactic before, as the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the Jews and all the rest saw their numbers in the population translated, through their favored candidates, into political strength.
Only Jackson was able to use the formula successfully among black voters. While that didn`t give him the victory he said he wanted, it gave him a very strong position to take to Atlanta. He came into town carrying what he called ”the nation`s historical burden,” all of those votes from blacks enlivened by the civil rights era and, now, by his own campaigns.
Just to underline the symbolism, he took the advice of counselors at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. The modern dream of political enfranchisement for blacks, they noted, had a lot to do with where a person sat on a bus and the long journeys of the Freedom Riders across the South.
And it was a bus caravan that carried Jackson from Chicago to Atlanta. He brought along a strong constituency, some would say the most dedicated in modern history.
John White, former Democratic national chairman, has seen many politicians enter presidential primary contests. But he says it is the first time he has seen a candidacy that demanded the loyalty of the Jackson effort. ”In 1960, Lyndon Johnson had a constituency and John Kennedy recognized that and made it a part of the campaign, but it wasn`t a personal
constituency. It was the Southern moderate Democrat,” said White, a Jackson supporter.
”Every loser, every winner for that matter, generally only has a political constituency, not a personal one. But Jesse Jackson has a personal one. You might have to go back to William Jennings Bryan and the Cross of Gold speech to find anything like that.
”The hopes and dreams of an awful lot of people rest with Jesse Jackson, because he symbolizes what they want to have the opportunity to achieve in America. I don`t think any other candidate, winner or loser, has had that kind of constituency. That is why I think he is different.”
It presented an unusual problem for the Democratic Party. Michael Dukakis was clearly the winner, and the party desperately wanted to present a picture of unity at its convention. But Jackson had refused to give up.
The amount of bargaining that takes place at conventions is dictated by the strengths of the nearest challenger. Carter had to deal with Ted Kennedy in 1980, and he forfeited many platform planks to the Kennedy camp.
On the other hand, Carter was virtually unchallenged in 1976, and Johnson bargained with no one in 1964. Nor did Gerald Ford, who squeaked past Ronald Reagan in 1976 but yielded no turf after his victory. Reagan himself had to accept moderate George Bush on the ticket in 1980.
But the weight of all of those black votes gave Jackson a strong lever to use before the Democrats convened in Atlanta, made that much stronger by the party`s quest to present the picture of unity.
White, often on the other end of Jackson`s long-distance calls, said winning and losing were not the proper measures to apply this time around.
”You always have to expand on your constituency in politics. Even after you are sworn in. The win-lose thing offended me. There is no such thing as a loser, just someone with a smaller constituency. To those who thought that Jesse would cave in easily, they have to understand that Jesse has spent his life negotiating one way or another,” White said.
”Even if he knows the outcome, he is going to play it to some degree for the theater of it. That is as natural to Jesse as it is for me to go and try to work it out quietly. That is his style.”
Not all messages in politics are communicated directly. Sometimes, they come through unusual channels.
Jackson had become obvious in his pursuit of the vice presidency a few days before the selection was announced, casting his quest in terms of obligations to his constituency. It was a pressure tactic that apparently did not sit well with Dukakis.
The missed phone call was the first message, and the second came when Dukakis held a news conference to announce, just as Jackson`s buses were rolling toward Atlanta, that the team would have only one quarterback, himself.
If the intent was to chasten Jackson, it didn`t work. He responded with rhetoric of his own, and as Dukakis arrived in Atlanta on Sunday, the scene was set that would lead either to party unity or to the explosion of racial division that the Democrats had feared.
At least that is how Jackson set the stage, because he knew all along that it wasn`t in his interest to ruin the convention. It was all a matter of the application of pressure.
Jackson is almost philosophical when he discusses the importance of pressure as a strategic political and personal tool. Martin Luther King Jr., he says, described it as ”creative tension,” and used it well in Selma and Birmingham and Montgomery.
”Only through creative pressure does new life come forth,” he said.
”After the end of nine months pressure, a woman`s body, new life comes forth. It`s pain unto new life, not pain unto death.”
The whole history of the civil rights movement involved the successful application of pressure to a system that didn`t want to yield any territory.
