For Jesse Jackson and His Campaign

thenation.com · Feb 17, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Politics / April 16, 1988 Jesse Jackson is a serious candidate for the presidency. Jesse Jackson is a serious candidate for the presidency. He was always serious; it was just the the political scientists and the other politicians who belittled his campaign, trivialized his efforts. and disdained his prospects. Despite the contempt and condescension of the media — or perhaps because of it-Jackson went to the most remote and isolated grass roots in the American social landscape to find the strength for a campaign that has already begun to transform politics. For five years his distance from the funders, the managers, the mediators and the consultants who manipulate the Democratic Party and legitimize its candidates has allowed Jackson to do unimaginable things and say unspeakable words — about race, about class, about equality and, indeed, about democracy. To an extent that may be unique in presidential elections in this century, he derives his power from the people. The enormous energy that his campaign releases has created a new populist moment, overtaking the languid hours and dull days of conventional politics and imagining possibilities for substantial change beyond the usual incremental transactions of the two-party system. It offers hope against cynicism, power against prejudice and solidarity against division. It is the specific antithesis to Reaganism and reaction, which, with the shameful acquiescence of the Democratic center, have held America in their thrall for most of this decade and which must now be defeated. For that reason, The Nation is endorsing Jesse Jackson for the Democratic nomination for President. The Jackson campaign is not a single shot at higher office by an already elevated politician. Rather, it is a continuing, expanding, open-ended project to organize a movement for the political empowerment of all those who participate. In the beginning, Jackson identified his basic’constituency as the most “dispossessed and disaffected” Americans of all, the blacks of the rural South and the Northern ghettos, people who seemed permanently disenfranchised from citizen- ship and thus denied entrance into the system of rewards and privileges that is every citizen’s right, In a real sense, the campaign became a new civil rights movement with an added dimension of economic justice deriving in spirit from the last campaigns of Martin Luther King Jr. with the black working poor. “We work every day,” he reminds the crowds, which invariably respond with knowing assent. “And we are still poor. We pick up your garbage; we work every day. We drive your cars, we take care of your children, we empty your bedpans, we sweep your apartments; we work every day. We cook your food, and we don’t have time to cook our own. We change your hospital beds and wipe your fevered brow, and we can’t afford to lie in that bed when we get sick. We work every day.” He does not merely see the poor as victims; he calls them to struggle for their rights. To include would-be followers in his new movement Jackson made a simple dehand: that they register and vote. They responded with groundbreaking enthusiasm. Millions of people who won the vote in the great civil rights efforts of the early 1960s exercised that right for the first time two decades later. The success of Jackson’s long march through the cotton counties and ramshackle slums of America was evident before his current campaign commenced, and in ways outside the realm of presidential elections. The “new voters” he inspired joined with millions more, motivated by the stirrings of populist potential on many fronts, and helped break the conservative stranglehold on the Senate in 1986. More than that, young black-and white-activists from the new movement challenged the legitimacy of cynical and sometimes corrupt leaders who for years had dominated racial and ethnic politics on the local level. Jackson felt compelled to deal with many of the anachronistic demagogues, ward bosses and machines that were in place in his field of operations. He had not yet built an independent force strong enough to present a credible alternative, and his 1984 campaign suffered from that weakness. The pool of available, authentic leaders who shared his vision was smaller then, and he chose some who did his project discredit. His perplexing association with the charismatic but divisive Nation of Islam firebrand Louis Farrakhan can be seen more clearly now in terms of the contradiction it expressed: the tactical acceptance of a powerful rival who had considerable authority over the hearts and minds of the very people Jackson meant to organize. It is no longer necessary for Jackson to make such bad deals, if it ever was. His successful resolution of those earlier problems, by building his base and expanding his horizons, shows a skill and a sophistication that makes a powerful case for his candidacy. In Mississippi, in Vermont, in Maryland, in Michigan, California, Texas and across his sphere of operations a new breed of progressive leadership has penetrated and in some cases replaced the old power structures. In Detroit, the successful campaign is poised at Mayor Coleman Young’s door. And not only in elective office: The campaign has already begun to have important consequences for restructuring leadership of work, social and religious institutions at the base — in labor locals, church groups, community organizations and academic associations. As the Rainbow Coalition reaches beyond its primary constituency to include an array of new ones, the values espoused are incorporated into the growing movement. When unionists, feminists, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, students, civil libertarians and community activists join or endorse the Rainbow campaign, they contribute their ideals and their energies while they share the coalition’s strength. In the end, it is their participation that catches Jackson’s attention and insures the campaign’s integrity. Jackson has struggled to legitimize his own leadership above the Old Guard, and he is strong enough now to transcend most of the regressive elements and see the parts of his coalition actually coalescing in practice as well as theory. The results are startling. Farmers from Iowa campaign in black Chicago, white ethnic hard-hats and young gays and lesbians work together in northern Wisconsin, genteel peace activists and black hip-hoppers leaflet in the projects of Hartford. The culture of American politics is being radically reformed. The shape and substance of the Jackson campaign — in the long version — is essential to an understanding of his candidacy. For one thing, they offer evidence of Jackson’s extraordinary conceptual powers and political skills and constitute just the kind “experience” a President should have to organize the country around a transformative agenda. The argument that Jackson is unqualified for high office because he has never held one is bogus on its face. A modern President — or a postmodern one — is not primarily a business executive or even an engineer of a sterile consensus. There are plenty of managers, budgeters, policy analysts and public relations specialists who would love such jobs and can be hired to perform them. A seat in the Senate or an office in the statehouse has undoubted advantages in the electoral game, but neither has much to do with being President of the United States. A President who would bring real change must organize a social movement to do it, must re-cast the culture, must institutionalize a vision in politics from the grass roots to the halls of power. Building coalition “on the ground” is one thing; using it as a model for an Administration that would redistribute power, reorder priorities and extend democracy is another. The Jackson campaign is woven around a dream whose realization would bring into Washington such doers and dreamers as have not been seen since the first age of Jackson in the infancy of America. They propose to shift the direction of foreign policy from its costly and dangerous obsession with cold war relationships in a bipolar world to a new partnership with the dispossessed and disenfranchised. In this vision, Third World countries would no longer be appraised as mere bases to be contested and their populations as markets to be exploited, but as organic components of an economic and political order in which development and independence take precedence over profits and the paranoia of empire. Jackson’s shorthand on the stump for the new economic system he envisions is, “Stop jobs from going out.” What that entails is exceedingly complex. For starters, it involves the C.I.A. and its old assets in labor ceasing to manipulate foreign trade unions; U.S. corporations and transnationals curtailing their most exploitative practices and redirecting the profits from their foreign operations to the development of independent local economies; and a change in monetary policies and debt management in this country to end the economic enslavement of America’s clients. At home, Jackson vows to end the “economic violence” evidenced everywhere — in the ravaged cities and crumbling factories and deserted farms, the homeless and the overcrowded and the underpaid, the uneducated and the sick and the alienated. Despite the blather of the social theorists, those conditions and those people did not. just happen; they are the grist of a specific economic order that is supported up and down the line by government policy. Jackson’s campaign proposes to confront corporate power with the challenge of populist power, something that sets him apart from the other candidates, who are still reeling from the corporate counterattack in full force since the early He has consistently urged real tax reform to reverse the regressive Reagan legislation (passed with many Democratic votes) and, beyond that, to begin a program to redistribute wealth and power from the corporate class to the consuming and working class, on a magnit