![\"The](\"https:\/\/ecp.yusercontent.com\/mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenation.com%2Fcdn-cgi%2Fimage%2Fwidth%3D896%2Cquality%3D80%2Cformat%3Dauto%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2023%2F07%2Fjesse-jackson-1988-getty.jpg&t=1689484941&ymreqid=d41d8cd9-8f00-b204-1cb4-5714ac019d00&sig=D3zLnkZBJx_ayrIml86OZA--~D\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a>The Rev. Jesse Jackson.\u00a0(Cynthia Johnson \/ Getty Images)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI did not start with the money, the ads, the polling or the endorsements. I started with a message and a mission.\u201d As the now-grizzled veterans of Jesse Jackson\u2019s 1988 presidential campaign gather in Chicago this weekend to pay tribute to their ailing leader, Jackson\u2019s words summarize well the historic insurgency he led 35 years ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Jackson presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 were a forceful response to Ronald Reagan\u2019s conservative movement presidency. In the face of soaring interest rates, Reagan doubled the military budget in peacetime, cut taxes on the rich and corporations, drove deregulation and privatization that savaged working and poor people, while wielding Old Glory patriotism and Old Dixie race bait politics to attract Reagan Democrats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mainstream Democratic response reflected the rightward drift of the party over 15 years, particularly on economic questions. Technocratic \u201cAtari Democrats\u201d\u2014led by the likes of Gary Hart\u2014scorned unions and brandished their embrace of markets. Southern Democrats formed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)\u2014which Jackson indelibly labeled \u201cDemocrats for the Leisure Class<\/a>\u201d\u2014pushing Democrats to be more bellicose on national security, more conservative on social programs, while distancing themselves from New Deal and Great Society liberalism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Against this, Jackson launched his campaign to salvage the soul of the Democratic Party and to break open a new era for American politics. In 1984, his campaign focused on consolidating support in the Black community, often against the resistance of traditional leaders. He helped register 2 million new voters<\/a>, unleashing the energy that helped Democrats take back the Senate by 1986. That majority, catering to the concerns <\/a>of what Alabama Senator Howell Heflin called the \u201cnew votah,\u201d voted to block the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1988, Jackson was aiming higher. Standing with working people at the \u201cpoint of challenge<\/a>,\u201d he walked picket lines, stood with family farmers facing foreclosure, reached out to progressive peace, women\u2019s, gay and lesbian and environmental activists. He would stun the mainstream political world when they saw white workers and farmers not only give Jackson a hearing but also begin to vote for him in ever-greater numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mission, in Jackson\u2019s words, was to build a \u201cprogressive rainbow coalition\u2014across ancient boundaries of race, religion, region, and sex,\u201d moving millions of Americans from \u201cracial battlegrounds to economic common ground and on to moral higher ground.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The campaign naturally started with little money and big debts. But Jackson and campaign chair Willy Brown hired a skilled campaign manager, Jerry Austin, and put together a small but effective team of strategists like Steve Cobble, researchers like Frank Clemente, political operatives like Minyon Moore and Ron Brown. Austin relaunched a mail program that eventually raised $27\u201328 million, counting the $14 million match.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The campaign\u2019s greatest asset was its candidate. With little money for paid advertising, Jackson relied on generating free media and drawing big crowds. Among the Democratic contenders, he was by far the best orator, the best on the debate stage, and the best at rousing a crowd. Washington Post<\/em> columnist David Broder wrote that comparing the oratory of Jackson with that of other Democratic presidential candidates is \u201clike comparing a mighty organ with a kazoo band.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n To paraphrase New York Governor Mario Cuomo, Jackson campaigned in poetry while the others droned in prose. The poetry, however, had a purpose. Jackson\u2019s genius was in presenting a complicated message and agenda in language that, as William Greider put it, \u201chad a beat so strong that even white folks can dance to it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n While mainstream politicians focused on law and order, Jackson\u2019s focus was economic violence\u2014the violence done to working and poor people in an economy that worked for the few and not the many. While his opponents were trying on ideas to see what fit, Jackson\u2019s message drove the debate and made the most sense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe cost of welfare and jail care on the back side of life is so much greater than the cost of Head Start and day care on the front side of life,\u201d he argued<\/a>, laying out a plan to fund Head Start, prenatal care, and daycare while doubling the education budget. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA bridge falls every other day,\u201d he noted, calling for a major initiative to rebuild America, paid for in part by using public pension funds with full government guarantees. <\/p>\n\n\n\n He pushed for empowering workers\u2014raise the minimum wage and index it to medium incomes, card check to make organizing unions easier, equal pay and comparable worth, family leave\u2014and for holding corporations accountable with a corporate code of conduct, notice and reparations for plant closings, and more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n He railed against an economy that had drugs and guns flowing in and jobs going out. The Chinese did not take our jobs from us, he argued; American corporations took the jobs to them, seeking low wage labor abroad. His focus on drugs was central to his continued call for personal responsibility supported by public policy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Challenging Reagan\u2019s lies directly, he educated: \u201cMost poor people are not lazy. They\u2019re not Black. They\u2019re not brown. They\u2019re mostly white, female and young\u2026 Most poor people are not on welfare\u2026. They work every day. They catch the early bus. They work every day. They raise other people\u2019s children. They work in hospitals.\u2026 They wipe the bodies of those who are sick.\u2026 They empty their bedpans\u2026and yet when they get sick, they cannot lie in the bed they made up everyday.\u201d So Jackson argued the case for a National Health Care Plan, what now would be called Medicare for All. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Warning of the dangers of having guided missiles and misguided leaders, Jackson put forth the Jackson Doctrine in foreign policy, founded on four principles: support for international law; self-determination; human rights; and the promotion of international economic justice. He called for working with Mikhail Gorbachev to end the arms race with the USSR, while implementing a no-first-use policy. He denounced Reagan\u2019s Central America wars. At a time when the US considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist and South Africa\u2019s apartheid government an ally, he condemned that government as terrorist and embraced Mandela as a freedom fighter, demanding a boycott of South Africa. He earned praise even in The Des Moines Register<\/em> as the only candidate willing to speak clearly about Middle East violence, arguing that \u201cIsraeli security and Palestinian justice are two sides of the same coin.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike his opponents, Jackson put out a budget to prove that he could pay for his dreams, calling for raising taxes on the rich and corporations, freezing the military budget, creating an infrastructure bank and more. \u201cJackson,\u201d Newsweek <\/em>reported, \u201cis saying more than any other candidate for president and saying it better\u201d on everything from domestic to foreign policy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Jackson campaign, The Nation<\/em> editorialized<\/a>, \u201coffers hope against cynicism, power against prejudice, and solidarity against division. It is the specific antitheses to Reaganism and reaction which, with the shameful acquiescence of the Democratic center, have held America in their thrall for most of this decade.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the end, Jackson garnered<\/a> 7 million popular votes, over 30 percent of the total cast. He won in 100 congressional districts. In the 54 primary contests, he came in first or second in 46, winning 13. He amassed 1,218 delegates. His opponents paid him the tribute of recycling parts of his message, as he dragged the party toward what he termed the \u201cmoral center.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The insurgent campaign generated energy. Candidates like Paul Wellstone and Carol Mosely Braun built on that to win election to the US Senate; David Dinkins won the mayor\u2019s race in New York. A generation of progressive activists were inspired, creating new organizations and candidacies. Savvy politicians like Bill Clinton borrowed from the Jackson gospel\u2014with Clinton making public investment, tax hikes on the rich, and national health care the centerpieces of his 1992 campaign, if not his administration. Barak Obama said Jackson\u2019s campaign awakened him to what was possible, and the rule changes forced by Jackson\u2014requiring that delegates be allocated proportionally to votes\u2014were crucial to Obama\u2019s victory in the primary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At the 1988 Atlanta Convention, Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis for the presidency. Dukakis chose the conservative Southern bourbon Senator Lloyd Bentsen as his vice president. Dukakis fatefully thought the election was more about competence than direction. Spurned, Jackson chose to stay in the party and build rather than bolt and divide. He suffered no small number of insults and indignities that would not have been inflicted on a white, traditional candidate. But he always saw the Democratic Party as the vehicle\u2014and battleground\u2014for progressive change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As Jackson and, more recently, Bernie Sanders have shown, insurgent presidential candidates can have dramatic effect. Such a campaign provides a national megaphone to inform and inspire, to mobilize the young and forge new leaders and activists. It can force the party establishment to embrace far bolder reforms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The limits of these insurgencies are also apparent. When Jackson chose not to run in 1992, no one took his place. That opened the way for Bill Clinton, who ran as a progressive but governed, as he put it, like an Eisenhower Republican, consolidating the conservative era rather than challenging it. Similarly, when Sanders chose not to run in 2020, Joe Biden, a lifetime centrist, won the call. While he surprised by adopting more of the Sanders agenda than was expected, he remains wedded to an interventionist foreign policy that undermines our real security. Neither the Jackson campaigns nor the Sanders campaigns found a way to sustain and build the progressive energy after the election. That remains a task for the next generation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One thing is clear. In 1984 and 1988, Jesse Jackson challenged the country to move beyond racial division and find common ground. His was the first campaign of what would now be called intersectionality. He called it a quilt<\/a>, making the point in union halls in Georgia, to family farms in Iowa, to gay and women activists that \u201cyour patch isn\u2019t big enough.\u201d He recalled his grandmother taking pieces of old cloth, with different colors and textures and binding them together with a common thread to make a quilt, a thing of beauty, a source of warmth. He challenged all to make as much sense. He showed the way\u2014and will always be remembered for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Robert L. Borosage is a leading progressive writer and activist.\u00a0<\/em>_._,_._,_<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Courtesy of Norma J F Harrison)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Veterans of his remarkable insurgent 1988 campaign gather to pay tribute. By\u00a0Robert L. Borosage (TheNation.com) The Rev. Jesse Jackson.\u00a0(Cynthia Johnson \/ Getty Images) \u201cI did not start with the money, the ads, the polling or the endorsements. I started with a message and a mission.\u201d As the now-grizzled veterans of… Continue reading