More Than a Crusade

Four years ago, a Jesse Jackson campaign stop would have been incomplete without a stretch Cadillac, driven by a local funeral director or minister, filled with local VIPs riding from one event to the next. This year the Jackson campaign has an entourage of staff and Secret Service, plus a fleet of official vehicles to handle such chores. The local limousines are dinosaurs in the 1988 campaign, a nuisance the Secret Service would like to banish. But Jackson holds on to them, although they often ride empty except for one proud driver whose fingers no one in the Jackson campaign wants to pry from the steering wheel.

The riderless limos are not the only sign that the 1988 Jackson campaign is a far cry from the seat-of-the-pants, roller-coaster operation of 1984. The dilapidated Lockheed Electra turboprop (which later crashed) has been replaced by a DC-9, complete with computers. Schedules, just vague advisories in the last campaign, which ran on Jesse Jackson time (three hours behind all known time zones), are sometimes adhered to. Church choirs warming up the crowd are still crucial, but now so are the hard-nosed strategists busily color-coding districts on wall-size maps. “Eighty-four was a crusade,” says Ann Lewis, a longtime Democratic Party pro. “This is a real campaign.”

The stakes are also suddenly very real. Solid black support and a potential three-way split of the white vote make it quite possible that Jackson will emerge from the Super Tuesday frenzy next week rivaling the front runner in delegate totals. Moreover, if he continues to attract a slice of white votes, he would become, at least for a while, the legitimate front runner, one whose clout could overshadow the little “yes, but” asterisk next to his name.

One major change is the arithmetic. Party rules now award most delegates by congressional district: any candidate who gets 15% of the vote in a district (down from 20% last time) gets a share of the delegates. Of the 167 districts in Super Tuesday states, Jackson’s wall maps have 60 of them in blue, meaning that he could win them outright. An additional 45 are marked red, meaning that he could meet the threshold and get some delegates. Even rival campaigns and state party officials believe Jackson could emerge from the 14 Southern and border states with a plurality of delegates. “You can’t write him off anywhere but Oklahoma and Kentucky,” says Donna Brazile, field director for the Gephardt campaign and Jackson’s top organizer in 1984. “In the rest of the states, he is in the mix, and in some, he is the clear winner.”

Black church leaders and local officials who were cool to Jackson’s candidacy last time are now heartily involved, no longer fearful that a black will siphon votes from a liberal Democrat. They are integrated into well- disciplined state organizations, with sophisticated canvassing and get-out- the-vote operations. Since black Democrats turn out to vote in much larger proportion than do their white counterparts during the primaries, their clout will be considerable.

Jackson is this time also courting leaders of the national black establishment. In New York City last week, he met with 25 prominent blacks gathered by former Urban League President Vernon Jordan Jr. His political success, Jackson argued, provided an enormous opportunity to barter for blacks, and he promised to share his leverage with the black leadership. “It’s a real sign Jesse has matured,” said one of the group. “He wasn’t talking this way four years ago. He was a solo operator then.”

But the most significant change in the Jackson campaign is the attempt to expand beyond its black base. In order to add working-class whites to his rainbow coalition, Jackson has renegotiated loans for farmers in Iowa and Missouri. He has fought for the right to unionize plants in New Hampshire and Maine. He stood with disgruntled workers in Dubuque and Marshalltown, Iowa. He joined environmental battles in New Hampshire.

It worked. In Iowa and New Hampshire, where blacks are less than 2% of the population, Jackson got about 10% of the vote. In last week’s caucuses in Minnesota, with a black population of about 1.3%, Jackson swept to an impressive second-place finish with 20%, ahead of all save Dukakis. Indeed, some whites in these states have had a remarkable experience: one of the few black men they had ever seen up close turned out to be running for President.

The worry within his campaign is whether the white stripe in his rainbow can grow without shrinking the other colors that were there first. Having set a standard for himself as a candidate who can attract broad support, Jackson will now be measured by his ability to do so. No wonder, then, that Jackson last week diverted his attention from getting out the vote in black districts and ventured into white districts in Kentucky and North Carolina that were flyovers in 1984.

To forge a black-and-white coalition in such places, Jackson aims his populist message at working people of both races. He wants to raise the minimum wage, institute comparable-worth wages for women, build affordable housing and, as he always says, “stop drugs from coming in, stop jobs from going out.”

His trip to Asheville, N.C., last week allowed Jackson to return to a town 60 or so miles from his birthplace and recall how he played segregated football games nearby during the 1950s. Jackson drove home the point by bringing along his white press secretary, Asheville Native Liz Colton. Unlike 1984, Jackson repeats over and over that this is not a black struggle. The poorest Americans, he says, are white and female. “We can’t just lift black boats,” he said to a black audience at Winston-Salem State University last week. “We must lift all boats.”

The modest success of this message, however, contains an irony, one that is discomforting to the Jackson campaign: it seems to appeal to affluent white liberals more than to the poorer white workers. CBS News exit polls taken in New Hampshire indicate that much of Jackson’s support came from voters with incomes over $50,000 and with postgraduate education. There were more nonunion households than union ones among those who voted for him.

So what? Some of Jackson’s strategists are urging him to take advantage of the situation and direct his appeal more to the affluent liberals who seem receptive. But the purists in his camp warn against altering his message; a coalition involving students and liberals, they say, will turn out to be more ephemeral than one embracing poor and working-class whites. Jackson, bowing to electoral realities, has opted to do some tinkering with his message. He has ^ toned down his talk of “poor people,” speaking instead of “working people.” In later speeches, the “working poor” has become “working families with no health care.”

Jackson’s performance in the South next week, however impressive, will not thrust him into the nomination. Even the optimistic scenarios of his advisers do not give him much chance to continue his success when the election moves away from the South and the number of white candidates has been reduced. But it is increasingly likely that the Democratic nomination will end up involving some bartering, and Jackson now seems sure to arrive at the table with one of the largest piles of chips — as many as 700 delegates.

That in itself is destined to mark a fundamental change in the nature of black politics in America. During the 1970s, the civil rights struggle was transformed into a political movement that gained power in cities and towns across the country. Next Tuesday, Jackson has the potential to bring this power to bear at the presidential level. Even though he will still have the asterisk by his name, it will be enough to earn him a place in the history books.