The Worst Democrat: Jesse Jackson again-and again

National Review, Dec 4, 2000 by Jonah Goldberg

'This is a replay of Selma, Alabama, all over again," Jesse Jackson said. Holocaust survivors have been disenfranchised, he lamented in front of any camera he could find. The fact that a few minorities and a passel of old Jewish ladies double-punched some ballots-which had been printed in large, old-folks-friendly type-was, to Jackson, an obvious extension of the "blood of blacks and Jews" spilled in 1965. Blacks were "discouraged" from voting in this election, Jackson asserted with the level of conviction only people untroubled by facts can muster.

And yet New York Times reporter Lynette Holloway, even after cataloguing such statements, can write: "Mr. Jackson has been careful not to be inflammatory, which may be one reason the Democratic National Committee has changed its mind about his involvement." This raises the intriguing question of what could possibly pass for "inflammatory" to either the New York Times or the Democratic National Committee. After all, one might think repeated and forthright declarations and suggestions that elderly Jews were "targeted" for "disenfranchisement" because of their status as Holocaust survivors isn't the most helpful course to take.

Many old people were confused by the Palm Beach ballot only after they voted. Jackson, with the approval of the Gore campaign, successfully translated what amounted to a vague sense on the part of some voters that they might have read the ballot wrong into a full-blown racist and anti-Semitic electoral pogrom.

"Once again, the sons and daughters of slavery and Holocaust survivors are bound together by their hopes and their fear about national public policy," Jackson said, leaving little room for principled compromise. Besides, he explained to the press, "the African-Americans and the Jewish senior citizens [of Palm Beach] were targeted." He later added, "Something systematic was at work here. . . . It was large and systematic."

Liberal commentator Bill Press said on CNN's Spin Room that Jackson's comparisons of Palm Beach to Selma were "over the top." But among media heavyweights, Press appears all but alone in that assessment. Receiving the sort of reserved treatment normally afforded to distinguished statesmen, Jackson has been ubiquitous on cable news shows and on the scene in Palm Beach. In the first day or two of this postelection campaign, he exhorted people to bring forward complaints about the Florida vote. He's held umpteen press conferences. He's sought to answer every pressing question of the current political crisis-except one: Who the hell does he think he is?

Everyone knows that Jackson holds no public office, and has no obvious connection to Florida. He may have considerable moral authority with his base, but he has exceedingly little outside it. Even if he weren't needlessly playing on the passions and fears of blacks and Holocaust survivors, it's far from clear that he could do any good in this situation even if he were inclined to. In fact, he is up to no good.

Which seems to have become his favorite pastime. Last winter, Jackson took a public-relations pasting for parachuting into a local school- board decision in Decatur, Ill. Six students received two-year expulsions for initiating a wilding-like brawl at a college football game. Jackson, before he saw a videotape of the fight, dismissed it as "something silly, like children do." City councilwoman Betsy Stockard, who is black, agreed, believing the punishment too harsh. After Stockard saw the tape, she changed her mind. "I realized this was not a simple kids' fight," Stockard told the Los Angeles Times. "I had to support their expulsion. This was a horrendous brawl. This was scary." Jackson took exactly the opposite approach, calling in his squad of rent-a-rioters and ratcheting up the racial rhetoric, invoking time and again the memory of Selma.

The following summer, he again spent weeks holding press conferences, vigils, and marches, this time in Mississippi. He hoped his public- relations alchemy could transform the suicide of a young black man into a lynching. Without a shred of evidence, and in the face of two separate autopsies-one done for the family-that concluded that 17-year- old Raynard Johnson killed himself, Jackson denounced local and state officials and helped delude the Johnson family into believing that their son was a martyr in the cause of hate-crimes legislation. Jackson forced a federal investigation by the Reno Justice Department; it continues today. The press-especially TV-gave Jackson's entirely unsubstantiated fabrications ample and somber play. Here, too, Jackson found the "blood" of Selma.

In fact, it seems clear now that Jackson simply has Selma on the brain. As pointed out by John Miller and Ramesh Ponnuru on National Review Online, Jackson is almost incapable of not referring to Selma. Last year, after an accidental police shooting, Jackson found Selma in the streets of Riverside, Calif. This March, Jackson invoked Selma again, to defend two race-preference programs in Houston. And of course, how could Jackson denounce the shooting of Amadou Diallo without reminding people that in Selma "the people were as innocent as Amadou Diallo, but they were beaten with sticks, hit with horses-blood was spilled."