Jackson rocks steady - Jesse Jackson campaign

National Review, June 10, 1988

Jackson Rocks Steady

AFTER the last month and a half of losses, no combination of homestretch victories can possibly put Jesse Jackson over the top in Atlanta. This is the half-empty-glass view of the Jackson effort-and, in simple arithmetical terms, it has been the only sensible view to take all along. For good reasons (his wispy qualifications and his wild-man view of the world) and bad reasons (his race), it was simply inconceivable that Jesse Jackson could be nominated for President in 1988.

But consider the half-full-glass view. It is Jesse Jackson who is pacing the front-runner all the way to the finish line-not Albert Gore or Richard Gephardt (just as Jackson, not John Glenn or Ernest Hollings, dogged Mondale and Hart four years ago). Jackson will be a presence at the convention, and a force in the party for the next four years.

Jackson improved his electoral performance this time around by completing his monopoly on the black vote (which he had shared, to a degree, with Walter Mondale in 1984), and by broadening his appeal to hard-line white liberals. This is a compact and fairly distinct base, not enough ever to secure him a nomination.

But it is enough to give him a platform for his message, which is a steady tug to the left. It may take the form of platform pressure. The Democratic platform, said Jackson's spokesman at the platform committee's first hearing, "must not be [a] generalized statement of principles. . . . We've got to raise taxes . . . on those who have benefited most from the Reagan tax breaks. . . . You can't talk about meeting human needs without the money."

More significant is the mere presence of Jackson himself, who recently denied that he was pushing Dukakis. "I'm pulling him. I'm in front on a plan to stop the flow of drugs. I'm pulling him. On a plan to build affordable housing, I am pulling him. On a plan to define South Africa as a terrorist state, I am pulling him."

The pull will continue, throughout the campaign and the Dukakis Administration, if there is one. Jackson's effect on his party is like the influence exerted by bewhiskered nineteenth-century Yankees on the hero of a John P. Marquand novel: stern, monitory, inescapable. Except that Jackson is alive, young, and full of beans. Dukakis should get used to it. It will be part of his political future, as long as he has a future.