Getting restless - Afro-Americans and Democratic Party

THE 1988 ELECTION presented the Democrats with a grim prospect: the possibility of slippage in the black vote, which has been solidly in the Democratic column ever since John F. Kennedy phoned Coretta King after her husband had been jailed during the 1960 campaign.

The final results will not be in until after these words are published, but there were numerous trouble signs during the campaign's last weeks. Some polls showed George Bush with as much as 16 per cent of the black vote-twice Ronald Reagan's totals. The national headquarters of the NAACP had to sit on the director of its Columbus, Ohio, chapter to get her to retract an endorsement of Bush. Other polls showed numbers of blacks thinking of staying home, or expressing their disenchantment with the Democrats by voting for Lenora B. Fulani, a radical, independent candidate who admires Louis Farrakhan and the Reverend Al Sharpton.

The black malaise spurred the Dukakis campaign into its shrill home-stretch effort, well amplified by the media, to portray the Bush campaign as racist. Distributing leaflets with pictures of Willie Horton, Michael Dukakis's favorite parolee, was supposed to be a racial slur. Right. As if pictures of Charlie Manson, had he been sprung from a Massachusetts jail, wouldn't have done as well. This desperate effort to rally the unhappy troops recalled Walter Mondale's October bid four years ago to lure back wavering Jews with scary talk about Jerry Falwell writing school prayers.

Several factors are at work. The random factor in all predictions about black evolution is Jesse Jackson. Intellectually, the man is a menace, supporting precisely the demeaning, paternalist policies that have kept his race back. In the context of this election, he seemed content to let the Democrats lose. He campaigned for Dukakis lukewarmly-"He will supply the policies, we can supply the passion," was a common formulation. Nothing, he knew, would freeze his advance within the Democratic Party more solidly than a Dukakis victory. So much for all the effusions over the Jackson family in Atlanta. Next time the Democrats sup with Jackson they should take a longer spoon.

Word of it has not trickled out much, but it is the