slug.com slug.com
1 0

In Chapter Two of his new book, "We've Got People," Ryan Grim details interesting historical moments in the Democratic Party that might surprise right-wingers.

Chapter Two - The Beginning of the Rainbow

Michigan has a way of surprising. That was as true in the 2016 Democratic primary, when Bernie Sanders stunned Hillary Clinton, as it was in the general election, when Trump stunned her.
And it was true in 1988, too.
The Michigan caucuses fell on March 27, 1988. After more than three dozen primaries and caucuses, a crowded presidential field had been winnowed down to three serious contenders: Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts governor and presumed frontrunner; Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt; and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a former close aide to Martin Luther King Jr., and the public bearer of the torch of the civil rights movement.
A Missouri congressman with Big Labor backing, Gephardt was chairman of the House Democratic caucus, the position that would later be held by Rahm Emanuel and then Joe Crowley. He was running on a platform of “economic nationalism,” long before Steve Bannon made the term his own. In Iowa, where the United Auto Workers were still strong, he had won an upset on the back of an issue that was resonating strongly at the time — trade.
He did it by running what became a famous ad that attacked East Asian automakers for selling cheap cars in the United States while slapping tariffs on American cars that made them effectively unmarketable there. The press pounded him for protectionism and charged him with some form of “yellow peril” racism. “He was totally demonized by the mainstream media as a protectionist, even though his description of East Asian protectionism was precisely accurate,” said Robert Kuttner, a progressive journalist who covered the election. “Gephardt was challenging the one-way mercantilism of Japan’s trade and industrial policies. This had nothing whatever to do with yellow peril, but that got hung around Gephardt’s neck.”
The ad tapped into a genuine economic anxiety being felt around the country. After dominating the global economy since World War II, the 1980s saw foreign countries — particularly Japan, when it came to cars and electronics — catching up. Big business fought back against growing labor power in the U.S. by offshoring jobs and moving factories first to the South and then to China, Mexico or other countries with a cheap labor supply. Cities were hollowed out, crack and cocaine was pumped in. Prison construction boomed. A farm crisis ravaged rural America. Amid it all, Wall Street roared and greed became a culturally celebrated virtue.
Even though he was unfairly demonized for his ad campaign, which had tapped into real economic anxiety, Gephart was a badly flawed candidate. Having earlier been an opponent of abortion rights, he made all liberals, and particularly women, nervous. And he utterly lacked charisma. After losing New Hampshire in Michael Dukakis’ back yard, he had trouble raising money, and on Super Tuesday, Jackson topped him in southern primaries. Given Gephardt’s hard-hat, working-class brand, he badly needed a win in Michigan. He threw everything he had left into the state.
Dukakis, too, wanted Michigan — to show that his appeal extended beyond the liberal confines of Harvard Square, and that he could win back those Reagan Democrats whose defection had cost Jimmy Carter reelection.
Jackson, meanwhile, focused on actual Democrats. And like only a candidate on the ground can, Jackson felt like something was happening in Michigan. He decided to shift his campaign schedule around so he could stay there longer to do everything he could to boost turnout.
He spent that election day touring Detroit, hitting black churches and five different housing projects. The New York Times’ legendary political reporter, R.W. Apple, was on hand for the last minute push. Jackson, Apple observed in his election night dispatch, “had drawn surprisingly large crowds of both blacks and whites in the last few days,” adding that despite the black establishment’s support of Michael Dukakis — Detroit Mayor Coleman Young was backing Dukakis — Jackson won some Detroit neighborhoods by 15 or 20 to one. “But the surprise was the Chicago clergyman’s powerful showing in predominantly white cities like Lansing, Flint, Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, several of which he carried.”
Indeed, Jackson did more than get out the black vote. Progressive whites in the state also rallied hard to his cause. Dean Baker, who is now a prominent progressive economist, was district director for Jackson in Ann Arbor, and described how Jackson’s team out-organized Dukakis.
Because it was a caucus and not a primary, that meant the voting would not be held at the regular station, so Baker’s team had an artist draw a map with numbered sections that indicated where each caucus would be held. The map was included on every piece of literature the team distributed.
They also realized that Michigan law, which said that a voter must be registered at the time of the caucus, meant that the voter could be registered at the caucus, or least a moment before. The state allowed “deputy registrars,” so Baker’s team put enough people through training so that a registrar could be at every caucus site in Ann Arbor and Jackson, which was also in Baker’s district.
“We advertised this in our lit, which said, ‘You can vote for Jesse Jackson and justice, or you can vote for someone else.’ The asterisk then indicated at the bottom that even if they were not registered, they could register at the caucus site and vote,” said Baker. “On Election Day, the Dukakis people had all their workers at the caucus sites with their lit and their big buttons. The only person we had was a deputy registrar who had nothing to identify them with Jackson, since it was supposed to be a non-partisan process. The Dukakis people thought Jackson had no one working for him (they thought the deputy registrars were sent by the county). Meanwhile, our people were knocking on doors in the largely black and student areas dragging people to the polls. We thought there was no point in having people at the polls, since no one was going to the caucus who had not already decided who they were going to vote for.”
The energy of the moment comes through in the Apple dispatch. “So dramatically did [Jackson] seize the public imagination that he was able to counter successfully the notion that Mr. Dukakis was the Democrat with the best chance of nomination,” the Times wrote.
Jackson, after nearly 40 primaries and caucuses, was now effectively tied with Dukakis in the delegate count — a stunning moment in American politics that has gone down the memory hole.
For much of the campaign, the pundit class had been asking, What does Jesse Jackson really want? Surely, they reasoned, he didn’t want to be president. What was his angle? A big job? Patronage? Fame? At around 2 am that night in Michigan, a news station called Baker’s victory party and wanted comment. “I said that Dukakis lost the southern primaries, he lost Illinois, and now he lost Michigan. I think people have to start asking, What does Michael Dukakis really want?
In 2019, speaking in Selma, Alabama, on the 54th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Bernie Sanders was on stage. “There is a gentleman sitting right behind me whose name is Reverend Jesse Jackson,” Sanders said, going on to talk about the Rainbow Coalition. “History will not forget that he talked about the imperative of black and white and Latino and Native Americans and Asian Americans to come together to fight for a nation of peace and justice.”
History, of course, did forget. When we look back at election outcomes, it’s easy to ascribe a certain destiny to the outcome, but that obscures what it was to live through those moments, not knowing the outcome. In some significant ways, the Jackson campaign was an answer to the question of what an alternative strategy for the party, one rooted in people rather than money, might have looked like. It was one that excited Democratic voters, but had them wondering if Jackson was truly as “electable” as the safer Dukakis. A young John Harwood, then writing for the St. Petersburg Times, asked voters in Erie, Pennsylvania what they thought of Dukakis and Jackson. “I find little enthusiasm for Dukakis, but kind of a feeling that he’s a credible candidate,” said Dr. William Garvey, president of Mercyhurst College.
For those in the Jackson camp, his surging campaign hadn’t started in Iowa that year, but stretched back to 1983 in Chicago. The city that year underwent a fierce mayoral contest that pitted the old-school Daley machine against a grassroots coalition of progressive whites, blacks, and Latinos, rallying behind Harold Washington, a member of Congress with the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America. Washington, in Congress, had been the legislator who had managed to amend the Voting Rights Act so that courts didn’t need to prove that legislators had conspired intentionally to disenfranchise blacks with a particular election policy, but only that its effect was discriminatory.
Jackson was the lead organizer for the coalition, and he got wind that liberal lion Teddy Kennedy, along with former Vice President Walter Mondale, planned to endorse the machine’s pick in the primary — Richard Daley Jr., the son of the former mayor who’d arranged for Humphrey’s nomination in 1968.
Kennedy and Mondale were towering figures in the party, and their intervention threatened to derail everything Jackson and Washington were working toward. Jackson told me that before the endorsement was public, he reached out to the pair, begging them not to weigh in, explaining the campaign was on the brink of something historic. But the duo told him that they were longtime friends of Daley’s family. What could they do?
“Friends? What are we? Chopped liver?” Jackson told me he thought at the time.
Yet the machine and the endorsements were no match for the coalition Jackson and Washington had built. Luis Gutiérrez, who would go on to become an iconic Chicago congressman, remembers the Washington campaign as a seminal moment in progressive politics. Gutiérrez was a social worker in his 20s, he said, and went to a Washington rally at the pavillion, the University of Illinois at Chicago’s basketball arena. “With Harold Washington it was love,” he said, describing how stunned he was by what he heard from the mayoral candidate. “I said, This is a bad motherfucker. He said he’s gonna fire the police chief! Everybody thinks all this Black Lives Matter, and the police, that that’s like been of our time — look at Harold Washington in 1983 saying [Richard] Brzeczek must go. Who the fuck says you’re going to fire the police chief running for mayor?!”
“My story’s not unique. How the fuck did Harold Washington put an army together against the Chicago machine?” Gutiérrez said, explaining how the Washington campaign became an expression of broader leftist politics. “I asked my friend...to help and she said she didn’t have time, and I said, Don’t you ever fucking complain about apartheid in South Africa. Don’t invite me to another rally. Don’t, because I’m not coming. Because that’s what they’re doing here. She looked at me and she said, You’re fucking right.”
In an alliance with the reformed gang the Young Lords, the campaign registered a staggering 100,000 new voters. Gutiérrez credits Young Lords founder Cha-Cha Jiménez, who helped organize the Hispanic community for Washington.
Washington stunned the city and won the primary, but the fight wasn’t over, as the machine switched parties, rallying behind Republican Bernard Epton in the general election. The police chief quit just before the election, avoiding his coming termination, but also in the hopes of galvanizing white reaction against Washington. Even the local congressional delegation turned against Washington. “You and I would not be having this conversation if Dan Rostenkowski — congressman, counselor to presidents, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and a colleague of Harold Washington — hadn’t sent a precinct captain to my house and asked me to put up an Epton poster. There are moments that just piss you off. I said, I can’t do shit about Nelson Mandela, and I couldn’t help the civil rights movement, but you just have a moment in your life where you say, I can do something about this.”
Gutiérrez had been a supporter of Washington’s in the primary, but watching the Democratic Party turn on its own nominee radicalized him. He did everything he could for Washington, who won the general election by just four points in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. The next year, Gutiérrez primaried Rostenkowski. “I got 24 percent, but don’t worry, two years later I was Harold’s boy and I went to the city council,” Gutiérrez said. His win ended what had been called the “Council Wars,” as the machine used its council majority to block Washington’s agenda. Gutiérrez’s victory broke the back of the opposition.
Early in his tenure, Gutiérrez said, Washington showed that he would fight for the city’s immigrants. “He [signed] an executive order barring the INS from coming on city property. That’s a pretty bad motherfucker. He was the progressive — before the term had been coined and now everybody says they are one — he was one. That’s pretty badass shit, to say to immigration agents, Don’t come fucking around my city.”
Washington’s win was part of a wave of black mayoral victories in major American cities, reshaping local political dynamics and busting up rusting machines. It convinced the black community that electoral politics — beyond marching and movement building — were needed to move the Democratic Party forward. It also pointed toward a potential coalition, through the expansion of the electorate, that could take on the growing power of capital that had taken over the Republican Party and was making its move on the Democratic Party.
“We’ve got to break this up,” Jackson recalled thinking of the Democratic consensus forming around white-male-dominated, big-money liberalism. “This brand of liberalism is not liberating.”
In spring 1983, the Black Leadership Forum — a coalition of nationally prominent and influential black leaders — met and decided to run an African-American for president in 1984. But nobody stepped forward, and Jackson eventually agreed to do it, but didn’t get into the race until January 1984, the last candidate to join.
Manning Marable, one of the most incisive observers of the party realignment in real time, laid out the terrain Jackson operated on in an essay in 1985:
The ...

WilyRickWiles 8 July 27
Share
You must be a member of this group before commenting. Join Group

Be part of the movement!

Welcome to the community for those who value free speech, evidence and civil discourse.

Create your free account

1 comment

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

0

Continued: The defections of major electoral groups from the Democrats had reduced the party to four overlapping social blocs. The first tendency, which was clearly subordinated within the coalition, was the democratic left: African-Americans, Latinos (except Cuban-Americans), feminists, peace activists, liberal trade unionists, environmentalists, welfare-rights and low-income groups, and ideological liberals. In national electoral politics, they were best represented by the Congressional Black Caucus and a small group of white liberals in the House and Senate. To their right was the rump of the old New Deal coalition, the liberal centrists: the AFL-CIO, white ethnics in urban machines, some consumer-goods industrialists and liberal investment bankers, and Jewish organizations. The chief representative of this alignment in national politics was Minnesota senator and former vice president Hubert Humphrey. Following Humphrey’s death in 1977, his protégé, Walter Mondale, assumed leadership of this bloc. A third tendency, which exhibited the most independent posture toward partisan politics, comprised what some have called the “professional managerial class” and sectors of the white, salaried middle-income strata. These white “neo-liberals” tended to oppose US militarism abroad and large defense expenditures. But on economic policies, they tended toward fiscal conservatism and a reduction of social-welfare programs. They were critical of nuclear power, and favored federal regulations to protect the environment; but they also opposed “special interests” such as organized labor. This constituency was behind the unsuccessful presidential campaigns of Morris Udall in 1976 and John Anderson in 1980. Its principal spokesman in the Democratic primaries was Colorado senator Gary Hart, who as early as 1973 had proclaimed that “American liberalism was near bankruptcy.” At the extreme right of the party were those moderate-to-conservative southern Democrats who had not yet defected from the party, and a smaller number of midwestern and “sunbelt” governors and legislators who had ties to small regional capitalists, energy interests, and middle-income white constituencies. The most prominent stars of this tendency in the 1970s were Jimmy Carter, Florida governor Reubin Askew, millionaire Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen, and Ohio senator John Glenn. All of these groups, in varying degrees, opposed the general agenda of the Reagan administration. But only the democratic left, and most specifically the African-American community, mounted a sustained series of social protests against literally every initiative of the Republican president.
Mondale quickly rounded up establishment support, winning over the AFL-CIO early, as well as most leaders in the party. A handful of racists ran to Mondale’s right, and two progressives, California’s Alan Cranston and George McGovern, to his left, reprising his 1972 campaign that ended with Nixon’s landslide reelection.
Jackson made his case by referring to non-voters as the Biblical rocks that today’s David could be slinging:
In 1980, Reagan won Massachusetts by 2,500 votes! There were over a hundred thousand students unregistered, over 50,000 blacks, over 50,000 Hispanics. He won by 2,500. Ted Kennedy’s state. Rocks just laying around.
He won Illinois by 300,000 votes — 800,000 blacks were unregistered, 500,000 Hispanics, rocks just laying around! In 1980 three million high school students were unregistered to vote. Now they’ve registered to draft. Rocks still laying around!
[snip]
In 1980 Reagan won Pennsylvania by 300,000 votes, 400,000 students not registered. More than 600,000 blacks unregistered! Reagan won Pennsylvania by the margin of despair, by the margin of the fracture of our coalition.
The coalition had been well-fractured by the time Jackson got in, with most of the key endorsements already divvied up. Yet he still ran a race that drew thousands of new people into Democratic politics. He ran a thoroughly progressive campaign, which was an outgrowth of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, the King-led movement to bring together poor whites, blacks, Latinos and Native Americans to attack poverty and inequality. That movement had drawn its inspiration from the famous 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice, of which the “I Have a Dream” speech is the legacy.
Jackson’s campaign embraced single-payer health care, gay rights, called for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, free community college, reparations for descendants of slaves, gender pay equity and an end to Reagan’s drug war, with a focus instead on banks who facilitate money laundering.
He won five caucuses or primaries and more than 3 million votes, 18 percent of the total. Marable describes a familiar scene playing out on the convention floor, as Mondale, who had less than 39 percent of the vote, locked up the nomination. “A large bloc of convention delegates were directly selected by the party apparatus, virtually guaranteeing Mondale’s nomination. In many states, the selection of convention delegates had little to do with the actual primary vote. For example, in Pennsylvania’s primary, Jackson received 17 percent of the statewide popular vote to Mondale’s 45 percent. On the convention floor, however, Mondale received 117 delegate votes to Jackson’s 18,” he wrote.
Mondale’s campaign exists in our memories today as a feckless liberal effort. But in fact he ran to the center-right, applauding Reagan’s invasion of Grenada; saying he’d be tougher than Reagan on the Soviet Union; and promising to cut spending and attack the deficit. The only promise he made that was traditionally associated with liberal Democrats was to raise taxes. “By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds,” he vowed during his acceptance speech at the convention. “To the Congress, my message is: We must cut spending and pay as we go.”
That political poison was injected into Mondale’s speech, it would later emerge, by none other than Goldman Sachs’ Robert Rubin, an archetype of the new type of Wall Street Democrat.
“It was a completely incoherent campaign, relying on kind of a core of sentimental, post-New Deal liberalism, while promising to raise taxes/cut spending/eliminate the deficit,” said Rich Yeselson, a longtime labor movement strategist.
While Jackson had made ending apartheid in South Africa a key moral plank in his campaign, using it as a proxy to challenge Reagan on racism, Mondale shied away from it. “Mondale took the black vote absolutely for granted, and devoted nearly his entire campaign to courting fractions of the white electorate which historically had voted for Republican presidential candidates,” Manning concluded in his essay the next year.
But Reagan Republicans were not on some historically inexorable glide toward a permanent majority. Tom Harkin, running on a progressive populist platform, won his first Senate race that year in Iowa. The liberal Paul Simon, who the young Rahm Emanuel was detailed to, knocked off a popular veteran Republican in Illinois. Then in 1986, Democrats re-took the Senate and made further gains in the House as the Iran-Contra scandal hobbled Reagan, leaving an expectation that the White House would swing their way in 1988.
By that year, Jackson was better prepared and organized, and the team that had formed around him in ’84 knew what it was doing. His strong showing gave him credibility, which came with endorsements, including one by Burlington Mayor Bernie Sanders and another by Paul Wellstone, who chaired Jackson’s campaign in Minnesota two years before he was elected senator. (“It was a big deal. I respect him very much,” Jackson said in 2019 in Selma.)
Catapulted by the Michigan upset, Jackson surged into Wisconsin, where he was already polling ahead. A win there would be an exclamation mark on his Midwest tour, and launch him toward the convention with a strong argument that he was well positioned to unite and inspire black voters, liberals of all races and white working-class voters ready to push back against economic oppression. At a rally outside a Chrysler plant that was due to close, Jackson zeroed in on his message that the question of class versus race missed the point, that only by uniting across race and gender in a “rainbow coalition” could the people confront the forces waging “economic violence” in the Midwest.
Gephardt surveyed the post-Michigan landscape and dropped out, leaving just Jackson and Dukakis.
Talk in the top echelons of the Democratic Party turned to panic, with David Espo of the Associated Press reporting that the establishment feared a general-election blowout if Jackson was the nominee. Plans were being drawn up, he reported, to draft New York Governor Mario Cuomo to challenge Jackson at the convention if Dukakis couldn’t stop the reverend.
E.J. Dionne, then reporting for the New York Times, captured the sense of dread.
White Democratic leaders who do not support Mr. Jackson admitted they were in a quandary, wondering how to confront the growing movement toward Mr. Jackson without appearing to be racist and without alienating the large core of activists, including many white liberals, that he has attracted….
Around Washington, the words used by leading white Democrats to describe their party’s situation included crisis, disarray, disaster, consternation, mess, and wacky.
“You’ve never heard a sense of panic sweep the party as it has in the last few days,” said David Garth, an adviser to Senator Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee.
Mr. Garth predicted that ‘”the anti-Jackson constituency, when the reality of his becoming President seeps in, may be a much bigger constituency than there is out there right now.”
Jackson, the Democratic political class argued, was simply unelectable, so the party should go with a winner like Dukakis. Rep. Barney Frank’s sister, Ann Lewis, was working for the Jackson campaign, but Frank was backing his home state governor. He explained to Dionne that there were two reasons Jackson couldn’t win. “One, there is unfortunately still racism in the country....That doesn’t mean the whole country’s prejudiced. It means that if there’s an irreducible 15 or 20 percent prejudice against a particular group, you’re giving away an awful lot,” Frank said. “Two, he’s still to the left of the country, especially on foreign policy.”
Jackson’s opponents had argued that his proximity to the nomination would paradoxically push some white Democrats away from him. It’s all fine and good to vote for the charismatic black guy with the unifying message in 1988 — indeed, it was an anti-racist badge of honor — just not if he actually might win. The party establishment pulled the fire alarm. I asked Jackson what kind of pressure he felt after his Michigan win. “The pressure was not on me,” he said. “It was the so-called Reagan Democrats who began sowing discord and spreading lies.”
The cynics were right; the polls were wrong. Dukakis won solidly in Wisconsin, stunting Jackson’s momentum. Over the next month, Dukakis would win Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Indiana, and while Jackson continued picking off a state here and some delegates there, the nomination contest was effectively over. As is often the case, political wisdom failed the party elite, and Dukakis was crushed by George H.W. Bush, on the back of a racist attack around Willie Horton.
But with the act of forming a campaign team, Jackson had opened opportunities to people of color to enter politics.
The late Dr. Ronald Walters, a University of Maryland professor who was a deputy manager of Jackson’s team, once told me he often ran into veterans of that campaign on his lecture tours.
“A number of people will come up to me and say, ‘I’m a member of city council now,’ or, ‘I’m on the school board now.’ It created a whole generation of elected officials,” Walters said. Some of those officials weren’t actually on the campaign. “You go to these places now and everyone was a Jackson delegate,” he told me during an interview in 2007. “It’s kind of like a folk tale. It’s become sort of an iconic moment in African-American history.”
Using the political capital earned during the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, the Jackson camp negotiated major rules changes that opened the party process to minorities.
His 1984 and ’88 campaigns paved the way for the rise of a generation of black leaders inside the Democratic Party. “So many leaders of the African-American community have come from that campaign. He was the one,” said Tina Flournoy, who has worked in the top levels of the Democratic Party and became assistant to the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
The list of those who started in or got a break from a Jackson campaign is a “Who’s Who” of top minorities, most of them African American, in the Democratic Party.
Among them: Donna Brazile, the first black person to manage a presidential campaign (Al Gore’s) and later the acting head of the DNC; Minyon Moore, who was President Clinton’s political affairs director; Yolanda Caraway, a former top official of the Democratic National Committee and now CEO of The Caraway Group; the Rev. Leah Daughtry, a longtime veteran of the DNC who oversaw two conventions; and Alexis Herman, the first black secretary of labor (under President Clinton).
A savvy grasp of the system paved the way for Ron Brown to win the race for the DNC’s chairmanship in 1989. “Ron’s campaign couldn’t lose. His becoming DNC chair came right out of that campaign,” Jackson told me.
“Jackson opened that door,” Brazile said.
An entire class of elected Democratic officials also graduated from the Jackson campaign, including Rep. Barbara Lee of California; Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; Rep. Maxine Waters of California; Jesse Jackson Jr., who represented the Chicago district that was his father’s political base; and Carol Moseley Braun, the first African American woman elected to the Senate.
The viability of the New Jacksonian remake of the coalition was demonstrated in the years after his run. The 1984 campaign had registered two million new voters, most of them African American, and not coincidentally, Doug Wilder became the first black official elected statewide since Reconstruction when he won his race for lieutenant governor in Virginia in 1985.
In the 1986 midterms, those two million new voters made a big difference. Democrats netted eight seats to win control of the Senate, beating six senators who’d been elected in 1980 with Reagan. The new senators were white, but many won extremely tight races in the South and were powered by black voters. Democrats won seats in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana. Harry Reid won his first Senate race that year by 14,000 votes in Nevada.
Another million voters were registered by the ’88 campaign, and a wave of advances came the next two years. Wilder was elected Virginia governor by just 6,000 votes. The first African American mayor was elected in New York, Seattle and Durham; the second was elected in Cleveland.
The two then-obscure white backers of Jackson also saw surprise wins. Wellstone upset his Republican opponent, the only Senate candidate to beat an incumbent in 1990. And that same year, Vermont elected democratic socialist Bernie Sanders to the House of Representatives for the first time. The next year, as a freshman, he brought a handful of other independent-minded lawmakers together — including Lane Evans, a rural populist who managed to represent a Republican district as a leftist for 24 years; and Ron Dellums, the first DSA member to serve in Congress; Maxine Waters and Peter DeFazio — to found the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Jackson delegate Moseley Braun’s Senate election came in 1992, and that year, despite Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment at Jackson’s convention, black voters powered Clinton to a narrow plurality.
Jackson’s 1988 run is one of the great roads-untraveled in Democratic history. Could Jackson have beaten George H.W. Bush? If he had run a strong race, what would it have done to shape the soul of the party? How many more millions could the party have registered in a general election with Jackson at the top of the ticket? If the party had started organizing its grassroots base and appealing to white working-class voters in economic terms rather than with racial resentment, could a workable coalition have been built? Could the rapid expansion of mass incarceration throughout the 1990s been avoided? Could the nation’s rightward drift been slowed or reversed?
We’ll never know, but most of the Democratic elite at the time would have said that in their hearts they were for Jackson, but in their heads they were for the more pragmatic choice of Dukakis.
But there was a lot more going on in those hearts and minds. It’s common for people to say that in the 1970s the party became too liberal, and corrected by moving toward the center. But what’s often left out of the conversation is the necessary verbiage, however uncomfortable it might be. The party had become more progressive not because of flower-power, the counter culture or some liberal softening of hearts. What people meant by too liberal was that it had become too cozy with blacks.
The success of the black freedom and women’s liberation movements accelerated a realignment of the parties — more women and people of color became Democrats, and more white racists became Republicans — but party leaders resisted this realignment until the bitter end, worried about being called too liberal.
The resistance to the realignment was chipped away at during the 1988 convention, when Jackson forced a rules change that would have a profound effect. Winner-take-all primaries were moved toward proportional representation, as long as a candidate got at least 15 percent.
Without that rule change, Barack Obama would not have won the 2008 nomination. “Barack Obama won big in 2008 with a diverse, young, expanded electorate modeled on Jackson’s 1988 rainbow coalition successes,” said Steve Cobble, a senior adviser to Jackson’s campaigns.
But it would take two decades from his run for the party to learn that lesson. Its first order of business was to get Jesse Jackson and his coalition back in line. Four years after Jackson’s run, Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 1992. That summer, at the height of the general election, Clinton accepted an invitation from Jackson to speak at his annual Rainbow Coalition conference. With Jackson on stage, Clinton used the platform to rip into an obscure Bronx rapper, whose videos didn’t play on MTV at the time and who had by then never topped 78 on Billboard.
“Let’s stand up for what’s always been best about the Rainbow Coalition, which is people coming together across racial lines,” Clinton began, then made his move. “You had a rap star here last night, Sister Souljah. I defend her right to express herself through music.”
Clinton then quoted Sister Souljah, making it appear as if she had recently called for black people to kill whites in the wake of the Los Angeles-Rodney King riots. In fact, Time magazine wrote then, “she was trying to explain the mind-set of black youths who have experienced so much violence at the hands of whites that murder means nothing to them.”
“I know she is a young person, but she has a big influence on a lot of people,” Clinton said, a statement that only became true the minute he uttered it. “If you took the words white and black and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.”
It became one of Clinton’s touchstone political moments, defining the coming era of Democratic politics. It’s talked about as a way for Clinton to win over white moderates and conservatives by showing he was willing to take on the base of his own party. But that misses a major purpose of the attack — it was not just a means to another end, hitting Jackson was an end in itself. The Rainbow Coalition represented the biggest threat to the Clinton wing’s party dominance. Jackson demanded an apology, but never got one. It was Bill Clinton’s party now.

Recent Visitors 13

Photos 11,776 More

Posted by JohnHoukVideo Collection of Tyranny Past, Present & Future SUMMARY: This is a collection of seven videos that are in a random date order showing my interest… Tyranny is the theme.

Posted by GeeMacMexico admits it is a hotbed of drug trafficking, but not of drug use, according to its top politician.

Posted by JohnHoukReprising ShadowGate Documentaries: With Dr.

Posted by JohnHoukLest YOU Are Brainwashed to be Happy in an Age of Transformation Tyranny: Videos & Commentary to Refresh YOUR Memory to at Least Awaken Personal Resistance! SUMMARY: An examination of saved videos...

Posted by Weltansichtwell....doggies

Posted by MosheBenIssacMetoo in action

Posted by JohnHoukDr.

Posted by JohnHoukConnecting the Dots! Some AI Truth – What Used to be “Playing God” is Really “Playing Devil” SUMMARY: … Satan – the foe – has only one delusional recourse: Brainwash human souls ...

Posted by JohnHoukMy Intro to Documentary, ‘Let My People Go’ SUMMARY: Dr.

Posted by JohnHoukMedical Tyranny – A Look at mRNA Danger & COVID Bioweapon Exploitation SUMMARY: Medical Tyranny has become a fact of life that the brainwashing Dem-Marxists, RINOs and Mockingbird MSM work hard ...

Posted by JohnHoukDr.

Posted by JohnHoukIrritated With Transformation Yet?

Posted by JohnHoukVOTE TRUMP – Overcome Dem-Marxist/RINO Lies – Video Share SUMMARY: The first batch of shared videos reflects VOTE-FOR-TRUMP in the midst of Dem-Marxist/RINO government LIES.

Posted by JohnHoukA Look at Mike Benz, THEN Tucker Ep.

Posted by JohnHoukLooking at ‘The Great Setup with Dr.

Posted by JohnHoukEnlightening Videos of a Corrupted Society SUMMARY: … The thing is, TYRANNY today has become very multifaceted in how the socio-political infection of CONTROL has crept into the one-time Land of ...

  • Top tags#video #youtube #world #government #media #biden #democrats #USA #truth #children #Police #society #god #money #reason #Canada #rights #freedom #culture #China #hope #racist #death #vote #politics #communist #evil #socialist #Socialism #TheTruth #justice #kids #democrat #evidence #crime #conservative #hell #laws #nation #liberal #federal #community #military #racism #climate #violence #book #politicians #joebiden #fear ...

    Members 9,397Top

    Moderators