When Jesse Jackson first ran for President in 1984, he was considered a symbolic candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, because President Reagan was a shoo-in for re-election. When he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination again in 1988, he was running to win. Not necessarily win the nomination - establishment Democrats, who have historically screwed things up for the party in the past four decades, had established the idea of "superdelegates" to prevent that, as Jackson's peer and brother in arms Bernie Sanders would later find out - but to win a better future for America.
Jesse Jackson, who died at 84 last week, was never going to win the Presidency - not because he was black, but because he espoused policies that had fallen out of favor with mainstream America, such as federal aid to urban areas, single-payer health care, and affirmative-action benchmarks for employment (which has since morphed into diversity, equity and inclusion). Progressive policies had fallen out of favor in the 1980s at the expense of a supply-side economic policy of incentives for corporations to produce more goods and employ more people, free-market competition, and deregulation of financial institutions. All of that failed. Which is why, ironically, Jackson was also ahead of his time. He was a harbinger of the early-twenty-first-century movement spearheaded by Bernie Sanders.
Jackson was fully committed to civil rights long after the movement faded in the 1970s in the mistaken assumption that the heavy lifting had been done and moderation in the pursuit of incremental progress was all that was needed going forward. Jackson was prescient enough to know that much more was needed to be done still, and he never wavered from that. But, in his campaign for economic justice through his group People United to Serve Humanity (PUSH) and for reconciliation with the nation's adversaries (he famously embraced Yasir Arafat and helped free an American serviceman by negotiating with Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad), Jackson expanded beyond the Rainbow Coalition, which he called the political operation representing his core supporters. When he established the Rainbow Coalition in 1984, it represented only a single hue - black. By 1988, he'd added white and brown to his color chart, attracting white farmers in Iowa facing foreclosure, Mexican-American fieldworkers in the corporate farms of California, and Puerto Rican domestic workers in East Harlem, as well as a multiracial assemblage of industrial workers in the Rust Belt who'd seen the desire for corporations to make more money and reward shareholders instead of employees lead to their jobs going overseas. The 1980s ended as unhappily as they'd begun - George H.W. Bush locked Reagan's conservative revolution in place - but Jesse Jackson inspired people to dream bigger, he got more minorities to register to vote, he ran a pair of presidential campaigns that cleared the path for Barack Obama to win the Presidency, and he encouraged people to "keep hope alive." (The Rainbow Coalition and PUSH ultimately merged, becoming the Rainbow-PUSH Coalition.)
Jesse Jackson never tired. He fought back against one wave of right-wing activism after another, be it the Gingrich revolution, 2001 and 2003 George W. Bush tax cuts, or the Tea Party movement. Now, with MAGA beginning to falter and the movement Jackson nurtured and Sanders assumed breaking through, it seems like we as a people could soon get to the Promised Land. The Reverend Jackson obviously won't get there with the rest of us, but he was in the fight long enough to make it possible for the rest of us to get there. Unlike his mentor Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackson found that longevity had a place for him.
I never supported Jesse Jackson for President for one simple reason - I felt that, having held no previous elective office or had no previous military service, he was not qualified. (Alas, those two deficiencies failed to stop Donald Trump in 2016.) But I did support what he stood for. I still do. RIP.
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