The Rainbow's Gravity (Page 5)

Someone else was doing outreach. In the spring of '89, Al From, intellectual architect of the Democratic Leadership Council, paid a visit to Governor Clinton in Little Rock. Unlike progressive forces, the backlash Democrats recognized the utility of a charismatic candidate, and of starting early. For 1984 they'd won rules changes, introducing the concept of "superdelegates" to shift power from party activists to elected officials. Jackson managed to negotiate limits on those delegates in 1984. The next year the DLC formally constituted itself. For '88 it advocated one big Southern primary, Super Tuesday, to secure the nomination, it expected, for a white conservative. Jackson swept Super Tuesday, besting the DLC's favorite son, Al Gore. When Jackson then took 54 percent of the vote in Michigan, what appeared in tantalizing prospect was a new party paradigm--neither the New Deal alliance of Northern liberals, blue collars and Jim Crow, nor post-McGovern liberalism with its smorgasbord of interests and its white elite firmly in charge of portion-control. Party liberals had a choice; they chose reaction.

As outlined in Kenneth Baer's Reinventing Democrats, From and Co. were straightforward about rolling back the party to its pre-civil rights past, where the issue of "special interests" would be submerged for the goal of winning, and winning would mean reinstituting what Congressman Jackson calls the "Democratic Legacy of the Confederacy." In the run-up to the 1992 race, Clinton's people, as recounted in Marshall Frady's book Jesse, would confer with old Mondale hands asking, "Why did you guys give so much to Jackson? You shouldn't've got pushed around like that." The iconic image of '92 would be Clinton and Senator Sam Nunn posing at Stone Mountain, Georgia, the graven images of the Confederacy's heroes looming in the background, and in the middle distance, a group of black prisoners.

"The error," says Kevin Gray, who coordinated Jackson's winning campaign in South Carolina in '88 and organized for the '84 win as well, "was in assuming we ever left the Age of Reagan, and not carrying the critique to the Age of Clinton. Where Jesse dropped the ball is he became a Democrat. Instead of a small-d democrat, he became a big-D Democrat--except with an asterisk."

Asterisk? "You know the line, 'World champions and you MVP, you a nigger,/Four degrees and a PhD, still a nigger.' And that's exactly how I think the Democratic Party sees Jesse. Now, I have disagreements with the brother--I think he squandered his leverage, which was our leverage, because the beauty of Jesse running was the threat that we all might one day walk, or even the threat to disrupt things, and for African-Americans in this political system, hell, that's the only power we got. That and moral authority, especially as relates to a Democratic Party that styles itself as having the interests of black folk at heart. Are they living up to it? Hell no. But, now, everybody else got to look in that mirror too. What did the Rainbow stripes get from Bill Clinton? And where were progressive forces on that?"

By a brisk accounting, the black stripe of the Rainbow got the crime bill, women got "welfare reform," labor got NAFTA, gays and lesbians got DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act). Even with a Democratic Congress in the early years, the peace crowd got no cuts in the military; unions got no help on the right to organize; advocates of DC statehood, which would virtually guarantee more Democrats in Congress, got nothing. None of them fought together, if they fought at all. On affirmative action, Jackson had to threaten Clinton privately with an independent run in 1996 before the President declared, "Mend it, don't end it." Marable points out that between Clinton's inaugural and the day he left office, some 650,000 more people were incarcerated; today one in eight black men is barred from voting because of prison, probation or parole. "Talk about amputating your base," he says. Ideologically, however, it was not Clinton's base, the DLC base, that was attacked. It was Jackson's base, the Rainbow base.

Now for every national election, the party underwrites Jackson's loyalty by contracting him to boost voter participation. He believes in it, but the indifference of those South Carolina teenagers last year is multiplied many times over in black communities, where, as Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a progressive South Carolina legislator who was a 1984 Jackson delegate, says, "I hear it all the time: 'I ain't votin'. Ain't nothin' gonna change.'" Half a million blacks in the state are "missing voters," she says, either unregistered or no-shows on Election Day, and no one person can "deliver them all." Nationwide the number is 13 million. Counting whites and others similarly disposed, mostly poor and working-class, it's 100 million. For Jackson there's a contradiction in being a prophetic voice of opposition and the party's paid vote rustler. As he knows better than anyone, people don't vote for just anyone--perhaps the greatest, discounted lesson of 1984.

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