The only repeat runner among the Democratic candidates, Jesse Jackson is pushing hard to broaden his appeal beyond black America. This is one of a series of occasional profiles of major 1988 contenders.
Something positively weird is going on with the political career of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The angry outsider, the superheated maverick who used to beat up on the Democratic Party just four years ago, no longer seems angry. His shrillness has almost vanished. Sometimes he is even in danger of being bland.
Instead of threatening to bolt the party, he embraces it. At a gathering of Democrats in Atlanta, Jackson declared that while the party has both a conservative and a progressive wing, it needs two wings to fly. Democrats let out a sigh of relief. During a debate among the presidential candidates, the preacher sounded so reasonable he was almost irrelevant. His supporters argue this is a more mature Jackson. But the skeptics wink at that. They say Jesse is singing white music to get white votes.
In a Manchester, N.H., motel room one afternoon last month, Jackson rested under the sheets of a king-size bed. There was something sultan-like about him as he sat propped up, arms folded across his chest, wearing a white undershirt. His voice was the tip-off to his great pleasure as he told of large white audiences that turned out to see him around the country. 'There's a real phenomenon going on out there," Jackson said. Organizations that shunned him in 1984 now urge him to visit. The Montana state legislature gave him a standing ovation. He described how the faces of Iowa farmers and Louisiana energy workers changed from defeat to hope as he spoke to them. Suddenly Jackson began laughing, burying his face in the sheets. "A lot of them are real rednecks," he chuckled. They let Jackson know they didn't give a damn about civil rights. But they were thrilled at his cry about how their suffering should end. "No other candidate can bring groups like that together," he boasted.
Now Jackson climbed out of bed, pulled his dark pinstripe trousers up over his knee-high blue socks. He ran a wide comb through his hair. At 45 he has become puffy around the neck and middle. But his tall, erect frame and penetrating gaze are still imposing. His zeal for credibility includes wearing no jewelry or flashy clothes. "People want authenticity," he said. "I'm authentic."
Small wonder that Jackson has a somewhat enlarged view of himself. Last month, while speaking to voters in a New Hampshire living room, he was called to the telephone. He returned to tell the group that the nation of Angola was holding a white American pilot and wanted to return him only to Jackson. The impressed voters fell silent. Like some giant gypsy moth, Jackson is drawn to crises, which offer him splendid opportunities for public exposure. Last fall when a race riot erupted at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he was asked to come help calm the campus. When the controversy over too few blacks in baseball management surfaced, Jackson quickly called Commissioner Peter Ueberroth and invited himself to address the owners. Ueberroth acquiesced.
Much of his early life was taken up in an endless quest for recognition. For years Jesse Jackson has been a man on a hunt for respect.