Standing over my seat in the airplane, he shadowboxes with the empty aisle just darkened for takeoff: "It's like a fighter who's got his guard up high, looking over at 'the Bear' " -- his head periscopes over his hands -- "and you expose yourself to these terrible body blows. Drugs." His midsection abruptly gives under the imagined punch, but the hands stay up. "Debt." He buckles again. "The purchasing of America. Energy." It is Jesse Jackson's analysis of the gut dismay he finds in contemporary America. He is an ecumenical collector of dismays.
"I start my policy toward Russia from here, from the hurt" -- he holds his aching fighter's sides -- "and move on out toward them." Protecting against the body blows, he argues, will make America stronger against the Russian Bear. "We've been leading with our left, with our left" -- he jabs, repeated, automatic. "Always military first, not economic, not diplomatic."
His aides complain that reporters cover his style, not his message. But he is remarkably successful in phrasing a message that others understand -- "keepin' the grass down where the goats can get at it," in the famous advice George Wallace gave him. ("We can't have no goats jumpin' in the air after grass," Jackson says.) Certainly his rivals have grasped his message, especially Richard Gephardt, who dramatized his anticorporate populism in a series of ads that led Michael Dukakis to say "That's Jesse's line." Jackson, picking up on that in a Des Moines debate, said he could not afford the slick ads, but sure enough, "That's my line. That's my line."
One aspect of Jackson's populism is not imitated by others -- certainly not by Gephardt with his xenophobic pitch. Jackson can establish emotional ties with the troubled, with dispossessed farmers, striking workers, the sick and the elderly. This empathy with white misfortune was the surprise in Iowa, where his flamboyant gentleness disarmed farmers and won improbable allies. More than any other candidate, he sends people away from his speeches happy, proud that they are somebody.
His populism can keep itself in motion without the prods of rancor. Even the villains of his moral fables -- the barracudas who devour little fish of all sorts ("barracudas swim very deep, where it's very dark; they can't even tell whether they are swallowing white fish or black fish") -- are not so much evil in their own waters, but mainly when they swim back at us from Taiwan. GE is attacked for selling goods made overseas with jobs the company took from America in the first place. Jackson's solution is to keep GE at home with a combination of tax penalties and tax incentives.