Jackson advocated higher taxes on the rich. At a labor forum in Baltimore, he cited figures showing just how regressive Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts had been and declared, “He’s brought in reverse Robin Hood, taking from the poor and giving to the rich.” On the airport tarmac in his home state of South Carolina, which was losing textile jobs in large numbers, he criticized manufacturers for moving their operations overseas and called for policies to encourage companies “to invest in America, retrain our workers, reindustrialize America.” At a white-owned dairy farm outside of Greenville, he bemoaned the demise of family farms and shared a breakfast of eggs and grits with the farm’s owner and a neighbor. Although the farmers wouldn’t publicly commit to voting for their illustrious visitor, one of them said, “The American people like what he’s saying.”
In Black communities, Jackson consistently attracted big crowds, but even there he delivered a message that crossed racial lines. One of his stops was in Selma, Alabama, where, in 1965, state troopers and local police brutalized unarmed Black demonstrators. (It was this incident that prompted Jackson, then a seminary student in Chicago, to go to the South, where he joined other civil-rights activists and met Martin Luther King, Jr.) Speaking at a local school, he saluted those who took part in the Selma demonstration and the subsequent marches to Montgomery. Then he changed tack. “Twenty years ago, it was Black versus white,” he said. “Now it is the barracudas versus the small fish.” He went on, “Beyond social justice is the quest for economic justice and fairness. That is what the American people are looking for in this campaign. My campaign represents hope and fairness.”
In certain political circles, the rap on Jackson was that he was all talk. (In a 1990 magazine article, the Los Angeles Times quoted Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington, D.C., as saying, “Jesse don’t wanna run nothing but his mouth.”) But in 1988, Jackson’s oratory was backed up by an expansive policy platform, which called for hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for education, child care, housing, and infrastructure projects. The details included a national investment bank to back major development projects, a raise in the federal minimum wage, legislation to make it easier for labor unions to organize, an expansion of Medicaid, a proposal to mobilize capital from public pension funds to build low-income housing, and a national early-childhood-education program. Jackson was responding to rising concerns, among Americans of all races, about jobs, wages, affordability, and inequality—concerns that have now bedevilled the country for nearly forty years. “He was like a sponge: he took in everything,” Robert Borosage, a veteran progressive activist and author who served as Jackson’s issues director on the 1988 campaign, said when I called him up last week. “And he was very ambitious, and he wanted a very ambitious program.”