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OUTHOUSE TO WHITE HOUSE?
From the guttermost, to the upper- most,' chants Jesse with a charmingly defiant smile; 'From the outhotise to the White House.'
The Democratic party leaders do not find it so quaint anymore. The Revd Jesse Jackson broke out of the Detroit ghetto to win a landslide victory in the Michigan caucus last Saturday. He won enough white votes to beat Mr Michael Dukakis by two to one — and to knock the car workers' candidate, Mr Richard Gephardt, out of the campaign altogether. All of a sudden it seems possible that the kingmak- er may crown himself.
President Jackson would be a colourful addition to Washington. His wife Jac- queline says she would not redecorate the White House because Nancy Reagan had already done it beautifully. But she would find other ways to spend money. The Jacksons are heirs to the Kennedys. They are Beautiful people with a taste for jets. In 1984, one of their top campaign aides resigned in disgust when she found out that the whole Jackson family was hopping back and forth across the Atlantic on Concorde.
The Rive Gauche of the Potomac would become the centre of intellectual fashion in a Jackson administration. The literary. Left would come from all over the Third World to celebrate the end of American imperial- ism. There would be plenty to celebrate. Jackson says that Jimmy Carter has 'a lot of milage left' and would make a good Secretary of State. Foreign policy would be a frightful mix of Carter morality and `Jackson action', as he calls it. Jackson seems willing to use American power abroad — more so than Dukakis who takes refuge in fatuous legalisms — but primarily against countries that are not hostile to the United States. He would support the ANC against South Africa, while at the same time restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba and Nicaragua. 'I'm a tree-shaker not a jelly-maker,' Mr Jackson says. 'The corporate barracudas' that commit 'economic violence' against the people would get the first shake. They are responsible for the unemployment disaster of the Reagan economy by closing factories in the United States, taking pro- duction offshore to exploit 'repressed' labour in South Korea and Taiwan, then reimporting the goods back into the coun- try. Never mind that capital is flowing into the United States, not out, that the current unemployment rate is 5.7 per cent, that 15 million new jobs have been created since 1980.
Jackson's economic speeches are non- sensical. There is little hint that he under- stands how wealth is created. His interest is in redistribution, not surprisingly for a man whose entire career has been spent in racial politics, much of it riding white guilt. 'The trouble with Jesse,' according to Mr Cole- man Young, the black mayor of Detroit, 'is that he ain't ever run nothing but his mouth.' He is an economic populist, a socialist of sorts, but without ideological underpin- nings, and therefore unlikely to persist in folly. Indeed, he has begun cultivating the Wall Street financier Mr Felix Rohatyn, and has mentioned Representative William Gray, the respected Chairman of the House budget committee, as a possible Treasury Secretary. They are liberals, but well with- in boundaries acceptable to American capitalism and to the permanent govern- ment in Washington.
Even so, Mr Jackson has not yet moved far enough to the centre. The latest surge of positive coverage by the American media may prove to be his peak in the 1988 campaign. Soon the 'alligators', as he calls the press (because they make allegations), will overcome their reluctance to hit a black too hard. He will be grilled on his ties with Arafat and Castro, his past fibs about Martin Luther King dying in his arms, his loose use of facts and figures, and his evasions. The symbolic phase of Jackson's candidacy is over. Now that he is seen as a possible nominee, Democrats will think twice about giving him a throw-away pro- test vote. On inspection, the joke of Mr Jackson as President does not seem so funny.
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