Over the rainbow: Jesse Jackson's supporters keep hope alive.

Just weeks before the 1996 Presidential election, on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara, more than 6,000 students turned out for one of the year's loudest and most energetic political rallies. Local candidates jockeyed for positions near the podium. Hundreds of new voters filled out the registration forms that the featured speaker urged on them.

Who was this featured speaker? Bill Clinton? Bob Dole? No, it was Jesse Jackson, doing what he has done for the better part of thirty years. In the midst of an election season when political dynamism was in short supply, Jackson drew thousands to churches, stadiums theaters, and union halls in Orlando, Little Rock, Lincoln, Des Moines, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York 

Jackson attracted little national media coverage this campaign season. But people came out in droves to see him. "This fall, you kept seeing that Jesse was the one drawing the crowds--2,000 here, 5,000 there," says Chris Townsend, political-action director for the United Electrical Workers union. "Everywhere he went, he was proving what we've always said: If you talk to people where they're at, if you talk about what they're talking about--jobs, fear of losing jobs, the fact that communities are falling down around them--you'll get their attention. They'll turn off their television sets and come out and listen to you. The thing about this fall was that Jesse was just about the only national figure who was willing to make any noise."

Newly elected Chicago Congressman Danny Davis, who has known Jackson for three decades, agrees. "He is touching people by stating the truths that would otherwise be left unspoken."

While the leaders of both major parties stumbled over one another to take credit for punitive welfare reforms, Jackson reminded farmers and factory workers in Iowa that "the threat to America comes not from the working poor but from corporate downsizing and outsourcing." He accused politicians from both parties of "trying to build reputations off their attacks on domestic welfare." He did not mince words about the underlying pitch of these politicians. "There is an awful lot of race-baiting laced into the welfare focus and the affirmative-action focus of our debate these days," Jackson told a multiracial crowd in Madison, Wisconsin. "And we know why that is: They are out to divide us again. They cannot have us talking about corporate welfare and health care for all, so they raise false issues to get us fighting. We do not have to fight with one another. We do not have to divide and be conquered."

But to the dismay of many progressives, Jackson provided Clinton with vital cover on the welfare issue. Jackson's eloquent speech at the Democratic Convention, coming a mere two weeks after Clinton's signing of the punitive welfare bill, shored up the President's base among disenchanted Democrats.

Jackson's continued support for the Democratic Party, even when it violates the very principles he passionately promotes, troubles a lot of people on the left. Still, Jackson was the most vocal Democrat advocating progressive politics during the 1996 elections. His name did not appear on the ballot, as did that of consumer activist Ralph Nader. But where Nader was invisible, Jackson was everywhere. Where Nader dodged controversial social issues, such as gay rights, affirmative action, and immigration, Jackson took them head on.

Jackson led the effort against Proposition 209, the California initiative to eliminate affirmative action. He traveled again and again to the state, organized huge rallies in Los Angeles and other cities, and headlined a late September bus tour that took opponents of the proposal from San Francisco to San Diego.

When he wasn't defending affirmative action, Jackson fed a voter-registration drive in dozens of cities across the United States. And he campaigned actively in behalf of progressive Democrats seeking House seats.

He also waged a fight over the legacy of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. When the Republican National Committee and the California Republican Party revealed in late October that they planned to use footage from King's "I Have a Dream" speech in a $2 million television advertising campaign attacking affirmative action, Jackson, a former King aide, cried foul. "This is blasphemy," Jackson declared. "For the right-wing Republicans to try to put Martin Luther King and David Duke on the same side of history is an atrocity.?"

The Rainbow Coalition, along with other groups, stirred up so much furor over the ads that the Republicans finally agreed to recut them--without the footage of King.

"Whether you like Jackson or not, the man is out there--getting involved in real issues, making contact with real people, bringing together coalitions that might not exist without him," says Townsend of the Electrical Workers. "Jackson still goes out and gets his hands dirty He throws himself into people's struggles. That gives people a sense of hope and movement that, frankly, they weren't getting much of from anyone else this year."

Since Jackson has reasserted himself as a political player, some on the left hope that he will gear up for another Presidential run in the year 2000. Others argue that such an effort would be a waste of time, as well as a desperate confession that the left has failed to develop new leadership.

Critics of Jackson note that he failed to build a viable national force after his previous two Presidential runs, and that his personality-based politics does not provide the long-term organizational strength the left needs.

Bob Kasen, an organizer for the Labor Party, fears that another Jackson run will be an exercise in futility. "Jesse knows how to run for President and he knows how to get a chunk of votes," he says. "But we've done that. We've seen where it gets us. Running a Presidential campaign is a great way to blow off steam. But where does blowing off steam get us?"

Like a good many organizers, Kasen, a veteran union activist, says progressives have to step running Presidential campaigns that suck energy away from the long-term grassroots organizing necessary to build an alternative to the politics that gave 1996 voters the bland choice of Bill Clinton or Bob Dole.

"I've heard the argument that the way to build a movement is to run a candidate for president. But Jesse ran in 1988, and where was the movement that came out of that?" says Kasen. "It just doesn't make sense to keep pouring everything we've got into Presidential campaigns that aren't going to win. I just don't understand how you can effectively move in the political arena until you've built the base--and you just cannot build that base from the top down. You can't start with a Presidential campaign, even when you've got a candidate like Jesse, and expect to build something that lasts."

Still, there are those who salivate at the prospect of a Jackson candidacy. "There's a real tendency in politics to say something's impossible until it's done. Then everyone says, `Oh, yeah, I knew we could do it,'" says Jackson aide Steve Cobble. who recalls that Ronald Reagan, a man many said could never be President, won on his third try.

One threshold question for Jackson is whether to stay in the Democratic Party or leave.

"Jackson has to make the hard decision--stop following the people who lead us over the cliff every time," says Ronnie Dugger, founder of The Texas Observer and organizer of The Alliance, a new populist group. "Jesse really ought to join the e effort to form a people's movement that is independent of the Democratic Party. We've been sold out too many times and for too long."

One longtime supporter, who asked not to be identified, doubts Jackson will take the plunge."Would Jesse ever run on a third line? I think we've seen this year--with his support of Clinton--that he'll never leave the Democratic Party."

Jackson may still cling to the hope that he has some pull with the new Clinton Administration, given the support he gave it in the election campaign. He will soon find out if he has any.

"We've got some run-ins scheduled with Clinton right away. It's not just welfare reform, which Jackson and everyone else with an ounce of sense knows is a sewer," Townsend says. "It's also overtime--this bozo Clinton wants to eliminate our overtime protection. So there are going to be some fights almost immediately. Jackson has to figure out how he's going to deal with Clinton, how he's going to call in the chits that Clinton owes him. And if he gets the `fuck you' from the White House, then Jackson can't turn around and say `OK.' He has to respond in some kind of effective way."

Much of Jackson's response will come via the Rainbow/PUSH Action Network, an amalgam of the National Rainbow Coalition and Operation PUSH, the two organizations Jackson has headed over the years. Started twenty-five years ago in Chicago, Operation PUSH has traditionally used boycotts, picket lines, and negotiations to promote economic empowerment, while the Rainbow Coalition, formed after Jackson's 1984 Presidential campaign, has been more explicitly political.

"Since there's such a connection between political empowerment and coalition-building, and economic empowerment and expansion, we're pulling these two organizations together to be more efficient and more effective," says Jackson, who claims that he wants Rainbow/PUSH, headquartered in Chicago, to become the premier nationwide organization responding to the nation's drift to the right.

At a September convention in Chicago, the two organizations formally merged and adopted an ambitious agenda that promises to build chapters in every state and city, and on high-school and college campuses around the country. Jackson says the group will also seek to forge "serious coalitions across lines of race, gender, religion, and class."

"After November, the Rainbow/PUSH Action Network must hold on to the moral center, build its ranks all across the country, and lead a tenacious fight for expansive, inclusive, humane politics in America," Jackson told the September gathering.

With help from veteran aide Cobble, Jackson moved quickly in the fall to flex the network's political muscle, mobilizing support for progressive candidates.

But whether the Rainbow can again streak across the political sky remains to be seen. "There's a dense network of people out there who are still very big fans of Reverend Jackson, but pulling them together into an organization like this will take an incredible amount of work," says Dan Cantor, national organizer for the New Party.

Jackson failed to keep a previous incarnation of the Rainbow thriving long after his 1988 campaign. While there was a great deal of grassroots energy in individual communities around the country, the organization did not gel at the national level, and the vast majority of its chapters disintegrated.

"As the Rainbow began to fade around the country, it was harder to get hold of anyone at the national office and to get much follow-through," recalls Wisconsin Democratic State Representative Tammy Baldwin, who was once active in the Madison chapter. "For a while we didn't care about the lack of contact. But eventually we started to feel like an entity standing alone, and that made it harder to continue independently."

Still. Baldwin--like many others--remains loyal to the Rainbow concept, and is excited by the prospect that Jackson might devote his energies in coming years to its revitalization.

"The spirit that brings a broad range of people together for political action is still desperately needed." she says. "There are a number of groups that try to make that happen. But the Rainbow really achieved it for a while there. At its best, the Rainbow Coalition created a unique brand of activism--and I'd like very much to see it re-created."

But what would a renewed Rainbow be? Would the organization merely become a vehicle for a future Jackson Presidential candidacy?

Some worry that Jackson might, in Townsend's words, "become a liberal Harold Stassen"--a reference to the former Minnesota governor whose repeated runs for the Republican Presidential nomination grew increasingly ineffectual.

Others think Jackson would be a serious contender in a primary contest with \rice President Al Gore and Missouri Representative Dick Gephardt. "Jesse Jackson still reaches people in ways that no one else can," admitted Gore, who was a rival of Jackson's for the 1988 Democratic Presidential nomination and is now the frontrunner for the party's nod in 2000. "People make a mistake when they underestimate him."

Some believe that Jackson will attempt to transfer the loyalty of his followers to his son, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., who was just reelected to Congress representing a south-side Chicago district. At the Democratic National Convention. Jackson the elder was clearly promoting his son's political career in the Democratic Party. The younger Jackson combines solid political skills, a progressive perspective, and a somewhat mellower style than his dad.

But for now Jesse Jackson Sr. seems as determined as ever to carry the torch. "We must never surrender," he says. "And we must keep building coalitions--because only when the workers and women and ethnic minorities identify their common interests do we move the country forward.".