The Political Interest Rumblings on the Left

By Michael Kramer

"He spent his campaign distancing himself from me. Now that he's President he's trying to dismiss me. He's trying to prop up other black leaders. It's not working. Look at the polls; walk the streets. The other guys don't have the juice. It's only me."

Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton have never much liked each other, and the divide is widening. Indeed, at the exact moment last Friday when Clinton was cementing the support of centrist Democrats in Washington, Jackson was in a New York City synagogue eulogizing a labor leader whose life's work represented the best of the disappearing black-Jewish civil rights coalition. Neither Jackson nor Clinton swiped at the other directly during those appearances -- Jackson's slurs came before and after his public comments -- but the thrust of their presentations could hardly have been more different. The President talked about mutual obligation and individual responsibility (two themes one can as easily hear from Jackson), but his claim that Democrats must "express the basic values of mainstream Americans" clashed with Jackson's insistence that the Administration's policies require "us to organize" to protect minority interests.

His point, Jackson explained later, is that "blacks still live in America's West Bank. We're still after respect in a white-dominated society that paints us as the face of welfare. Clinton hasn't corrected that false impression. What we have now is the Bush program we thought we'd defeated. Our quarterback has joined the other team. We were promised relief from things like bank redlining and the unequal funding of school districts. In fact, we've gotten nothing."

In fact, though, poor Americans (who are disproportionately black) have already gotten a great deal from Clinton. The Administration's fivefold expansion in the earned-income tax credit, for example, guarantees that no family headed by a full-time worker will any longer live in poverty. But Jackson sees none of it. He hears Clinton's rhetoric and complains that "we get the caring words and the other side, the rich businessmen, get the cash."

Clinton conceded last week that "Jesse is right in the sense that we're kidding ourselves if we believe we can rebuild the fabric of life . . . if there is no work." But Jackson snickered at the President's understanding of the problem: "More nice talk," he said.

Clinton's tenure shouldn't be measured by its first 10 months, but the easily slighted Jackson is already threatening the President's re-election. "He thinks we'll have nowhere to go except with him in '96," says Jackson. "Well, that's what other Democrats thought when they talked the talk but then didn't deliver. Those guys, like ((New Jersey Governor Jim)) Florio, fooled us the first time around. We weren't foolish the second time. Florio didn't lose because the black vote was suppressed. He lost because blacks were depressed and didn't vote."

In another attempted wake-up call, Jackson is talking about an independent candidacy that could have the same electoral effect -- Clinton's defeat. "It's like where I was 20 years ago," says Jackson, referring to his almost candidacy in 1972. Back then Jackson said, "I don't trust white Republicans or white Democrats; I want a black party." He's too clever to echo those inflammatory words today, but his meaning is the same. "To get respect, we've got to be free agents," he says. "We won't be taken for granted" -- which means that Jackson himself wants to be taken seriously. Clinton has the power, the smarts and more than enough time to stroke Jackson, and he surely will if he determines he must.