Never mind what the presidential candidates are saying. And forget the media gibberish about whether Al Gore is an “Alpha-male” or George W. Bush knows who’s running Pakistan.
If you want to know which way voters will be leaning in next year’s elections, keep your eye on the two Jesses.
That’s Jesse Helms and Jesse Jackson. They are the secret weapons, respectively, of the Democratic and Republican parties.
And no, I didn’t get that mixed up.
Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), and what he represents (the southern captivity of the Republican Party), is the best thing the Democrats have going. Every time Sen. Helms lauds the Confederate Stars and Bars, every time he kills the nomination of a gay diplomat or sticks an anti-abortion rider onto a foreign-aid bill, he forces the Great American Middle–the folks who will decide the outcome of next year’s elections–to confront the sorry condition of the Grand Old Party of Lincoln.
Jesse Helms turns independents into Democrats.
Rev. Jesse Jackson (a one-time Democratic presidential candidate and civil rights leader from South Carolina, Chicago and the world) is the best thing the Republicans have going. Every time Jackson jumps into a racial or diplomatic trouble spot, as he did last week in Decatur, and reduces a complex situation into one of his catchy, made-for-TV rhymes, he forces the Great Middle to confront the sad state of the Democratic Party and its ever-so-correct politics of victimization.
Jesse Jackson creates Republicans.
As much as we might like to think otherwise, this is the stuff that makes middle-class Americans get out and vote. It’s not the difference between the health-care plans of Al Gore and Bill Bradley or the foreign policy expertise of George Bush and John McCain. It’s people getting ticked off at what they see on TV and read in their newspaper. It’s people voting against those who offend their sense of fair play.
And nothing gets people more stirred up than our never-ending national soap opera about race fairness and exploitation. Only the abortion issue registers as strongly on the anger meter. But those two opposing camps are dug-in, off-setting and inert. It’s the race issue–everything from cross burnings to affirmative-action debates–that is the central political dynamic of our time.
Last week, thanks to the two Jesses, the undecided Middle witnessed plenty to push them one way or the other.
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There was Helms, sneering at former Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun and saying that, while he would no longer block her nomination as ambassador to New Zealand, he sure-as-sugar wasn’t about to vote for it.
Weeks ago, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said he wouldn’t consider her nomination unless Moseley-Braun personally apologized for saying uncomplimentary things about the Southern habit of displaying the Stars and Bars on everything from club logos to license plates. Seems she thought it had something to do with slavery and a war fought long ago. Later, after Republicans with more political sense pulled Helms aside and explained the symbolism involved, the 78-year-old senator switched arguments. He dredged up the tired criticisms used to defeat Moseley-Braun in last year’s U.S.senate race in Illinois. (That she made an unauthorized visit to a dictatorship in Africa. That she spent campaign funds on personal items.)
A lot of fair-minded voters probably suspected those criticisms were overdone back then. So it was confirming to hear them drawled from the lips of Jesse Helms, who has made a career of stirring up white resentment against blacks. So ask yourself: Did anyone raise a stink back in 1996 when Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) went on a little-publicized Asian junket that included Myanmar (formerly Burma), a country that was, and is, run by a military junta as brutal as any African strongman visited by Moseley-Braun? Of course not. Hastert isn’t a barrier-breaking, African-American woman. Nor is George Ryan, which may explain why the Moseley-Braun-haters had nothing but good things to say about the governor’s recent pilgrimage to Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
Then there was the other Jesse–the Rev. Jackson–descending on blue-collar Decatur with his rhetorical flamethrower, lighting up a hard-luck central Illinois town that has been struggling with the double-whammy of deindustrialization and racial change.
As with his unofficial negotiating with the Serbian butcher, Slobodan Milosevic, Jackson opted for the spotlight again.
But there he was in Decatur, demanding that young toughs who never had much use for school prior to their expulsion be returned immediately to same. There he was, comparing their violent gang-rumble at a high school football game to on-rink fighting in the National Hockey League.
Decatur is a town of lunch-bucket working people who can’t afford to send their kids to elite private schools (as did Jesse Jackson) and who lack the political influence to set their children up with a congressional seat or a beer distributorship (as has Jesse Jackson).
Now they and their school board are being portrayed as a bunch of rednecks because they dared stand up against thuggery and intimidation in their public high school. They must be counting the days in Decatur until they can go and vote for the party of Jesse Helms.
Too bad neither party has the guts to tell their Jesse to chill out or get out.