Fear, Loathing, and a Black Reverend on the Campaign Trail, 1984
January 25, 1984
Washington National Airport
Washington, D.C.
While the drinks were a rip-off, at least the beer nuts were good, thought Reverend Jesse Jackson. He and his campaign staff were stuck at the bar in Washington’s National Airport for a few hours, waiting for their plane to be de-iced. While money was trickling in to Jackson’s campaign from all sorts of sources, corporate included, they were still an understaffed insurgency. Church’s sudden withdrawal had thrown the race into chaos, but Mondale, Glenn and Hart still had the top-of-the-line operatives and party machinery behind them. Jackson had the black community, and was making inroads among the remnants of the activist left, but he was still decidedly third in the polls.
“Shit weather, huh?” asked the man across from Jackson. Milton Coleman, reporter for the
Washington Post, sipped his whiskey. One of the few black men on staff at the prestigious paper, Jackson appreciated that he had chosen to cover Jackson’s campaign rather than one of the leading white men. Jackson nodded and took a sip of his beer, feeling the foam bubble against his mustache.
“Headed up to New York, it won’t be any better.”
“You could say that again.”
There were a few moments of silence, then Coleman started again. “How do you feel about your chances in Iowa, Reverend?”
Jackson laughed. “Milton, I think you’ve read the polling.”
Coleman nodded. “You’ll need to win in states like Iowa if you want to be president.”
Jackson responded. “I think we’ve got a chance, if we can make it through the hurdles now. New York is a more natural place to start than the prairies though, for pretty obvious reasons.”
Coleman, whose notepad and pen had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, continued. “What makes New York different?”
Jackson immediately became wary. While Coleman seemed like a friend, he was still a journalist, and thus more shark than man. He clearly smelled blood. “New Yorkers live with America’s great melting pot every single day. You’ve got Negros, Chinese folks, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Poles and, uh, Jews, and that’s just Brooklyn!”
Coleman and sipped his beer. Jackson thought carefully for a moment, and then continued. “For too long, the people in power have used bigotry to divide from each other. Jim Crow pitted the poor white man against the poor black man, letting the poor white man kick the poor black man so that he wouldn’t notice he was poor. President Rumsfeld continues to pit the people against each other. I’m running because I want our country to be united. Ending racism and addressing the morally reprehensible levels of poverty ravaging America go hand in hand.”
As Coleman scribbled his notes down, one of Jackson’s aides tapped him on the shoulder. “Reverend, they’re tellin’ me our plane is ready. We need to get goin’.”
Jackson got to his feet and reached out. “Nice to spend a few with you, Milton. Hope you don’t go to hard on me in the paper.”
Coleman winked and shook Jackson’s hand. “Don’t worry, Reverend. If there was, I’m sure you’d already know.”
***
Entries from Saripedia.org
The United States presidential election of 1984 was the nation’s 50th presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 4, 1984. The contest was between incumbent Republican President Donald Rumsfeld and Democratic challenger, the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson. Despite a weak economy and relatively low approval ratings for President Rumsfeld, Jackson’s inexperience and a divisive, often racially-charged campaign by the Republican side gave Rumsfeld a narrow electoral victory…
Republican Primary
Rumsfeld faced effectively no challenge for the nomination for president on the Republican ticket, with perennial loser Harold Stassen and a small-time New York comedian running under the name “Ronnie Raygun” as his two most prominent opponents. Rumsfeld could thus spend the primary period watching the Democrats tear themselves apart and looking presidential, while relying on Vice-President Paul Laxalt as his partisan attack dog.
Yet, not all was well for the President. With the invasion of Belize by Guatemala in April 1983, Rumsfeld was forced to cease shipments of military aid to the erstwhile dictatorship, which was a key American ally in the Cold War. Rumsfeld refused to fully support the United Kingdom in its tough response though, calling for peace talks and showing willingness to negotiate away Belizean independence. This caused a significant chill in Anglo-American relations, with secretary for Northern Ireland Tom King going so far as to label Rumsfeld’s policy “cowardly tripe”.
Guatemala struggled under the arms embargo, although continued to purchase large supplies of materiel from its neighbors and other allies like Chile and South Africa. As the media would eventually discover though, much of this materiel was American stock, routed through these third-party militaries. First reported by the San Diego Chronicle in June of 1983, the Guatemalan arms pipeline fiasco became an increasingly large headache for the administration. While it is unclear if the Rumsfeld administration was aware of these arms transfer –and even if they were, whether they had violated U.S. law– the steady drip-drip of scandal, exacerbated by the administration’s reluctance to hand relevant documents over to Senate and House investigations or suspend aid to the relevant militaries. This hurt the President, and made many liberal activists eager for a sharp break with the present political climate…
Democratic Primary
Contrary to the previous election, where the Democrats were relatively united while the Republicans engaged in a rough-and-tumble primary, the Democratic primary campaign of 1984 was long and undecided until just before the convention. With the death of former Vice-President Henry “Scoop” Jackson in September 1983 from a heart attack, the Democrats had no presumptive nominee. This opened the door for a bloody primary season…
Initially, Frank Church was as the favorite to win the Democratic nomination, pushed into the front-runner position by the party elite. Church, Secretary of State under the Udall administration and a popular former Senator from Idaho, had strong foreign policy credentials and was well-liked by the party’s liberal activists, while also being palatable to the general electorate. By early January, he had raised more money than any other establishment candidate. However, even with these advantages, the long-winded, liberal Church was not an heir-apparent, and seen as vulnerable. In response, a number of other mainline Democrats stepped in, including Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale, Ohio Senator John Glenn, California Senator Alan Cranston, former Florida Governor Reuben Askew and Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen. Relying on state party machinery and attempting to differentiate themselves by focusing on specific policy areas, these candidates divided the party establishment’s support, although most party leaders fell in behind Church.
The race was thrown further into chaos when, just two weeks before the Iowa caucus, Church was hospitalized. After only a few days of rumors swirling, Church briefly rose from his sickbed to announce that he had pancreatic cancer, and was withdrawing from the race immediately. When both Senator Ted Kennedy and former President Udall refused to enter the race as an establishment “white knight” candidate, the field was left wide open…
Meanwhile, several insurgent candidates also emerged, benefitting substantially from the divisions in the party establishment. Colorado Senator Gary Hart was a political unknown when he announced his run February 1983, barely winning 1% of the vote in polls compared to nationally-known figures. To counter this, Hart started campaigning early in New Hampshire. By late 1983, he had risen in the polls to the middle of the field, mostly at the expense of the sinking candidacies of Reuben Askew and Alan Cranston. Hart shocked much of the party establishment and the media by narrowly winning the Iowa caucus, following by the New Hampshire primary, which he won by ten percentage points. Hart immediately became the frontrunner for the nomination, as he appeared to have “The Big Mo’” on his side.
Unlike most other candidates in the race though, Hart had no clear base support group among the Democratic Party’s factions or party machinery. Instead, he criticized the current crop of candidates as "old-fashioned" New Deal Democrats who symbolized "failed policies" of the past. Hart positioned himself as a younger, fresher, and more moderate Democrat who could appeal to younger voters and other disaffected groups, while remaining moderate enough to defeat President Rumsfeld. Without a crucial base of support within a particular bloc of voters –such African-Americans or working-class whites– his support was fragile though. Moreover, activists worried about his inexperience and sometimes-nebulous rhetoric.
This came to a head during a televised debate in February between the candidates. Hart committed a serious faux pas that threw into question his grasp of foreign policy. Asked what he would do if an unidentified airplane flew over the Iron Curtain from a Warsaw Pact nation, Hart replied that he'd send up a United States Air Force plane and instruct them to determine whether or not it was an enemy plane by looking in the cockpit window to see if the pilots were wearing uniforms. Fellow candidate John Glenn, a former fighter pilot, replied that this was physically impossible, making Hart look foolish and unprepared.
Later in the debate, Walter Mondale went in for the kill, using a popular television commercial slogan to ridicule Hart's vague "New Ideas" platform. After Hart had attacked Mondale’s partial support for Rumsfeld’s policies in Central America and calling for “new thinking”, Mondale struck back. Turning to Hart on camera, Mondale said that whenever he heard Hart talk about his "New Ideas", he was reminded of the Wendy's fast-food slogan “Where's the beef?”. The remark drew loud laughter and applause from the audience and caught Hart off-guard. Hart never fully recovered from Mondale's charge that his "New Ideas" were shallow and lacking in specifics, and his support began to quickly migrate to other insurgent candidates, while establishment support began to consolidate behind Mondale and the more moderate Glenn…
Meanwhile, Sam Nunn, junior Senator from Georgia, led the party’s shrinking white Southern wing into battle. Nunn had launched an abortive primary challenge of President Udall in 1980, which brought him notoriety and name recognition among Southern whites. He ran to “take the party back from the elites”, casting himself as a tough-on-defense, culturally conservative moderate who could beat Rumsfeld at his own game. Nunn narrowly won the Wyoming and Florida primaries, securing the endorsement of Reuben Askew in the process. However, he lost Alabama and his home state of Georgia, with John Glenn nipping at his heels among more moderate whites and the large black vote overwhelmingly favoring Jackson…
The candidate who ultimately benefited the most from the disorder in the Democratic establishment, along with the collapse of Gary Hart’s campaign, was the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Jackson’s candidacy was initially seen as something between a protest and a joke. However, as the second black person to run a nationally competitive primary campaign, he immediately affirmed the importance of the black vote to the Democratic Party. While Jackson was strongly associated with the black community, his platform called for the formation of a “Rainbow Coalition” of minority groups, progressive activists and the white working class, aiming to create a “Second New Deal”. Jackson, who worked outside of electoral politics, was considered a breath of fresh air untarnished by cooperation with the Republicans or an ambiguous voting record.
While the first several primary states were held in predominantly white states, Jackson surprised everyone by winning nearly 25% of the vote in Vermont, due to the enthusiastic support of popular Burlington mayor Bernie Sanders, although the state’s delegates went to Gary Hart. Jackson then followed this with wins in Alabama and Georgia, where high African-American turnout and division of the white vote between Glenn, Mondale and Nunn gave Jackson the margin he needed for a clear victory.
Jackson continued to surge across the country, with liberal supporters of Gary Hart and left-leaning activists shifting towards his campaign. Racialized tactics by the Nunn campaign, aiming to mobilize white voters, backfired, with Jackson gaining new supporters both out of sympathy and from his calm, dignified response to the attacks on his character. Jackson even made gains among Catholic working class voters due to his moderate pro-life stance and economic populism, promising to protect “American jobs” from foreign competition. A second place finish in Michigan behind the moderate Glenn, along with a victory in Illinois, pushed that Jackson into first place, if not by a large margin. The Democratic Party had a new frontrunner, and what many party elites believed was a serious problem…
The Democratic National Convention began without a nominee. Jackson had a clear plurality of delegates, but could not assemble a majority. The party elite faced dual fears. On one hand, Jackson was in many ways a new McGovern: far too liberal for the American electorate, with the added impediment of being African-American. At the same time, any attempt to withhold the nomination from Jackson could cause an irreversible split in the party with a third-party run by the Reverend, or at least severely reduced turnout among the party’s base. Moreover, while Mondale was the leading establishment candidate, he was seen as inexperienced, prone to gaffes and weak on foreign policy. Meanwhile, while John Glenn was a war hero and astronaut, he was a notoriously soporific public speaker who would be no match for Rumsfeld’s charisma. While the party’s “super-delegates” deliberated, Mondale, Glenn and Hart, who had won enough delegates to be a factor, tried to negotiate a combined establishment ticket, to no avail.
By the evening of the second day, with the deadlock unbroken, delegates began to migrate to Jackson’s camp: while many people had doubts about his ability to win the election, the idea of selecting a man who could be America’s first black president held a strong emotional appeal for many of the party’s activists. With their support crumbling, around 11:00pm on July 17, with his delegates steaming to Jackson in droves, establishment frontrunner Mondale agreed to cede the nomination. Jackson wasted no time selecting Senator John Glenn as his running mate in a move to unite the party. The ticket was set, and the race was on…
The General Election
The 1984 election was extraordinarily divisive, characterized by character assassination, exaggerated claims of progress and doom, corruption, and, particularly from the Republican side, implicit and explicit race-baiting. It reinforced and deepened the country’s political realignment in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 electoral victory, with the country increasingly becoming polarized between those who saw Donald Rumsfeld as a savior from threatened chaos caused by liberals and progressives, and those who saw him as a pair of horns short of Mephistopheles himself…
Following the messy brokered end to the Democratic nomination process, and with a Republican coronation of President Rumsfeld, polling put the sitting President ahead by nearly 20 percentage points. However, Rumsfeld was vulnerable. Sharply falling oil prices and high interest rates had reduced inflation, but the economy was still growing slowly, while manufacturing jobs and other industry continued to downsize or move operations out of the United States to emerging centers of production in Asia. Rumsfeld’s strong support for free trade, including a push for more open trade relations with Mexico and the war-torn countries of Central America, were unpopular positions among the white working-class voters, so-called “Reagan Democrats” that had propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. Meanwhile, his other policy accomplishments –including a comprehensive tax reform and cuts to welfare spending favored by conservative Democrats and Republicans– had failed to noticeably improve the economy.
Meanwhile, Jesse Jackson, who focused his campaign on “protecting and uplifting the American worker and middle class of every color and creed” began to make rapid gains. Jackson advocated strongly from the economic left, with proposals for restored welfare programs, a national healthcare system, and new public investment, particularly in transportation infrastructure. These new measures would be paid for by reversing Rumsfeld’s tax cuts on high earners and corporations, a new bevy of taxes on luxury items and cuts to military spending. Aiming to win over white voters, he consciously ruled out reparations for slavery and expressed skepticism of racial quotas, calling them a “bribe” and advocating massively increased federal funding for state universities, colleges and public-works programs.
On foreign and social policy, Jackson was less assured of popularity. He sat outside the political mainstream by promising to end American support for the juntas that ran Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala until they held U.N or U.S-supervised elections and ceased their repressive policies. He also advocated strongly for a Palestinian state and called for a “balanced” American approach in the Middle East, alienating many Jewish voters, who in light of Rumsfeld’s strong advocacy of increased aid to Israel’s “beacon of freedom in the Middle East” began to consider voting Republican for the first time…
Jackson also advocated rolling back the War on Drugs, which hurt him among the white middle class. Finally, his position on abortion, while it had boosted his support among Catholic and other culturally conservative voters, alienated a significant chunk of his liberal base, with many women’s groups refused to campaign for him. By mid-September, Jackson was only four points behind Rumsfeld, and despite the President’s massive financial advantage, it seemed he had momentum behind him…
With the election seemingly slipping away, Rumsfeld switched tactics. While he had aimed to run a moderate campaign, tacking towards the center to win a business elite and middle class frightened of Jackson’s populist rhetoric, that strategy seemed insufficient. In increasing desperation, and with an equally desperate corporate America behind him, Rumsfeld turned towards the ugly. While local surrogates and “independent” groups funded by corporate and party backers had already started using similar rhetoric, Rumsfeld threw his weight behind a racially charged campaign against Jackson and the Democrats. High taxes would amount to, as one party ad declared “a new slavery, for the real hardworking American, to a government run by the urban machines and liberal elites”. Independent groups used even cruder language and imagery, with caricatures of brutish blacks seizing the property and women of white men…
With months of wrangling, the candidates agreed to two debates, on foreign and domestic policy respectively, to be held on October 21 and 25. The debates were expected to be a clash of the titans. Rumsfeld had a smooth, light-hearted and youthful charm, an avatar of the corporate, besuited “American Tomorrow” of his campaign slogan. Meanwhile, Jackson had the charisma of a preacher, who could speak to the individual voter as well as he could sermonize on the “two Americas” his campaign sought to unite.
The debates, while they showcased a clash of ideologies, outwardly proved inconclusive: both candidates performed adequately and met, if not exceeded, expectations. Some voters commented that Jackson’s proposals seems vague or unrealistic, while others found Rumsfeld’s defense of his Central America policy, which had risen in the national agenda with the Guatemalan arms scandal, disingenuous. Both candidates made a significant error in the second debate, with Rumsfeld seemingly brushing off concerns about rising inflation due to high federal deficits by mocking inflation hawks as “Chicken Little, running around yelling ‘Henny Penny, the sky is falling!’”. Meanwhile, Jackson wavered when asked if he believed the Republican Party was racist, stumbling over an answer that made him seem simultaneously evasive and radical. When combined with his often-animated performance and clear frustration with the political status quo, it proved ominous for the Jackson campaign when the word most used to describe the candidate in the days before the election was “angry”…
While polls initially suggested a possible Jackson upset due to much-heightened African-American turnout, the final result was the one predicted by Democratic elites and the election’s broader polling. Sweeping the South and winning New York by a margin of less than 2,000 votes, President Rumsfeld retained the Oval Office. However, the tone of the election would alienate Democrats, and the scandals that had empowered Jackson in the first place would return with a vengeance…
