Jesse Jackson

When Jesse Jackson was running for president in the 1988 Democratic primaries, I was twenty years old and excited to vote for him. I grew up in Washington, DC, where everyone was familiar with politics, whether they wanted to be or not.

After years of listening to the bland and meaningless promises of congressmen, senators and presidential candidates, I was excited when Jackson came along and actually had something to say. The man seemed to stand for something. He was eloquent, he cared about people, and he believed that government had a responsibility to improve peoples lives in whatever ways were practical and feasible.

At the time, P.J. O’Rourke was covering both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions for Rolling Stone Magazine. He mocked and lambasted both, lamenting the poor quality of American presidential candidates and the low standards of a public that actually voted for them.

O’Rourke, a conservative Republican, found Jackson to be the highlight of the Democratic convention. He wrote:

Jesse Jackson was the only Democrat who came to Atlanta with real ideas. This is because, in the American political system, you’re only allowed to have real ideas if it’s absolutely guaranteed that you can’t win an election.

He is the only living American politician with a mastery of classical rhetoric. Assonance, alliteration, litotes, pleonasm, parallelism, exclamation, climax, and epigram–to listen to Jesse Jackson is to hear everything mankind has learned about public speaking since Demosthenes. Thus, Jackson, the advocate for people who believe themselves to be excluded from Western culture, was the only 1988 presidential candidate to exhibit any of it.

I was beyond disappointed with the party’s choice of Michael Dukakis as the nominee. Just before the election, Saturday Night Live ran a skit making fun of the debate between Dukakis and Republican candidate George W. Bush. When asked to sum up his message to voters, Bush looked into the camera and said, “Bush good. Opponent bad.”

Dukakis stared at his opponent in wonder and said, “How can I be losing to this guy?”

Despite my disappointment with that whole election, I came away with a high regard for Jackson as a man who actually cared about his country and the people in it.

In the summer of 1989, I was working as a bike messenger in DC. One day, after lunch, I was fixing a flat tire in Farragut Square. I unhooked my front brakes to remove the wheel, patched up the flat, and put the wheel back on the bike. My dispatcher radioed, telling me to pick up a package at the Commerce Department bound for Capitol Hill.

I rode down Jackson Place, through Lafayette Square and across Pennsylvania Avenue. In front of the White House fence, I saw three men gathered before another man who spoke in a resonant, familiar-sounding voice. Wondering who was speaking, and why the voice sounded so familiar, I rode toward them. I hit my brakes a couple of seconds before I reached the group, but the brakes did nothing. I hadn’t reattached the front cable after fixing the flat tire.

I could see by then that the speaker was Jesse Jackson. He addressed this group of three with a commanding eloquence, just as he would have addressed a church gathering or a presidential convention. He saw me coming, saw I couldn’t stop. I sailed right between two of his listeners, and without stopping his speech or even braking cadence, he put his arm out and grabbed my handlebars and stopped me.

I was surprised by how tall he was, and even more surprised at how he kept his focus and continued speaking as if he didn’t just almost get run over. He kept his hand on my handlebars until he finished speaking. The men asked him questions, I don’t remember what about, but I stayed and listened.

After a minute or so, Jackson looked at me and asked why I was riding my bike like that on the sidewalk with so many people around. I told him I was a messenger and I had ridden up onto the sidewalk to hear what he was saying, but I had forgotten to reattach my brake cable and was unable to stop in time. He nodded and told me I should be careful. I leaned down and fixed my brake cable and went on my way.

I had many encounters with famous politicians in those days, because I was always going in and out of the US Capitol and the House and Senate office buildings. But the encounter with Jackson stuck with me because the man had a kind of poise and presence and substance that the others lacked. I would have felt that even if I had no idea who he was, even if I had never heard him speak before. It was just something he carried with him.

I’m sad to hear he has passed, and sad for my country that now has so few people of principal in leadership positions and so few voices of eloquence, compassion, and reason.

Rest in peace, Reverend Jackson.