excerpt - After the rout of Mondale in 1984, who ran a listless and confused campaign against the Reagan machine, the powerbrokers of the Democratic Party decided to reshape the party in Reagan’s image. The DLC was born, a reactionary movement within the Democratic Party led by the likes of Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden that pushed for a retreat from the New Deal and Great Society programs that had defined, in theory if not in practice, the party for the previous five decades, replacing it with neoliberal austerity economics, corporate-driven slashing of regulations, gutting the social safety net and a more belligerent foreign policy.
The Party leadership reconfigured the primary process so that they could engineer wins for party favorites and stifle insurgent candidates, like Eugene McCarthy, Jerry Brown, Jackson and Gary Hart, before their campaigns caught fire. One of the innovations was Super Tuesday, frontloading a host of primaries early in the race, making it nearly impossible for grassroots campaigns to spend much (or any) time in each state. But Jackson shocked the establishment by winning five states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia) and coming in second in Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington. He beat Gore in the South and Gephardt all over the place, except his home state of Missouri. In March 1988, a poll showed Jackson leading the Democratic field of big shots, whose pockets were flush with corporate campaign cash. This sent shivers through the party elites, who coalesced to derail his campaign, just as they would Bernie Sanders’s two decades later. Gephardt, Gore and the others obediently dropped out, engineering a Dukakis primary victory. But leaving the Party with a candidate so uninspiring that he would lose to the equally uninspiring George Bush. It could have been different. The spirit of Jackson’s ‘88 campaign would only resurface again in 2016 with Bernie’s campaign, but Jesse had built a multi-racial/ethnic campaign aimed at poor and working-class people that Bernie, for whatever reason, couldn’t replicate. Still, the Democrats’ strategy for rigging the primaries and personal demonization remained much the same. If the party had changed in the intervening 18 years, it was only for the worse. Jackson seemed lost during the Clinton years, a cautious critic, as Clinton and his neoliberal ur-DOGE crew slashed social welfare programs for the poor, incarcerated blacks, terrorized Haitians and reinstituted a Bracero system for migrant farmworkers. He should have challenged Clinton in ’96, either in the primaries (as The Nation urged) or as a Green. But Jackson just couldn’t shake off the Democratic Party, believing, wrongly, that it could be revolutionized from within. (Of course, Bernie Sanders has shown the same perverse allegiance to the Democratic Party and he’s never identified himself as a member.) I remember the tears streaming down Jackson’s face as he stood on the steps of the Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, the night Obama defeated McCain. The tears were authentic and it was a genuinely moving sight. But he was probably crying very different kinds of tears a few months later as Obama morphed into a hipper version of Hillary Clinton and professed his admiration for Ronald Reagan as a “transformative figure” in American politics. full - https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/20/up-down-and-around-with-jesse-jackson/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40798): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40798 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117946196/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
