August 19, 2008 10:52 PM
Lessons of 1996 (and beyond)
Today we present chapter eight of the Rocky Mountain News' "Unconventional Wisdom" series, featuring some notable characters of past Democratic National Conventions offering their advice for Sen. Barack Obama, convention organizers, the city of Denver and average voters watching at home.
To follow the entire series, bookmark this link HERE. And keep checking back.
Part 8 of 10
Jesse Jackson, Chicago 1996
The story by M.E. Sprengelmeyer is HERE.
The video by Judy DeHaas is HERE.
The transcript of the Jackson interview is HERE.
Portraits are by Chris Schneider.
Below is a bit of the back story on the making of the 1996 chapter.
* * *
Oh, now we get it.
It took two weeks - and a few seconds of unguarded audio clips - for us to really understand our interview with the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Our team traveled to Chicago in mid-June and met with Jackson at the Rainbow/P.U.S.H. Coalition headquarters, just a few blocks away from the home of Sen. Barack Obama.
We could have talked to him about his groundbreaking run for president in 1984, his advances in 1988 - when he, for a few brief moments, was the front-runner for the nomination. We could have talked to him about 1996, when Democrats brought their convention back to Chicago to erase the bad memories of 1968. Jackson played a softer-spoken role at that convention, when he mostly set aside his anger over President Clinton's welfare reform bill and backed the "imperfect" president for the sake of fighting another day.
But over the past 40 years, since he was alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on a fateful day in Memphis, Jackson's role transcends any one convention. So we wanted to talk about what Obama's nomination means to him, to the party, to the country, to race relations and so much more.
He was generous with his time, offering what at the time seemed like nothing but kind words for the younger man who had exceeded his own place in the history of presidential politics - and in prominence right there on Chicago's south side, too.
But within days, just as I was sifting through my notes and trying to put the Jackson story in order, there was a bulletin on one of the cable news channels.
FoxNews had caught the Rev. Jackson on a live microphone, during a break from another interview taping, whispering to a fellow guest that he thought Obama was talking down to black folks. In fact, Jackson whispered, he wanted to cut off a part of Obama's male anatomy.
To pundits, it showed jealousy, resentment, a generational rivalry - things Jackson denied even as his own son, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., joined a chorus of blistering criticism.
To me, Jackson's unguarded quips served as a sort of decoder device to help me understand our own interview much better.
I highly recommend reading the full transcript of our Jesse Jackson interview HERE.
The word "nuts" does not appear even once. But now, keeping his slip-up in mind, it's easier to read between the lines.
When Jackson tells the history of the civil rights movement, from 1954 to the present, he seems to be hinting that someone has not acknowledged what the earlier generations had to suffer on the way to the "mountaintop."
When he praises Obama's winning strategy, winning large proportions of delegates even in states that he lost, he includes reminders about who helped establish those proportional representation rules.
When he praises Obama's ability to turn out large numbers of young people, he makes sure we know who helped change the laws to allow younger people to vote - and let college students vote where they were studying, like, say, Iowa.
When he talks about Obama and rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton taking their groundbreaking candidacies from coast-to-coast, he makes sure we remember that this isn't the same country as it was in his day.
"So, when I saw Hillary and Barack campaigning in Mississippi, the state where Emmett Till was lynched, the state where (Michael) Schwerner, (Andrew) Goodman and (James) Chaney were killed, the state where Medgar Evers was killed, where (James) Meredith went to school with the National Guard, and in that state saw whites voting for a black to be president, and saw men voting for a woman to be president, Barack and Hillary are now the conduits through which a new and better and more mature America is expressing itself. They are not the causes of this."
His perspective is easier to understand after the "nuts" comment, because now we can read between the lines.
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