In certain political circles, the rap on Jackson was that he was all talk. (In a 1990 magazine article, the Los Angeles Times quoted Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington, D.C., as saying, “Jesse don’t wanna run nothing but his mouth.”) But in 1988, Jackson’s oratory was backed up by an expansive policy platform, which called for hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for education, child care, housing, and infrastructure projects. The details included a national investment bank to back major development projects, a raise in the federal minimum wage, legislation to make it easier for labor unions to organize, an expansion of Medicaid, a proposal to mobilize capital from public pension funds to build low-income housing, and a national early-childhood-education program. Jackson was responding to rising concerns, among Americans of all races, about jobs, wages, affordability, and inequality—concerns that have now bedevilled the country for nearly forty years. “He was like a sponge: he took in everything,” Robert Borosage, a veteran progressive activist and author who served as Jackson’s issues director on the 1988 campaign, said when I called him up last week. “And he was very ambitious, and he wanted a very ambitious program.”
At a time when Reagan’s tax cuts had created a big budget deficit and raised fears of looming insolvency, critics claimed that Jackson’s platform was unaffordable and irresponsible. To counter these attacks, Borosage and a team of outside experts put together a budget proposal, which raised taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and froze the Pentagon budget for five years, enabling Jackson, at least in theory, to finance his programs and also cut the deficit. “It turned out that if you were prepared to cut military spending, if you were prepared to reverse the Reagan tax cuts for the rich, and do a few other things, you had a lot of money to spend,” Borosage recalled.
Like all budgets, Jackson’s depended on disputable economic assumptions, but the Washington Post’s editorial page, a different creature then than it is now, highlighted how it went beyond the level of detail that his rivals had provided and sought “to remind the Democratic Party of a set of obligations that have become unfashionable.” Ultimately, this reminder wasn’t sufficient to carry Jackson to the nomination, which went to Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts. But Jackson came in a strong second, garnering almost thirty per cent of the votes and more than a thousand delegates. At the Democratic National Convention, in Atlanta, he delivered a rousing speech in which he called for “common ground” and ended by repeating, to deafening cheers, his signature refrain: “Keep hope alive!”
Some of the obituaries published last week—including a fine one by Borosage, in The Nation—pointed out that Jackson’s 1988 campaign, by demonstrating that a Black candidate could gain large numbers of white voters and by forcing changes to the rules governing the Democratic primary, helped to pave the way for Barack Obama’s victory, twenty years later. That’s true, and it’s an important part of Jackson’s legacy. But his death also got me thinking about some different history—counterfactual history. What if Jackson—or another Democratic hewing to his populist line—had won the nomination, gone on to win the Presidency, and enacted the program that he campaigned on? How different would U.S. politics look today?
This exercise is clouded by the fact that, in 1992, another brand of economic populism played an important role in Bill Clinton’s successful Presidential bid. Politically, Clinton positioned himself as a centrist “New Democrat.” But he also promised to make the rich pay more taxes, raise the minimum wage, introduce universal health care, and protect the “forgotten middle class” that “plays by the rules” and “gets the shaft.” In office, the Clinton Administration did hike the top federal income-tax rate, from thirty-one per cent to 39.6 per cent. It also expanded the earned income-tax credit, which raised the spending power of many working families. But Clinton’s health-care reform foundered, his commitment to deficit reduction constrained the rest of his domestic agenda, and, in December, 1993, he signed NAFTA, which he had criticized during the 1992 campaign before eventually giving it a qualified endorsement. Thereafter, his Administration supported the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995 and granted China permanent normal trade relations in 2000. Globalization fostered global economic development, provided Americans with lots of cheap imported goods, and boosted some U.S. industries—over-all employment grew strongly in the nineteen-nineties—but it hollowed out parts of the manufacturing sector, and hit some sections of the country particularly hard, creating societal problems and political alienation.
