The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

  Jesse Jackson

  I want to offer the highest and the best service in our highest and most sensitive job, the job that has the most capacity to bring justice in our land, mitigate misery in the world and bring peace on earth—the office of president. Only in America is such a dream possible.37 —Jackson’s announcement speech for his 1988 run for the Democratic nomination, October 10, 1987.

  In Democratic Party politics, Shirley Chisholm was followed by the high-energy and certainly much more popular campaigns of Reverend Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. Jackson ran in an era when defeat of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were paramount among mainstream Democrats, including black Americans. The Reagan administration on both foreign and domestic policy represented a setback for people of color, women, peace activists, working and poor people, and pretty much anyone who sought economic and social fairness in the 1980s America. Rather than challenge the conservatism of Reagan, many Democrats believed that moving toward the political center was the best strategy for defeating his bid for a second term.

  Despite massive opposition from the black political elite that in 1984 was mostly committed to Walter Mondale (who eventually became the nominee), Jackson ran a credible campaign for a first-timer and won 3.5 million votes in the primaries, electrifying the progressive wing of the party’s base. Jackson won about, 18 percent of the total, and five primaries and caucuses, including Louisiana, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, and Virginia. Jackson raised issues of democracy and inclusion within the Democratic Party as the campaign quickly realized the challenges it faced from the party elite and the structure of U.S. politics. His platform included support for D.C. statehood, curtailing the Defense budget, ending Reagan’s tax cuts, sanctions against the Apartheid government in South Africa, nuclear disarmament, universal health care, and other popular progressive demands.

  Jackson was also at the center of the National Rainbow Coalition, a dominant force in the progressive wing of the party. The Rainbow Coalition was comprised of progressive civil rights, labor, women, peace, environmental, and human rights activists from across the racial spectrum. With Jackson’s relative success in 1984, a number of elected officials also participated in and joined the organization including individuals like California’s Rep. Maxine Waters. In fact, the sudden interest in Jackson’s possibilities left many progressives feeling squeezed out of prominent roles in the organization.

  Jackson returned to the trail in 1988 with more experience, skill, support, and capacities. In fact, he started off as the frontrunner, and even appeared to be headed toward victory after winning the all-important Michigan caucus. He captured almost seven million votes and won primary contests in Alabama, Washington, D.C., Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Puerto Rico and Virginia and four caucuses in Delaware, Michigan, South Carolina and Vermont. One direct consequence of Jackson’s challenge was that Ron Brown, an African American, became chairman of the Democratic Party in 1989, a first for a major party.

  Yet, however legitimate he may have seemed to black communities and some in the civil rights, ethnic rights, labor, environmental, women’s, human rights, and other social change movements, for much of the rest of the country he was still viewed as a black candidate with a black agenda. Regardless of how much Jackson and the campaign addressed other issues—from workers’ rights to foreign policy—he could never escape his civil rights past (and present). This meant that even within the narrow confines of the Democratic primaries, he could not win enough non-black votes to defeat the relatively unknown and hapless governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis.

  Jackson’s campaigns for the White House were pivotal, however, in providing rule changes that would benefit Obama in 2008. After the 1984 primary season, when he had some leverage over how peaceful and cooperative the Democratic National Convention would be, Jackson argued that winner-take-all primaries and caucuses were patently unfair. He was able to win rule changes that allowed for proportional distribution of delegates for those candidates who won 15 percent or more of the vote. This important rule change was so critical to Obama’s campaign that it is difficult to see how he would have won without it. As discussed in Chapter 9, although Hillary Clinton was winning big states in the primaries, Obama was still gathering delegates because he was coming in a close second. That, in addition to the small and Republican-oriented states that he was winning that the Clinton and other Democrats abandoned, were his numerical keys to victory. The Obamas owe that strategic opening to Jackson.

  The major impact of the Jackson campaign was to invigorate the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and to inject a more progressive discourse into the national political debate. Liberals in the party were cowed by Reagan’s popularity and were reluctant to promote a progressive agenda. For African Americans, Jackson represented the most significant challenge to the party’s racial politics since the days of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Democratic Party in the 1960s. He mobilized millions who would later be the basis for victory for local and state candidates around the nation. And just as Obama would do two decades later, he motivated countless young and old to become involved in electoral politics and community activism.

  Jackson, however, undercut a potential future run and the establishment of a formal progressive element in Democratic politics by demobilizing the National Rainbow Coalition after the 1988 race. At a turbulent meeting at the Democratic National Convention following the nomination of Dukakis, Jackson told his followers that they needed to fold into the Democratic Party structure for the campaign, support the party’s candidate, and not act independently. That fateful decision pushed away many activists who were wary of Dukakis and the Democrats, and politically fractured the Rainbow Coalition.38 The Rainbow was eventually merged into Jackson’s Chicago-based organization Operation PUSH. Jackson teased with the idea of running again, but then ultimately decided not to run in 1992.

  Doug Wilder

  Many of the more popular Democrats, perhaps including Jackson, felt that President George H. W. Bush was in too strong a position to be defeated and declined to enter the race. This left the door open for some lesser known candidates to run, candidates such as Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder. On September 13, 1991, during the middle of his term as Virginia governor, Wilder, the first African American elected to that position, declared himself a candidate.

  Wilder’s victory in Virginia, in November 1989, perhaps foreshadowed his presidential hopes. Leading Republican J. Marshall Coleman by fifteen points two weeks before the election, Wilder only won by 6,854 votes out of nearly two million cast, less than 0.37 of one percent.39 In New York that same year, African American candidate David Dinkins had been leading by 18 percent but only won the mayor’s race by 2 percentage points.40 The gap between pre-election polls and election-day reality has been called by some political scientists the “Bradley effect” in reference to the experience of Tom Bradley in California in 1982. Former Los Angeles mayor Bradley, who was African American, ran for governor and according to polls was likely to win. However, on election day he lost a close race. Postelection analysis seemed to demonstrate that many white voters were hesitant to tell pollsters that they would not vote for an African American candidate, but on election day that is exactly what happened, i.e., the “Bradley effect.” These elections stood out because Bradley, Wilder, and Dinkins were all moderate, race-neutral candidates. By 2008, however, it was believed that both more whites were willing to vote for a black candidate and that polling sophistication was better able to account for respondents who lied.

  In a basically traditional announcement speech where he put himself forward as a savior of sort, Wilder stated:

  In seeking the Presidency, I recognize that I am the longest of long shots. I may not win. I may not get but a few votes. But I would not be doing my job as Governor—indeed, I would not deserve to be who I am—if I failed to step forward at this critical juncture in our nation’s history. For if we fa
il to heal this nation in 1992, it may not be healed in my lifetime. If we fail to put this country on a sound fiscal posture in 1992, then order may not be restored in my lifetime. If elected, I pledge to all of you that I will do everything in my power to heal the growing divisions among us; to restore economic vitality...so that more people can enter the middle class...and to secure peace around the world through American economic and military strength.41

  Neither in his speech nor in the abbreviated campaign did Wilder focus on race or issues of special concern to the black community. Only once did he address the issue stating, “Washington seems to have lost the passion to fight the deterioration in race relations in this nation.”42 Wilder’s moderation on race concerns was not surprising given his affiliation with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) at the time. The Council arose as a rival to Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition. In fact, there were suspicions in the Jackson camp that Wilder’s long-shot bid was to reposition another African American to vie for black votes. Those fears were reinforced by the celebration of Wilder’s run as a blow to Jackson’s political future by the Boston Globe’s Robert Jordan, who wrote, “We may be seeing the sun beginning to set on the ‘Jesse Jackson era.’”43

  Washington Post reporter Juan Williams, a conservative black writer who was often critical of Jackson, rejoiced at Wilder’s bid. Referring rather ridiculously to Wilder as the most important “black American politician of the 20th century,” Williams opined, “It is not just that Wilder is an alternative to the best-known black spokesman, Jesse Jackson: his success is a rebuke to Jackson’s 1980s political vision of Blacks as America’s victims.”44

  Beside missing the point that Wilder’s success was largely driven by the black voters that Jackson’s campaigns generated, Williams’ flawed assertion of him as an alternative collapsed rather quickly. Wilder ran a very poor campaign, raised little money, and garnered very few endorsements of note. Four months after jumping in, on January 8, 1992, before a single primary or caucus, Wilder jumped out.

  Although Jackson bowed out in November 1991, he became a part of the winning politics for candidate Bill Clinton. In a May 1992 interview with the Washington Post, rap artist Sistah Souljah discussed the uprising in Los Angeles after the exoneration of four white Los Angeles police officers in the beating of black motorist Rodney King. She stated, among other remarks, “If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill White people.”45 The statement was pulled out of the context of the overall interview and incorrectly promoted to say that she advocated murdering whites. Few critics noted that she was a widely respected youth organizer and active on a wide range of issues. In June, based on her activism, Souljah was invited to participate in Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition conference in Washington, D.C. So was Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee Bill Clinton. Jackson was holding the gathering to strengthen his and the Rainbow Coalition’s ability to influence the platform and strategy of the Democratic Party in the fall elections. To burnish his conservative credentials as he sought votes from the political center, Clinton decided to use the event to not only criticize Souljah but to also chastise Jackson for inviting her to the conference. At the time, Clinton was trailing in the polls behind President George H. W. Bush and independent upstart, Ross Perot. In his talk, Clinton compared Souljah to white supremacist and former Klan leader David Duke. Jackson was blindsided. Clinton’s strategy of distancing himself from Jackson and the progressive wing of the party, and presenting himself as a centrist to win moderate white voters was successful enough to win him the nomination.46

  Al Sharpton

  In 2004, New York’s Reverend Al Sharpton ran in the Democratic primaries. Like Jackson, he also tried to position himself not as a black candidate, but one representing a broad range of constituencies. He told CNN, “I’m not running an African-American campaign. We’re running a broad-based campaign that includes African-Americans and Latinos and gays and lesbians and laborers and others.”47 Sharpton built his reputation as a rabble-rouser in New York politics taking strong stands on a number of racial and non-racial issues and incidents. He morphed, however, into a respected and savvy political insider in Democratic politics. And he was seen by many, including himself, as the heir to the Jackson throne. Lacking Jackson’s reach and connections, but more willing to engage others as equals, Sharpton was taken seriously when he decided to enter the race although he had no chance of actually winning.

  Although he won no states (but nearly 400,000 votes) and came in far behind, his high quality performances at the debates during the two months he campaigned were well-informed and quick-witted. The debates went a long way in shedding the image of him as a confrontational extremist and racial rebel that the media had built over the years—an image that Sharpton himself helped create. Nevertheless, few people watched the debates or read campaign literature—not that those would have been decisive anyway—so the old Sharpton image remained for many Democratic voters. And even those who agreed with what Sharpton had to say and with his policy proposals had little doubt that if he miraculously made it through the primaries and Convention and emerged as the nominee, that the Democrats would go down in a historic defeat. To his credit, Sharpton was aware of these politics and used them to his advantage as he attempted to leverage a progressive and pro-civil rights agenda.

  Since the 2008 election, Sharpton has emerged as Obama’s favored black leader, having visited the White House at least five times by mid-2010. He has been described as the president’s “go-to man” when it comes to responding to black politicians, media personalities, and civil rights leaders who are critical of the administration’s policies as they relate to the black community.

  From issues ranging from civil rights to agricultural policy, Sharpton has provided the administration space to present its point-of-view primarily on his radio show, and debated black opinion-makers such as black talk show host and activist Tavis Smiley, who is a harsh critic of Obama and now Sharpton. Smiley said it was hard for Sharpton “to speak truth to power about the suffering of black people on the one hand, and then to be running in and out of the Oval Office and trying to run the president’s agenda or express White House talking points.”48 Sharpton argued in response, “The president does not need to get out there and do what we should be doing,” and there should not be a double standard where African American leaders “expect more from a black president” than from a white one.49

  While Smiley, Rev. Jesse Jackson and others have fumed at what they believe has been a poor response by the Obama administration to black concerns, Sharpton and other black leaders, such as NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, National Urban League President Marc Morial, and Harvard’s Charles Ogletree have met with Obama on a number of occasions including a snowy February 10, 2010 meeting with Sharpton, Morial, and Jealous, regarding the economy.50 Smiley criticized that gathering for not focusing more strongly on a black agenda. He and Sharpton continued to clash publicly on several radio shows. Sharpton refused to participate in Smiley’s March 20, 2010 “We Count! The Black Agenda is the American Agenda” symposium that included Jackson, scholars Michael Eric Dyson, Michael Fauntroy, Cornel West, and Ron Walters, economist Julianne Malveaux, and Minister Louis Farrakhan among others. Sharpton viewed it as an Obama-bashing session and a diversion from addressing a real program for change.51 Sharpton has directly engaged with the White House, even partnering with former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich on the issue of education access for minority youth as part of a Obamasupported initiative, the Education Equality Project.52

  Carol Moseley-Braun

  Former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun (D-IL) also announced that she was running for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. She stated, “I’m in this race to ensure that the American dream finally gets extended to all Americans without regard to race, color, or gender.”53

  Some felt that she was convinced to join the race to be a spoiler to stop Sharpton getting a monopoly
on black votes. However, she was still relatively unknown despite having been an U.S. senator, the first African American woman to achieve that position. She left office after one term, a tenure wrought with controversy and generally seen as a disappointment. One high point of her time in Congress was her challenge to Senator Jesse Helms, one of the Senate’s most anti-civil rights legislators. Unafraid to be brazenly racist, sexist, and homophobic, Helms was one of the institution’s most powerful members. In his 1990 campaign for reelection, he ran the infamous “white hands” advertisement against African American Henry Gantt, which showed a pair of white hands crumbling a rejection notice for a job that had been given to an unqualified person of color.54 A states’-rights advocate and segregationist until the day he died, Helms’ defense of racist Southern habits went unchecked by his Senate colleagues until he ran into Moseley-Braun. In July 1993, Helms proposed an Amendment to the National Service Act that would have renewed the patent for the logo of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Helms described the group as “24,000 ladies” who work as unpaid volunteers at veterans’ hospitals. In fact, it is an organization that seeks to preserve, defend, and even make-up Confederate culture and history. It protects a manufactured image of an idyllic pre-Civil War white South that minimizes or denies the brutality and racism of slavery, an objective Helms embraced.55 Moseley went to war with Helms over the issue and after a fiery speech on the Senate floor, a number of Senators including some from the South and Republican colleagues of Helms changed their vote and the legislation was defeated.

  Similar to Chisholm many years earlier, there was also a hope that she would garner support from women’s organizations and voters given that she was the only woman in the race. But due to her lack of popular support, inability to raise funds, and media snipes, she dropped out of the race early.