What More Do They Want on Jesse?

THE new fashionable point for political columnists to make is that Jesse Jackson hasn't been taken seriously--which in translation means that Jesse Jackson hasn't been run out of the campaign.

These columnists won't put it that way. They actually claim to be doing Jackson a favor by demanding that he be scrutinizied "fairly" by both press and politicians. Running him out of the race by hammering him with attacks on his record and his personality are meant to be means of according him the highest honor of "respect." After all Gary Hart and Joe Biden were worthy of respect, so why should Jackson be cut out? He's been given a free ride, the experts contend, and that is a form of racism.

But the facts suggest that Jackson has been given plenty of scrutiny, that more damaging revelations have come out against him than practically any other candidate in the race for the Democratic nomination.

In a long piece in Vanity Fair some months ago, Gail Sheehy recounted: Jackson's brother's shady dealings, the finagling at Operation PUSH, allegations of womanizing, his misrepresentations concerning the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., his hailing of Castro and embracing of Arafat, and his lack of any background in politics. To conclude the piece, Sheehy suggested that Jackson was too egotistical to be president.

Other reporters have suggested that Jackson left the University of Illinois only after academic troubles and not because of the racist atmosphere Jackson claims existed. On Candidates '88, Marvin Kalb interviewed Jackson just like everyone else. So did David Frost on the Making of the President. In a Boston debate, local television reporter Andy Hiller pointedly challenged Jackson's record with regard to Jews and Israel. And early in the campaign, reporters put Jackson in the headlines for lending his face to an advertisement for a business school, forcing him to apologize and withdraw his endorsement.

ACTUALLY, Jackson has been subject to unusual levels of scrutiny. The 1984 hymietown flap only became news when a Washington Post reporter decided to print the remarks made off the record. That incident has appeared in virtually every Jackson profile piece this year, as has his association with Farrakhan.

Now it is true that in the beginning of this year's campaign Jackson was not drawing much scrutiny, but then again he wasn't drawing much attention by anyone, period. You have to be winning to be scrutinized--unless as Joe Biden learned, another candidate has it in for you. The white candidates who supposedly have been under the gun of scrutiny so far all were doing well at the polls at the time. Gephardt's trade policy and his flip-flopping on the issues--notably abortion--came under fire only after his victory in Iowa. Gary Hart drew the spotlight of the Miami Herald because he was the front-runner. Paul Simon was quizzed on how his budget would add up only after he edged out Dukakis in Iowa.

Jackson finished fourth in both Iowa and New Hampshire. If you remember, Jackson did not prove himself to be a strong contender until Super Tuesday, and furthermore he had already been scrutinized four years before, and scrutinized strongly. Only in the last few weeks has Jackson done well enough to merit scrutiny. And as has been the case with his white rivals, Jackson's rise in the polls has been accompanied by increased scrutiny by the press. The New York Times and The New Republic have both recently printed articles raising questions about his record and his positions. The Washington Post this past Sunday torturously went over Jackson's claim that he cradled the dead King in his arms. And Jackson's letter to Noriega has been publicized sufficiently enough perhaps to prevent him from winning Wisconsin.

IT could be that columnists may not know the facts when they say that Jackson has had a free ride because he is Black. But it is more likely that the cry for Jackson to be taken seriously really amounts to a gasp of exasperation that a man who has been so heavily scrutinized, who has been the subject of so much negative publicity, continues to win.

The reason Jackson has been able to survive scrutiny--a thought columnists seem loathe to acknowledge--is that he, unlike virtually any other Democrat now running, has a loyal and well-defined constituency. Historian Alan Brinkley noted in The New York Times at the time of the Hart scandal that his campaign was mortally wounded by the Donna Rice affair precisely because he lacked a constituency. Hart was trading on his front-runner status and nothing more. The same could be said of Joe Biden. For a candidate without a natural constituency, any damaging revelation can bring a campaign to an end.

But Jackson, as he proved in 1984 after the hymietown incident, has sufficiently strong backing from a sufficiently large group of voters to withstand the occasional damaging story. Brinkley noted that the phenomenon of the constituent-less candidate was a relatively new and not particularly encouraging one. Jackson is throwback to an earlier political landscape, when candidates ran because people wanted them to, not just because they thought they should be president.

So in the end, the recent argument that Jackson has been given a free ride and that such indifference to him is a subtle form of racism, may itself be racist. Ignoring the fact that Jackson's record has been scrutinized, the argument assumes that Jackson is only doing well because no one has made it clear how awful he is. But couldn't it be that plenty of people--and virtually all Black voters--have heard all the revelations about Jackson and all of his left wing political positions and still like him? Or does it make more sense to say that the people are ignorant and must be educated properly? After all, if some worthy journalist doesn't take it upon himself to educate them, Jesse Jackson just might be elected president.