The Profound Impact of Jesse Jackson

Reaching out to blue-collar America, he campaigns not just to win votes but to save the soul of the Democratic party From the Archives The Profound Impact of Jesse Jackson Reaching out to blue-collar America, he campaigns not just to win votes but to save the soul of the Democratic party By William Greider William Greider Clinton and Character Will the Smart Gun Save Lives? The Hard Fight Against Soft Money View all posts by William Greider February 17, 2026 Jesse Jackson, Baptist minister and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. Jacques M. Chenet/CORBIS/Getty Images This story was originally published in the March 24, 1988 issue of Rolling Stone. Every seat in the high-school auditorium in Hibbing, Minnesota, was filled, and all the white faces strained forward, caught up in the black preacher’s melodramatic cadences: “Save the family,” the preacher intoned. “Save the farms … Save the environment … Save our jobs in America.” The Reverend Jesse Jackson‘s audience picked up the beat and cheered. Jackson was addressing a group of hearty and hard-working Midwesterners, iron miners and their wives and their glowingly blond children — not exactly a funky audience. But as Jerry Garcia once said about disco music, Jesse Jackson’s beat is so strong that even white folks can dance to it. “If a mother has two pork chops and three children, she doesn’t get rid of one child,” Jackson thundered. “She cuts up the pork chops and makes gravy.” Nobody in Hibbing had trouble understanding what pork chops and gravy meant. The iron range of northern Minnesota is one of those places where the lives of working people have been devastated in the 1980s. Jackson was speaking to their pain and anger and fears — bills piling up from long layoffs, kids who can’t afford to go to college or are messed up on drugs, old people terrified by hospital bills. Above all, Jackson left these people with hope born of his analysis of what’s wrong with the American economy and his agenda for halting the deterioration — restoring growth, jobs and equity. Jackson’s plan, in brief, would reverse the priorities of the Reagan Eighties — shifting scarce capital from the production of useless defense weapons to productive industries; shifting income through taxation and spending from the luxurious top to the broad middle class as well as to the neglected bottom. “Together we cannot be defeated;’ Jackson concluded. “I stood with you! I want you to stand with me!” The white audience was on its feet at the end, fired up by Jackson’s exhortations. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century This is an extraordinary show, probably the most compelling spectacle of the 1988 campaign. Jesse Jackson has learned how to do crossover politics. In 1984 he played mostly black venues. This time he is talking to white working-class audiences in a language that speaks to their distress. When I followed his zigzag trail across the Midwest recently — a paper workers’ strike in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a Teamsters hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a crammed college gym in Duluth, Minnesota — everywhere the response to him was stunning. The same show has played to raves across the white South and in northern industrial cities. But does any of this matter, really? Jackson is entertaining, sure, but will white people actually vote for him? He’s not really electable or qualified, is he? Some people are scared of him, some doubt his character, and others dismiss him as a diverting sideshow. As he himself jokes to reporters, “You’re traveling with the B team.” Regardless of how you respond to his candidacy, Jesse Jackson matters, perhaps profoundly, to our future. Put aside for the moment prejudice and oft-heard complaints about his shortcomings. Even put aside the question of whether he can win, much less serve effectively in the White House, and recognize what he is already achieving, not just for himself but for the country. Jesse Jackson is engaged in a profound struggle to restore the soul of the Democratic party, to break open a new era for American politics. Jackson is connecting with voters who are bread-and-butter Democrats, many of them workers who have become alienated from the party in the last twenty years. Their values are traditional; they are naturally resentful of “limousine liberals.” Many of them fell in love with Ronald Reagan’s Old Glory patriotism and voted for him in 1980 and 1984. And these are many of the same voters who supported George Wallace’s angry populism. Wallace told his working-class audiences to send the Washington establishment a message — and they did. Related Content Trump Uses Jesse Jackson's Death to Attack Democrats Jesse Jackson, Civil Rights Activist and Religious Leader