There's a lot that's parallel about then and now. Sanders' platform is similar to Rev. Jackson's back then, while Biden is winning a lot of the states Jackson won in '84 and especially 1988 when he did so well they had to bargain with him at the convention a la DNC post-2016.
In 1988 Jackson won the primaries in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Puerto Rico, Virginia and D.C and the caucuses in (ironically) Delaware, Michigan, South Carolina and Vermont. He won 11 contests total and nearly 7 million votes. (In '84 he won LA, SC, DC, VA & MS).
Because he had so many delegates but the Dems didn't want to put him on the ticket, they instead offered to give future primary contests proportional instead of winner-take-all, which ultimately is what allowed Barack Obama to grab a delegate lead in 2008 and hold it vs Hillary.
The other compromise Jesse Jackson's negotiators (Ron Brown and Harold Ickes -- two Democratic Party legends) won? They got the party to remove DNC members as superdelegates. True story! archive.boston.com/news/nation/ar…
And Sanders endorsed Jackson in 1988, when he was Burlington mayor (ok and he looked exactly the same as he does now...) which likely helped him that state tho Michigan was the big surprise that scared the party shitless-they feared a brokered convention!
Jackson's platform at the time included federally guaranteed employment thru a new Works Progress Administration, single payer universal healthcare, ending mandatory minimums & rerouting the "war on drugs," free community college, stricter Voting Rights Act enforcement...
a farm aid package, a nuclear freeze, ratifying the ERA, reversing Reagan's tax cuts, cutting the defense budget, isolating Apartheid South Africa with sanctions and supporting the creation of a Palestinian state. Here's Jackson's @thenation endorsement: thenation.com/article/archiv…
Two big differences of course were that Jackson was also running to be the nation's first black president (he was the second to try after Shirley Chisholm '72) and as a southerner and MLK lieutenant, he had huge resonance in the same southern states Bernie is struggling in.
He also registered over a million black voters as Democrats, which Bill Clinton ultimately benefited from in 1992. (Not sure if Bernie is registering voters on that kind of scale. Not saying he isn't- I just don't know). But Jackson's campaign was a voter registration MACHINE.
And one person Jackson inspired? Mike Espy, who is running for Senate again this cycle in Mississippi: latimes.com/archives/la-xp…
Jackson also had an explicit call for racial justice that was inherent in his message which Sanders, whose focus is on trans-racial class fairness, has struggled to incorporate. And ironically, it was a more modest appeal based on racial forgiveness that wound up winning the WH.
And when he became a congressman and Senator, Sanders became a somewhat more conventional politician at times, voting against gun reform bills and for the 1994 crime bill and some unpleasant stuff on storing VT waste in TX, which means he hasn't acted as some radical socialist.
But one thing he has been is consistent on the shared beliefs he and Rev. Jackson had all those decades ago. So it's no surprise, and kind of a full circle moment, that Jackson has endorsed him.
BTW I did write a book about this stuff called Fracture, which my publisher would appreciate me mentioning👀. But you get the idea and the thread's shorter. Happy Sunday!
