Jackson Barks, but Does He Still Have Bite

It used to be called “the Jesse Jackson problem”: Democratic presidential candidates fearing they would lose black votes if they got on Mr. Jackson’s bad side, given the influence he accrued as a civil rights activist and his history-making races for the White House in 1984 and 1988. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Russel A. Daniels/Associated Press The Rev. Jesse Jackson apologized Wednesday for remarks about Barack Obama, but they seemed to have little effect. Related Jesse Jackson Apologizes for Remarks on Obama (July 10, 2008) Times Topics: Jesse Jackson Blog The Caucus The CaucusThe latest political news from around the nation. Join the discussion. * Election Guide * More Politics News But if his recent critical comments about Senator Barack Obama prove anything, Democrats and political scientists said Thursday, it is that a Jesse problem these days can actually help a candidate like Mr. Obama — with white voters who have questions about whether Mr. Obama shares their values, and with black voters who see Mr. Jackson as a figure of the past. Even Mr. Jackson’s 43-year-old son, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois, went beyond repudiation to excoriate him — a poignant reminder that a real generational shift in power and leadership is under way in African-American politics. Mr. Obama, 46, has already overshadowed former President Bill Clinton, once a deeply popular figure among black Americans; if anything, Mr. Obama seems likely to gain political dividends from Mr. Jackson’s vulgar criticism of him for, as Mr. Jackson put it, “talking down to black people” in speeches about the responsibilities of absent black fathers. “This moment only reinforces that we have to let the younger guys take the lead in politics, that they know the issues of today, that we live in a far different world than 20 years ago,” said Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988, when Mr. Jackson won a series of nominating contests, including those in Georgia, Michigan and Virginia. Several Obama advisers said Thursday that Mr. Obama had not lost any sleep over Mr. Jackson’s remarks, a measure of the Obama camp’s confidence that excitement among many black Americans over his candidacy is approaching indestructibility. Indeed, the voting bloc that worries the Obama camp is white working-class voters. Many of them strongly supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton this year, while suspiciously eyeing Mr. Obama over matters like his association with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his former pastor, whose controversial remarks about the United States and race relations threatened to muddy Mr. Obama’s image as a candidate who could transcend racial divides. The current strain of criticism against Mr. Obama, at least from the left, is that he is moving to the political center, exhibiting a taste for Clintonian triangulation. If Mr. Obama’s goal is to show independence from interest groups and ideological orthodoxies, Mr. Jackson, some say, may just have helped him. “If anything, it could possibly help Obama in distancing himself a bit from Jackson and help him with white voters,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University. The idea that black voters might sour on Mr. Obama, the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, simply because Mr. Jackson criticized him struck Mr. Abramowitz, among others, as laughable. He recalled being in a restaurant in Georgia that was giving away tickets to an Obama event recently; 50 people, most of them African-American, were still standing in line even though the tickets were all gone. Put another way, this episode serves as a reminder that the Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988 were quite a long time ago. Mr. Jackson no longer has the pull or punch he once did; indeed, even in 1988, his power was not great enough to pressure Mr. Dukakis to add him to the ticket. “Al Sharpton is not a threat to whatever power Jesse Jackson has, but a black president of the United States absolutely is,” said Bob Beckel, who was Walter Mondale’s campaign manager in the 1984 presidential campaign. “Even Jesse’s son is showing a little of George Bush’s independence from his old man — a son wanting to show he is more than just his father’s name.” Yet if Mr. Jackson is no longer the leader of black Democrats, it seems fair to ask if Mr. Obama, in fact, is. Some in the party say that while he has largely moved on from last year’s media narrative about whether he was “black enough” to win black votes, he has not yet, in their view, become a more respected spokesman and advocate for black issues than Mr. Jackson was and continues to seek to be. Indeed, Mr. Jackson indicated Thursday that he was not ready to leave the spotlight to Mr. Obama and exile himself from the political scene as punishment for what he called his “pejorative and personally embarrassing remarks.” “When I said that some of the messages aimed at the black church could be considered talking down to the blacks,” Mr. Jackson said, “my appeal really was the moral content of the message, in order to deal with personal and moral responsibility of black males but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy.” With Mr. Obama now seeking to lead the government that Mr. Jackson is criticizing, some might wonder how a President Obama would deal with a Jesse Jackson headache, if not the Jesse problem.