Ben Smith at The Politico points out some interesting rhetoric from Geraldine Ferraro, circa 1988 - read it all.
Several people took exception to former President Bill Clinton's comparison of Barack Obama's landslide victory in South Carolina to the victories there of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. But there's a potentially more interesting perspective when one looks below the surface at Jackson's 1988 campaign.
You can see from the bulk of Jackson's 1988 platform, considered too liberal at the time, that it has come to represent mainstream thinking within the Democratic Party today. Yet, none of the planks, save one, were adopted at the party's conventions in 1984, or 1988. Just a few years later, Bill and Hillary Clinton championed Jackson's call for national health care, though the initiative failed, some insist as a result of mishandling.
Clinton and Obama still invoke some of it in their current campaigns, twenty-years after Jackson won 13 states. In one debate this year, Republican and former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee, proposed something similar to Jackson's WPA idea. Bill Clinton went even further than Jackson's platform regarding military cuts when he assumed office in 1992. And today some of Jackson's planks are embraced by both Republicans and Democrats, alike.
This at least raises the question, did so many South Carolina voters vote for Jackson in 1988 because he was Black, as some would allege? Or were they simply embracing a vision it would take the Democratic Party establishment years to embrace?
In both races, Jackson ran on what many considered to be a very liberal platform. Declaring that he wanted to create a "Rainbow Coalition" of various minority groups, including African Americans, Hispanics, Arab-Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, family farmers, the poor and working class, and homosexuals, as well as white progressives who fit into none of those categories, Jackson ran on a platform that included:
... creating a Works Progress Administration-style program to rebuild America's infrastructure and provide jobs to all Americans,
re-prioritizing the War on Drugs to focus less on mandatory minimum sentences for drug users (which he views as racially biased) and more on harsher punishments for money-laundering bankers and others who are part of the "supply" end of "supply and demand"
reversing Reaganomics-inspired tax cuts for the richest ten percent of Americans and using the money to finance social welfare programs
cutting the budget of the Department of Defense by as much as fifteen percent over the course of his administration
declaring Apartheid-era South Africa to be a rogue nation
instituting an immediate nuclear freeze and beginning disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union
giving reparations to descendants of black slaves
supporting family farmers by reviving many of Roosevelt's New Deal–era farm programs
creating a single-payer system of universal health care
ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment
increasing federal funding for lower-level public education and providing free community college to all
applying stricter enforcement of the Voting Rights Act and supporting the formation of a Palestinian state.
Comments