JESSE JACKSON AS KINGMAKER
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on Democrat
and Republican efforts to keep their preachers in order
South Carolina THE crowd was emotional in Spartanburg. Textile workers chanted and clapped as a Country and Western star, Ricky Skaggs, wearing bright red boots sang songs about Jesus. It didn't matter that Pat Robertson was late. They were all the more excited when he finally strode onto the stage and launched into an extravagant speech, promising to purge 100,000 liberals from the federal government and 'begin the decolonisation of the Soviet Empire'. Teenage girls jumped onto their chairs waving red, white and blue banners, as the hall burst into rapturous applause.
The next day Robertson gave the same speech in neighbouring Greenville at Bob Jones University, a shabby yellow brick campus that looks like a low-security pris- on. In the sombre auditorium Robertson got a mixed welcome. A group of support- ers, apparently outsiders, tried to turn it into a rally, but most of the crowd was subdued. Well scrubbed young men wear- ing George Bush or Jack Kemp buttons on their blazers listened sceptically as he insisted, with childish petulance, that there are indeed Soviet missiles in Cuba. Nor were they persuaded that a cut of $20 billion to $40 billion in defence spending sits well with a belligerent, interventionist foreign policy. Nor that a bicentennial jubilee is needed, in this case to cancel Third World debt, in order to avoid an economic depression.
Bob Jones University should have been a safe haven for Roberston. It was founded in 1927 to fight the mainstream Baptist seminaries that were beginning to question the doctrine of inerrancy, in particular the Virgin Birth. It promotes rigid family values, accepting Ephesians (5:xxii) that 'the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is head of the Church', and prohibits its students from smoking, drinking, or trysting at night. But it does not have theocratic leanings. It belongs to a wide- spread tradition that upholds the separa- tion of church and state, and looks un- favourably on preachers that dabble in politics. It also deplores charismatic sects — a new movement that forms the core of Robertson's support — which it considers heretical, replacing structured beliefs with mystical pap, and giving fundamentalism a bad name. 'I think there's a backlash of Southern evangelicals against Robertson,' says Carl Abrams, the university's direc- tor of political science. ' They don't want the world to think of them as backward.'
Robertson pinned his hopes on South Carolina, the most evangelical state in the union, where 65 per cent of the Republican primary voters call themselves born-again Christians. After declaring that victory would make or break his candidacy he came third with 19 per cent of the vote, slipping behind Robert Dole.
The Republican party can now breathe a huge sigh of relief. Robertson ran out of steam going into Super Tuesday three days later. He won ten delegates out of the 797 at stake and there is no longer any danger that he will be kingmaker at the Republi- can convention in New Orleans. Indeed, George Bush is likely to wrap up the nomination long before then. The scat- tered mega-primary favoured the candi- date with money, organisation, and a pull on Reagan's coat-tails. Bush carried every state which, owing to the Republican party's, winner-takes-all system in most of the region, gave him the lion's share of the delegates. The Dole campaign, royally mismanaged, has a last chance of recovery in next week's Illinois primary. It is vexing for the Democrats. Super Tuesday, the biggest joint primary in American history, was put together by conservative Southern Democrats, notably the former Governor of Virginia, Chuck Robb, and the senator from Georgia, Sam Nunn, in order to give the South greater influence and break the liberal lock on the nominating process. Instead, Super Tues- day, which the Republicans agreed to• reluctantly, has given their party a clear winner, while leaving the Democratic race splintered between four candidates. It worked to the extent that Senator Albert Gore, from Tennessee, whose fresh coat of Southern conservatism has not quite co- vered up his liberal voting record, has been able to jump start his campaign in the South after more or less ignoring the Northern primaries. He husbanded his funds and was able to launch a last-minute wave of television advertisements — the lethal weapon of the 1988 campaign — that helped him win five states in a stunning upset. But he has no organisation in the big northern states and scant chance of win- ning the nomination outright, if at all.
The Democrats therefore still face the problem that the Republicans have just been spared: what to do about their maverick Baptist minister? Unlike Robert- kin the Revd Jesse Jackson did not flop in the South. The black vote buttressed by a sliver of white radicals won him four states and a stack of delegates. He now has A good chance of being kingmaker at the Atlanta convention, a thought that horri- fies party officials. It is not long since Jackson was in Cuba toasting Fidel Castro, and he continues to be an equilateralist speaking of Soviet imperialism and Amer- ican capitalism in the same breath. I-fis fans say he has matured. It is true that he sometimes puts his eloquence to good cause, imploring school children in rhym- ing slang to give up drugs; but too often he squanders it on the politics of resentment. A moderate black, perhaps, could win on the vice-presidential ticket, but not a business-bashing populist like Jackson. Most likely he would not want the post, instead demanding only influence in choos- ing the vice-presidential nominee or mem- bers of the Cabinet, but even that could be hazardous. 'If he is perceived as setting the agenda it'll be catastrophic for the Demo- crats,' says Ben Wattenburg from the American Enterprise Institute.
The best news for the Democrats in this respect is that Al Gore may have crippled Representative Richard Gephardt and taken over as the white challenger to Governor Michael Dukakis from Mas- sachusetts, who did respectably enough in the old confederacy to return North as the national front-runner. A fight between Dukakis and Gephardt would have been long and bitter, perhaps leaving Jackson as final arbiter. But Dukakis should have an easier time against Gore in the industrial states. Moreover Gore would make ' the ideal running mate for a north-eastern liberal, and providing no bad blood is created over the next few weeks as they slog it out, the two ought to be able to patch a deal together later that would break Jackson's lock on the convention. Even so, they will have to give him something. Jackson, like Robertson, is quite capable of launching a third party one day if his supporters are taken for granted.
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