In a biting cold wind, on a hillside overlooking the huge round metal bins and spidery auger pipes of the Pro Farmer Grain Elevator just outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Paul Simon was worriedly testing his microphone. TV reporters shivered as their camera crews calculated angles and sound technicians tried to deal with the wind noise. “He’ll talk about grain exports and the embargo,” an advance man confided urgently. “He’ll mention Gephardt by name.”
Simon feels comfortable in Iowa, and Iowans seem to feel comfortable with him. As he reminds most audiences, he’s from Rural Route 1, Makanda, Illinois, population 402, “and that’s about as rural as you can get.” Although Iowa has some moderate-sized cities, it has more acres and income in agriculture than any state other than California. Despite a cultural conservatism that they share with Simon’s rural and small-town southern Illinois neighbors, Iowa Democrats tend to be more liberal and antimilitarist than downstate Illinois Democrats. That makes Simon even more at home: on issues like civil rights and peace, he’s always been to the left of his political base.
Despite a huge gap in background and personality, Simon and Jackson have more in common with each other than they do with any of the other Democratic candidates. Gephardt has been a moderate to conservative Democrat, now opportunistically trying to appear the fire-breathing populist. Senator Albert Gore has been a moderate, now trying to appear more conservative. Dukakis has been a cool-headed, cool-hearted, well-meaning liberal who hasn’t yet spelled out very clearly how he would translate “the miracle of Massachusetts” into a national phenomenon. Gary Hart and former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt stake out the neoliberal territory: they are democratic in foreign affairs, technocratic and market oriented in domestic policies, and they wrap the package together in a political vocabulary that clicks mainly for the middle class. Simon and Jackson, meanwhile, espouse more traditional liberal-left Democratic politics, speaking out on behalf of the economic interests of workers, farmers, and the victimized, needy, and powerless.
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Simon and Jackson were respectively the top two choices of one of Iowa’s leading peace groups, STAR-PAC. (No candidate received the two-thirds vote that the group requires to make an endorsement, and all of the Democrats but Gore were judged passable.) Both Simon and Jackson also strongly emphasize the creation of jobs by the federal government when the private economy falls short, and the need for investment in infrastructure–roads, sewers, mass transit, and the like (the latter is also a plank in Gary Hart’s program). Both argue against recent tax trends and favor placing the tax burden more on wealthier taxpayers and corporations (Jackson more forcefully and consistently than Simon).
“I think he’s a real person, a real Christian,” said Dawn Naig, an elderly Republican, after hearing Jackson speak outside the tiny town of Emmetsburg. “We need a man like him in the White House.”
While Simon advocates ending tax incentives for mergers and most overseas investment, he rarely focuses attention on corporate misdeeds. Jackson, on the other hand, continually leads his audience to the view that family farmers, factory workers, and welfare mothers have a common foe in big business and a common interest that should overshadow their differences.
Jackson is quick to join picket lines (even when it means siding with white strikers against a largely black force of strikebreakers), to protest with workers at shut-down factories, and to march with demonstrators against apartheid, against aid to the Nicaraguan contras, and for greater government action against AIDS. But he has never been elected to any office, and even as a movement leader has consistently failed to build effective organizations or even administer well the organizations he has established. Inevitably the organizations–from Operation PUSH to the Rainbow Coalition–are subordinated to the demands of supporting Jackson, the political celebrity, agitator, and educator.
