Column: Jesse's Mystical Tour:

Jackson struggles to find his old political magic

By Tom Barton, Savannah Morning News

This disappointing number says it all: 300.

That was the estimated crowd at St. John Baptist Church on Hartridge Street, a modest-sized house of God where the Rev. Jesse Jackson held a local coming-out party of sorts last Tuesday night as part of an important march through Georgia.

Now, 300 folks is a nice turnout in Savannah for a garden club event or a basketball game between two small high schools. It's probably a typical afternoon madhouse at Chuck E. Cheese's.

But for Jackson, the prodigal preacher with an out-of-wedlock child who is searching for forgiveness and a forum, it's bad news. He's used to filling houses, not playing to some empty seats - like all those in the mezzanine at St. John's, which opened its doors to the general public for this event.

This has to give him and his closest supporters serious pause.

If Jesse can't play in Savannah, a place that has been good to him over the years, then the party's over.

Savannah was one of two dozen stops for Jackson on a weeklong bus tour of Georgia that started a week ago Saturday in Atlanta. He called it the "New South Tour for Hope, Healing and Shared Economic Security."

It could be subtitled the "Jesse's Magical Mystery Tour to See If Georgia Has Him on Its Mind."

But this wasn't the old Jesse, the one who stooped to race-baiting and other lowest common denominators to build support for himself and his causes. This seemed to be a new and reinvented Jesse - one who sounds more colorblind, except when it comes to green.

Jackson's first stop in the state's First City on Tuesday came at midday, just outside the International Trade & Convention Center on Hutchinson Island. It wasn't a coincidence that IBM, one of those big, bad American companies, just happened to be holding its 2001 annual stockholders' meeting inside.

But Jackson wasn't there to woo Big Blue or to coax a big check out of its chief executive, Louis Gerstner Jr., for the Rainbow/Push Coalition. Instead, he was there too talk about the poor - the poor people who have pensions at IBM.

"There's another Georgia, too poor to be conservative," he said according to published reports. "They don't need a tax cut, they need a pay raise."

Those may have been red-meat words for the Alliance at IBM, which is part of the Communication Workers of America union and whose members organized Jackson's appearance. But in a state that voted big for President Bush last November, in part because of his tax-cut promises, such verbiage is like rotten tomatoes.

Vintage Jesse arrived at St. John Baptist Church that evening. He said - correctly - that most poor Southerners are not black. They're white. In fact, had he wanted to be perfectly accurat

e, he would have said more white families are on welfare in this nation than black families.

Jackson proceeded with a populist riff, which has a long, proud tradition in Georgia among white and black politicians.

"We have an obligation to redefine the new South," he was quoted as saying. "It's no longer the race gap, it's the resource gap."

Of course, one way to close that gap is to let workers keep more of their hard-earned money, rather than giving it up to a government that has a surplus. But that wasn't a part of the night's script.

On Wednesday morning, Jackson spoke to an invitation-only breakfast audience of about 75 people at the Temple of Glory Community Church on Stiles Avenue. According to at least two attendees, the new Jesse showed up.

"He presented a multi-point plan to improve education," one audience member, who happens to be a card-carrying Republican, said later. "He made a lot of sense."

His message, aimed at parents, when something like this:

* Take your children to school more often, go inside and talk to the teachers.

* Get the teachers' phone numbers - and use them.

* Pick up the report cards; they mean something.

* Turn off the TV for several hours every night.

* Actively practice a religion; children need moral grounding as badly as they need to know how to read and write.

"He's still a great orator," the audience member said. 'But it's hard separating the message from the messenger."

That's Jackson's biggest dilemma and his greatest challenge. However, if he's reinventing himself, Savannah is a good test city.

He should know his history here. In 1988, Jackson ran for president as a Democrat. He handily won the crowded Georgia primary, taking about 40 percent of the vote.

But in Chatham County, riding a big turnout in black neighborhoods, he grabbed an astounding 60 percent of the Democratic total. He captured every district, except the county's westside.

He didn't win his party's nomination that year. An eventual loser named Dukakis did. But Jackson established himself as a force to be reckoned with in this state - and, with about 14,500 local votes in the bag, he earned favorite-son status in Savannah.

Fast-forward to last Tuesday night.

An older Jackson, just shy of 60, is pitching a message to a church crowd. About 300 souls turn out.

It doesn't mean curtains for the reverend and his public life. That's premature. But last Tuesday night, in a city where Democrats once embraced him like a Moses, the light looked to go out on him in Georgia.

-- Anonymous, April 29, 2001