New York figures and fallout: Michael Dukakis won solidly, with 51 per cent, to 37 per cent for Jesse Jackson and 10 for Albert Gore. But New York Times/CBS poll showed only 45 per cent of those who voted for the Duke supported him “strongly”; 50 per cent backed him with reservations, or in order to stop another candidate (i.e., Jackson). Jackson took 17 per cent of white vote, 32 per cent of white liberals…. Was it a rough campaign? Not really, opined Governor Mario Cuomo: “I saw no fruit thrown. I saw no disorderly conduct.” Yes really, howled columnist Jimmy Breslin: “We had a mayor named Koch who tried to turn our sidewalks into a field in the night while he burned a cross, large and grotesque, with flames licking the night air.” Vera Brown, a Harlem barmaid, hoped Jackson would be back for mayor’s race. “He’s gonna campaign next year against that big-mouthed mayor, isn’t he?”… Most damaged pol, apart from Gore and Koch, was Cuomo. His I’m-not-running-but routine and incessant telephone kibitzing finally palled. Martin Nolan, of the Boston Globe, dubbed him the “Martha Mitchell of the Eighties.”
The hard Left is climbing all over Jackson bandwagon. Although the Communist Party will not endorse a candidate of any other party, says CP leader Gus Hall, “at this stage of the game most members of the party would be working for Jesse Jackson.” Angela Davis joined the Jackson camp several weeks back… James Steele, political-action director of the CPUSA, finds Jackson a “viable candidate” who could win the election. Steele says that Jackson’s foreign policy hasn’t changed since 1984 but he “has learned to articulate it better.”… Also in Jackson’s corner are the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Ann Lewis, writing in Democratic Left, the DSA’s publication, says, “Jackson has reached across the color lines to make the connection between progressive politics and real economic opportunity.”… Mrs. Lewis (formerly of the Democratic National Committee and of ADA) is a Jackson advisor, as is far-left Rep. Ron Dellums…. Jackson’s “issues advisor” is Robert Borosage, director of (notorious) Institute for Policy Studies for the past ten years. The IPS is variously depicted. Human Events finds it a Communist front; Ben Wattenberg describes it as “a hard-left institution,” and the Newspaper of Record as “a Washington research group of liberal orientation.”.. Running the store back at the Rainbow Coalition is long-time Jackson associate Jack [Hunter Pitts] O’Dell, identified as a Communist Party member by the FBI in 1959; as recently as 1983 he was a member of the World Peace Council, the premier international Communist front, and he is now a senior editor of Freedomways, the Communist magazine aimed at black intellectuals…. Amy is not the only Georgia Carter to endorse Jackson. Last week former First Brother Billy Carter joined the gang.
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