Pride and Prejudice

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Jackson's "Hymie" slur and his failure to repudiate Farrakhan caused outrage in several respected quarters. The New Republic, a leading liberal magazine with a strong pro-Israel slant, editorialized that Jackson's "potential for blighting the future of interracial politics and for wounding the Democratic Party now seems great indeed." Carl T. Rowan, the most widely circulated black columnist, warned that Jackson might be stirring a white backlash that would help re-elect Reagan, "in which case Jackson is going to have to face the conscience-searing question: Why, in his stubborn embrace of a few black demagogues, he has made it so easy for the Reaganites to appeal to white racism?"

Jewish leaders were skeptical of Jackson to begin with. Sympathetic to the demand for a Palestinian homeland, Jackson was borne aloft by Arabs shouting, "Arafat! Jackson!" on a trip to the Middle East in 1979. He was also quoted as saying that he was "tired of hearing about the Holocaust"—a comment that he says was taken out of context. Today many Jewish leaders are convinced that Jackson is antiSemitic. Although Jews and black leaders have had their differences—particularly on the use of racial quotas, which are anathema to Jews but favored by many blacks as a cure for historic discrimination—the two groups have often worked together politically. Jewish voters, for example, were supportive of black mayoral candidates in Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia. The conflict with Jackson threatens to scuttle that affinity.

The Republicans naturally hope that Jackson will drive Jewish voters right out of the Democratic Party. Vice President George Bush, acting in his role of G.O.P. stalking horse for '84, was quick to condemn not only Farrakhan and Jackson but Mondale and Hart, neither of whom made much of an issue of the ethnic slurs in order to avoid offending black voters. Bush's ploy was "a great political stroke," admitted a Mondale aide. "It was simple, crude and effective."

The Republicans are also counting on Jackson to push other threatened whites into the G.O.P. column. Conservative Jesse Helms even invokes Jackson's name in fund-raising solicitations (in one letter, 24 times). Republican strategists predict that Jackson will register more whites for the Republicans than blacks for the Democrats. Each side aims to sign up about 2 million new voters, but that represents far more of a challenge for blacks, since there are 49 million unregistered whites compared with 7 million unenrolled blacks. Says Lamarr Mooneyham, president of the North Carolina Moral Majority: "If I could afford to pay Jesse, I'd bring him down here every month."