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We're running a couple of wonderful deals for the holidays and today I want to tell you about our sub stack behind the Paywall Price Discount. So it used to be that to get access to all our Just List offerings where I make great jokes, where I tell you about stories you might not have heard about, for instance, the roller skating elephant and his love affair with a woman, that there's a lot of lawsuits involved, there's a lot of chicanery and almost near death experiences. I found that story. I'm giving it to you. So it's not just the fines. It's how I break down, say an Oval Office visit in a way you won't find on the Gist because I have too many things to get to. So this is all on substack. It is for paid subscribers to our substack. The Just List is now. Are you ready? $49 a year. It's going up to 5999 because of tariffs after January 4th. But from now to January 4th I want you to be able to get in for $49 a year. And the way to do it is to text 33777 and text the word Mike. I'm Mike. I'm giving you the Gist list because I care. And if you care about supporting weird stories about trapping bobcats in Indiana and a lot of other things, you will subscribe for only 49. Not the 55 it was until now. Not the 5,999 that these Trump tariffs are forcing us into, but for only $49. Text Mike 233777. It's Wednesday, November 26, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Now maybe you promos as the one we just played asking you to join us and pony up a Couple bucks for substack. This isn't a promo now though, if you're on the Pesca plus subscription plan, you didn't know about the promo. Probably don't know that Pesca plus also has a promo. Okay, I'm not using this for commercial purposes. I'm using this for word purposes to say that on the just list a couple days I came across a word I hadn't heard before, but maybe you had a scarification artist. I do love words. And as we go into Thanksgiving and the Thanksgiving holiday, I say thanks for words. You know what word that I'm not that thankful for on this Thanksgiving? Giving. I bet you're going to hear Thanksgiving is giving. Autumnal. That's fine. People like slang. Let's get over this one. Giving. I'm giving Angst. So scarification. This was about staffer for Jeff Drew. She or someone wrote Trump whore on her belly trying to reverse Jesse Smollett it. Uh, the cops in the area searched her car. There were the same kind of zip ties. And her story began to yes, untie or unravel soon after that, but not before she went to a scarification artist. Another great phrase I heard in the news. This is just an accident. NPR got their hands on some documents. Pete Hegseth doesn't like the boy Scouts. Listen to this word or phrase. Scouting America promotes DEI that it rebranded.
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Itself to be genderless and attack boyfriendly spaces.
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Boy friendly. This has got to be something that young men now put in their dating profiles. I don't know if I'm seeking a relationship, but I am boy friendly. I would be. Are we in a situationship or is this more of a girlfriendly boyfriendly type thing? Boy friendly. The last phrase I came across as we head into our Thanksgiving holiday and give thanks for words. Though not thanks for the word giving. This is one of the points on the so called Ukraine Russian peace deal. Here's a point, here's a whole point in full. A comprehensive non aggression agreement will be concluded between Russia, Ukraine and Europe. Europe. A lot of. A lot of people getting a say in that. And here is the phrase. All ambiguities of. Of the last 30 years will be considered settled. All ambiguities. I hope that means just in the region and I hope that doesn't mean. But of course it does. Claims or Ukrainians claims to you know, what was within its borders a couple years ago. But isn't that the point of a settlement? You can't just say the ambiguities will be settled and that's our settlement. You got to kind of have to spell them out. Otherwise you're being. What's the word? You're giving ambiguity. You're giving ambiguous. On the show today, someone who is very specific. Someone that you know. Her name is Abby Phillips. She hosts CNN show with her name in it. But she has just written a very interesting biography of Jesse Jackson and she is here for the whole show to discuss it. Abby Philip, Author of A Dream Deferred. I sometimes struggle to find gifts to give for my mom and dad especially. But now I have a great idea because I've been using Cove Pure. Cove Pure is a way to get without fancy hookups. Get great water, great tasting water and water that is active as half of the name implies or flat out promises pure. It makes your water taste very, very good. Pure, clean, no aftertaste. But sometimes it gets those contaminants slash floaties down to single digits. It's lab certified to remove 99.9% of contaminants from your water. That includes stuff like PFAS and pharmaceuticals, fluoride, lead, arsenic. The purest water you could get and so easy to install. Fits right on the countertop. Looks great doing so. So if you're looking for a gift that's good for your loved ones and one they will actually use, I highly recommend Cove Pure. And because I have partnered with them, they're giving you a special $250 holiday discount with my link covpure.com the gist that c o v e p u r e.com the gist to get $250 off covepure.com the gist hurry before the sale ends.
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Oh, hey.
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Welcome to gift wrapping.
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D
Whoa.
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So we saw Donna.
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E
Hey, can you wrap these, please?
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Wow. IPhone 17s. You splurged.
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At T Mobile you can get four iPhone 17s on them. The new Center Stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. It's the perfect gift for everyone.
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I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe.
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E
Well, it's better than socks.
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So I have to trade in my old phone, right?
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No AT T Mobile. There's no trade ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift.
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Incredible.
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In fact, wrap up my old phone too for my Aunt Rosa.
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Forget that.
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Aunt Liz will be jealous.
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Sounds like my family drama.
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Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with. Hey, where are you going?
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To T Mobile.
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The holidays are better. AT T Mobile get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you switch plus four lines for just 25 bucks a line. And now T Mobile is available in US cellular stores with 24 month legal credits and 4 eligible board inside essentials for well qualified customers. Got okay plus taxes fees and $35 device connection charge credits and imbalance due if you pay off early or cancel. Contact Us Finance Agreement 256 gigabytes $830 required Visit T mobile.com.
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Abby Phillip is the anchor of Newsnight with Abby Phillip on cnn. You can't get a better person to host that show. And now she is out with a book called Jesse Jackson. Well, it's called A Dream Deferred Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power. It is by turns historically revealing. I did not know there was a brief flirtation between Jackson and Reagan when Carter was causing inflation to go so high. It's, it analyzes the politics and just in terms of great writing, I'll read you just a little part. At the heart of his political pitch was a core theory that the tools needed to upend the political power structures were already there within reach. The stones for David slingshot shot. We're just waiting to be picked up in the South. Abby Phillip, welcome to the gist.
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D
Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.
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Nice job. Congratulations. And that passage I read was excellent because you channeled Jesse Jackson. I'm sure when you're in the middle of a book, it's hard not to, but you channeled some of his intonations and also his themes, which are because he was a seminarian marrying biblical verse with the way people talked and the. That is my first question as you got more and more into this, did you see and almost be able to anticipate where Jesse Jackson would go with his rhetoric at times?
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D
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can't not because he was so vivid in the way that he painted these pictures. And that was one of his gifts, to be honest, was that he was able to paint this picture that seemed very familiar to people. I mean, almost regardless of your religious background, you understand the David and Goliath struggle. You understand what that looks like. And he always saw the political system in that frame as the kind of the underdog being the regular American and the tools that they have at their disposal being their ability to vote and. Yeah, I mean the more time I spent with him and with his speeches and with his words and his thinking, the more that you can kind of see that he always saw things as being interconnected and he was always trying to weave what he liked to call a quilt. That was part of the story of how he saw America. Of all these different people, all these different backgrounds, and what do they have in common? How are all these things connected? That's how he thought. That's how he strategized as an organizer, and that's how he envisioned politics.
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Yeah, he did weave the quilt. And if it was one patch all alone, and that patch was indigenous people, it wouldn't mean anything. It was another patch all alone, and that patch was the concerns of Latino people. It wouldn't mean anything. I'm Channeling from his 1988 Democratic convention speech, and, my God, so many analogies and so much vivid imagery. But early on in the book, we could just talk about the rhetoric all day. You have him recognizing that Scripture and the words of the Bible are not connected to regular people. And he saw his role as being that vector, did he not?
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D
He very much did. And it also starts from the fact that he went to seminary in the North. He had a very different biblical upbringing than some of the other figures of the civil rights movement who came up in the South. So he went to Chicago Theological Seminary. And so he was around a lot of sort of progressive white white pastors and religious leaders. And it was a very theoretical education. But he's a guy from Greenville, South Carolina. He is just a regular Southern black boy. And I think that he always had both of those things in his mind and had to figure out, how do I take what I'm learning, the theory, the principles, the philosophy, and actually make it digestible and understandable to regular Americans. And I think he knew that was both his task and also a special gift that he had, which is why when he started doing these Saturday morning meetings in Chicago, they were basically like church on Saturday, but instead of necessarily just talking about the Lord and faith, they were talking about activism and politics and business and economic empowerment. And. And he used those meetings as a kind of revival setting for an extension of the church that he thought was really necessary, which was how to bring it into people's everyday lives, into their politics, into their advocacy, into their own economic empowerment, in terms of how they use their personal economies to influence the broader economy. And he really became a master at that and kind of differentiated himself from his own teachers, including Dr. King and others who came out of the south, in taking that message to urban settings in the North.
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A
Yeah, so he had these great skills. And, I mean, I am going to talk about his rhetoric with you and contrast it to Barack Obama's and among his skills were the rhetorical, but even beyond that, the charismatic, the interpersonally charismatic. Here's a 6, 3 former football player early on outside the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He's taking on responsibilities of crowd control that he's just naturally good at. The members of SNCC and the and the movement see his natural leadership skills. He's handsome. There is a message, there is a quote in there about how during his 1988 run, farmers were responding to him and of course the black people in the audience were responding to him. And then it also said teenage girls were swooning at his good looks. I don't know about that, but he's very charismatic. And another great thing that he does and among his great skills is great coalition building. He knew how to do it, he knew how to work behind the scenes. But his political deficits and I'd like you to talk about this, and the book talks about this, were he often had poor tactics and strategy and oftentimes. I don't know if you explicitly say this, but his tactics seem to fall back on the first two things I talked about that he was just so confident in his soft skills or his skills of persuasion that he would often do things that were in politic that were a little not well thought out. There was the time he is trying to cajole a Jewish leader and he goes into his office uninvited and puts his feet up on his desk. And often and even how he would introduce Barack Obama by calling him Barack Alabama. Things would slip out sometimes like a great Greek tragic figure. His hubris or his skills were also his fatal. Flawed, don't you think?
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D
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's really at the heart of it because you know, the heart, the central question you kind of end up with when you take a look at this is why didn't it work? I mean, he really did have a lot of the skills. He had not only the interpersonal skills, but he had the intellect really to. To play in the sandbox of. Of people who think that they can be president of the United States. But he was so reliant on the fact that he had charisma, he was able to speak, he was able to mar a lot of media attention around just about anything that he wanted to talk about in his heyday in the 70s and the 80s. But his ability to manage organizations, whether it was the questions around the Rainbow or excuse me, now it's called the Rainbow Push Coalition, but before it was called Operation push and their finances all the way to his actual campaigns. He was not necessarily the best of chief executives, right. And he used to have this phrase where he would say, I'm a tree shaker, not a jelly maker. And in typical Jesse Jackson fashion, what that means is he's the guy who's standing underneath the tree and he's shaking it and he's getting the fruit to fall down to the floor, but someone else is going to be picking it up, taking it to the jelly making factory and making jelly out of it. He was very good at the kind of rabble rousing, getting the attention, the, the idea of just bringing issues to light. But when it comes to putting actual organizations together, he was not as skilled in that. And, and, and, but I would also add he didn't have as much grace. I think, as you know, not everybody is good at an organization and nor do you have to be. You have to hire the right people to bring organizations along. But I think one of the things that really got in his way was that when he was running for president, he was the outsider of the outsider. You know, not even black leaders were supporting him in 1984.
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Not the black elite, for sure, not the black elite.
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So he was really building this plane as he was flying it. He did not have as much support as even Barack Obama did when he was running in 2008. And so as a black man trying to run for president, doing that for the very first time, being kept at arm's length not just from the establishment, but also from your own people, I think it made it in 1984 in particular, almost impossible for him to build a real organization. And in 1988, he was able to build a better organization, but it still wasn't quite enough to be operational at the level that it needed to be operational at in order to really compete with the establishment candidates in a really heated Democratic primary.
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Right. And I would say that's. It seems like you, one might say, oh, there's an injustice to that, but there's not, I would think. Walter Mondale was vice president for four years, and Walter Mondale and Gary Hart as a senator, and the people who were running against him, Al Gore, and in some cases beating him, and in some cases not because they were insiders. You could always portray that as they're part of the establishment. Look how amazing it is that this poor kid whose name isn't even Jesse Jackson for the first 12 years of his life from Greenville, South Carolina comes along, but because they knew how to play the inside game. They also valued the inside game. And it would be one thing if Jesse Jackson had these amazing skills and also recognized where he stopped short and actually addressed it. But it didn't seem like he did that too often. He thought the skills would and should take him to the promised land, as it were.
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D
Yeah, I think that's a fair, that's a fair way to put it. I mean, he had to always, I think throughout his life, in his view, rely on himself and rely on his sort of innate ability. And I think he, he like a lot of improvisational characters in politics, of which there are many. I've covered several of them. They like to, to, to march to the beat of their own drum. I mean, there is this kind of figure. I mean actually, you know, Bill Clinton's a little bit like this. Donald Trump is like this, and Jesse Jackson is like this too, where they trust their gut about how to go about virtually everything. And I think that Jesse Jackson was that type of Paul of political figure was that, you know, he would get up in the morning and the person deciding what candidate Jesse Jackson was doing was Jesse Jackson, not a cadre of aides, but really him. And if he wanted to spend an extra hour shaking hands and kissing babies, he would spend an extra hour shaking hands and kissing babies. And that was not the best thing necessarily for a well run campaign. And I talk about this, you know, at various points, both in 84 and 88, you know, he would decide, okay, I'm gonna get up and go to Cub. And while it's amazing that he brought back Americans and people wrongfully detained in Cuba, some of his aides were like, why is he going to Cuba when we've got to run in all of these primaries and rack up the delegates that you say you want so much? So there is a hubris to the personality that decides I'm gonna run for president. And Jesse Jackson definitely was that type of person who thought, I am the person who knows best how to run this campaign. And I think he, he was willing to entertain some establishment support, as in 1988 in particular, but fundamentally always believed that it would really emanate from him the success or failure of this campaign.
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A
Right. And when someone is an important and interesting political figure, we tend to say of them that without them, those who are of cut from a similar cloth might not have happened. And so the assertion is without or the question is without Jesse Jackson, could there have been a Barack Obama? Obama? Now I'm sure you interviews with Axelroder in the book I'm sure you tried to get an interview with Barack Obama to ask him that question. And if I understand how these things probably work, his people stringed you along for a little while, but then you realized it wouldn't happen. Am I right in guessing?
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D
That sounds about right. Yeah.
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A
Yeah. That's what they do. What kind of books are.
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D
We're not gonna have time. There's a lot of water underneath the bridge on that relationship. So it tracks.
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Sure. And what does Barack Obama have to gain from it? And all of those questions, I don't know how you could ever disprove that. I. You could also make the same case with Shirley Chisholm, you know, the first black person to run for president. And she's in the book. She's an interesting character in the book, but it's hard to make the case, the counter case. But I think I could. In that Obama had to go through the Jackson political dynasty, including his son. Obama was from Chicago. There was a template beforehand of a black man running for president. All true. But then Obama had not only these other and deeper and different skills. I think he did things in ways that were so different from Jesse Jackson that my theory is, and I'd like to know what you think about it, that it was the contrast with Jesse Jackson, especially rhetorically, that helped Obama or put Obama in a different category. The way that people related to Obama's speeches versus the way that people related to Jackson's soaring oratorical skills was very different. And I thought, I think, I don't know if you know the old story about Pericles and Cicero in Greece, but the story, the example was they would both try to convince the people to go to war. And the people would hear Cicero and say, oh, Cicero made a great speech about going to war. And then they would hear Pericles and say, oh, yeah, let's go to war. And that, I think, was the difference between Jackson and Obama.
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D
That's interesting. I mean, I do agree with you that they are actually, as political figures, quite different. They. They're ideologically not that similar. I think Jesse Jackson was actually much more, if you're going to use the left right paradigm, he was much more to the left than Obama was. I think he definitely was much less of a politician than Obama is. And that matters because Obama made a lot of important political decisions in those campaigns that allowed him to be successful in a way that Jesse Jackson was not. But I will say, I mean, and I'm curious, actually, if there's more that you want to share about the rhetoric but because I actually do find that I see a lot of Jesse Jackson influence in Obama's rhetoric. I actually do. I mean, when you really look at Jackson's speeches and the content of the speeches, not the delivery of the speeches, but the content of it, you see a lot of similarities in the way that they saw America as they both argue that America is a diverse and yet interconnected nation that has moral principles around what the government and the nation should be doing for its citizens. They both came from a sort of anti war tradition. Don't forget that Obama differentiated himself from Hillary Clinton in the primary because he was opposed to the Iraq war and she had not been. And so my one quibble only would be that I actually think that, that while you're right that Obama understood the need for contrast with Jesse Jackson, Jesse Jackson came out of a civil rights tradition. He was viewed as a firebrand, as a flamethrower, as the guy with the afro in the 80s and the big gold chain that he had on Sesame Street. And for a lot of Americans that was a very threatening image. And Obama cut a very different, you know, a very different image for most Americans than that. But I also think that his approach to the message of unity had a lot that was borrowed from Jesse Jackson. One last thing I will say though is that the most practical way in which Jesse Jackson is a forerunner for Obama is just simply in the basics of delegate math. And that is super, super important because Obama in 2008 is running as the non establishment pick for the presidency. Hillary Clinton is the establishment pick and he is popular and he has a lot of grassroots support. But the Democratic primary process, had it been set up for Obama the way it was set up for Jesse Jackson, would have resulted in Obama still losing to Hillary Clinton. So what Jesse Jackson ultimately did was he said to the party, we need to change these delegate rules. Not just because, you know, I said so maybe might have benefited me, but because a winner take all system is designed to lock out non establishment candidates. And that was true in 1988 and it was true in 2008. Had they had a winner take all system, Obama would have lost. Hillary Clinton was still winning the big states, but he was still winning delegates. And that was the reason that as popular as he was, there was a structural barrier that was removed by Jesse Jackson that made it possible for him to be president. And so, you know, look, I think it's a super interesting conversation also just about how Obama knew that. We saw it firsthand. They had to keep Jesse Jackson really at arm's length in that campaign. Not just because of the hot mic movement, but because.
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A
Which is when he said something about cutting off Obama's balls. Yeah.
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D
Yes. Yeah. And that was not even the only thing. I mean, that was just one of a couple of other moments like that. But they were intentionally trying to say Obama is not quite that kind of black man. And they needed to say that just from a pragmatic perspective in order to make the critical pivot in the general election that allowed him to gain the support of white voters in this country.
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A
We'Re back with Abby Phillip, author of A Dream Deferred, Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power. And a second or so before the break, Abby, you mentioned the styles, the temperaments of Jesse Jackson. Barack Obama were different, but they both had a unity message. But isn't that really necessary for specifically a black politician? I say black, but isn't that necessary for a black politician? If you're going to be successful as a black politician in America with your natural base of only 14% of the population, you can't have an us versus them message. You can't be Donald Trump and try to be divisive because Trump has 60% of the. Of the population as his ethnic base. And like I said, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, 14%. So isn't it necessary to lean into a unity message out of strategy and, you know, also genuine conviction for a black politician? Right, I.
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D
100%. 100%. And, you know, I'll say that the. The concept of black political power that I tap into in the title of the book is intentional, even though that is not the totality of the message from Jesse Jackson. But it's intentional for this reason. I think he saw the black electorate as a vehicle for creating leverage. They are in the Democratic Party, the largest minority bloc. Right. And he saw that as a really important tool to force the party to open up its doors, so to speak, to everybody else. And so I think that Jesse Jackson understood that black voters were necessary, but not sufficient to do what he wanted to do. It was necessary to unify them, to have black voters operating in concert so that other Things are possible, but he never, I don't think he was under the illusion that that would be enough. And so that's why he did spend time with white farmers. He did go down to the south talking to the various segregationists that when he was, you know, in Selma were, you know, were state troopers trying to stop the marchers from getting across the bridge. You know, he was very cognizant that true coalition politics would have to include all of these constituent groups, minority constituent groups, and also enough white Americans. And that is ultimately the path that Barack Obama took to the presidency. Right?
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A
Yes.
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D
Did it work for Jesse Jackson? No, but yeah. I mean, you cannot be a Democrat running for president and not do both things at once. You can do that perhaps on the right. If you're Donald Trump. The us versus them message is not as much everyday working people against the powers that be, but it's for Donald Trump, it's immigrants and foreigners against Americans. And that's what the us versus them can look like. But I think Jesse Jackson saw a path for Democrats to take that form of populism and make it operable in a very diverse political party where you have all of these different groups who have different needs. But he thought that they could be unified under an umbrella of shared economic interests.
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A
Right. And so he's more similar to Bernie Sanders in that way than Barack Obama. And it's perhaps unfair. Yeah, yeah. It's perhaps unfair to only compare him to Barack Obama. And we're not only doing that. But there is one other thing I wanted to point out, which is that you said earlier, you know, both he and Obama gained fame initially for their anti war stance. But as you know, Obama's anti war stance was much, much more nuanced and subtle and always expressed. I'm not against all wars. I'm against dumb wars. And I was looking at some of Jackson's statements and they often, because they were so rhetorically powerful, sometimes they lack nuance. But I also think because his international instincts lacked nuance, it lend itself, it lended itself to powerful comments. So at one point, and this is also during I went back, I watched the 88 DNC speech, he says a couple things, says a couple of things that I think are just wrong. And this is an international. He talked about Reaganomics believing that the poor had too much money. I guess that's just rhetoric. He asserted that Reagan wanted a 20% tax cut for the rich. True. Technically, highest rates went from 90 to 70 and or from 70 to 50. And the poorest got a 20% tax rise. I tried to look all over to what that's based on. It seemed just to be based on. It's a good rhetorical flourish. It's not true. But he also said, and in this way, he's similar to Trump. And maybe it is populist. We're spending $150 billion to protect Japan and Germany, but Japan and Germany are creditor nations where a debtor nation let them protect themselves. So no one asked Jesse Jackson too much about it, but he very much seemed to want to withdraw from international commitments because of people in the homeland. Again, this is more of a Trumpian position than any Democrat, even Bernie Sanders. Sanders. And not one that Barack Obama would ever take.
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D
Totally. This is why I say that ideologically, I don't really think that Jesse Jackson and Obama really have that much in common. It is closer to, on the domestic front, Bernie Sanders politics. But those ideas that you just pointed out, actually, I'll say this, two parts of it. One is the rhetorical flourish, maybe the exaggeration, maybe the papering over of nuance. That to me is much more reminiscent of a kind of Trumpian approach to politics. And I think that both of them, both Jesse Jackson and Trump, you have to remember in the 80s, they were actually very similarly situated, at least ideologically, at that time.
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A
At least that one time in Trump Tower when they got stuck on an escalator together. Right?
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D
But I mean, remember when Trump had, had been complaining, Trump has been complaining about Japan cleaning our clocks and trade since the 80s. Since, since right around this time when in the 1988, he, he was talking on, you know, on, on late night TV about potentially running for president. He didn't end up doing it, but, but his philosophy then about trade and about how our international commitments are making it more difficult for us to focus on, on our commitments to our citizens at home. That was Trump in the 80s. That was also a little bit Jesse Jackson in the 80s. And so in 1988, the Democratic Party was not nearly as globalist as it is today. And so it was not. It was not. I think the kind of left right paradigm of 2025 does not really apply in the same way, you know, but today, I think Democrats, in large part because of opposition to Trump, but also because of nafta, because of the Clinton era, they've become much more favorable toward trade. They've been much more willing to, as Obama say, not be opposed to all wars, but just dumb wars. I think in the 80s, the Democratic Party's coalition was a little Bit different. There was more union power at that time. They weren't that past.
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A
We weren't that past the solid south and the Democrats dominating Southern politics. And you talk about Jim Hightower and Howell Heflin, there are all these. Still, the remnants of Southern Democrats were important, and those guys were always conservative and never what we would consider liberal or progressive.
- [38:00]
D
And Trump is. You have to understand Trump as actually a former Democrat. I mean, he. He is formerly someone who probably more aligned with that part of the Democratic Party that was more strong in the 80s than it is today. So, yes, I mean, we're kind of in the sort of horseshoe politics where the sort of. The left and the right kind of start approaching each other at the bottom. But that's why I don't think it is as easy to put this entire conversation in this kind of left, right frame. I think that what these politicians have in common, populism is one way of fram it, but it's speaking to something in the American populace that A, favors outsiders and B, is looking for somebody who addresses economic conditions and says, I'm gonna fight for you, regular guy. And Bernie was doing that. Jesse Jackson was doing that. And then Trump, like him or not, that's one of the things that he did in 2016 in particular, but. But also in 2024 that helped him win the presidency.
- [39:09]
A
Mm. So I did go back. I watched the 88 DNC speech. I watched a couple other of his speeches. They're wildly entertaining. I'll take the note that the politics of the 80s is different from today. The rhetorical style, the communication of the 80s was different from the aughts when Obama, I think, connected. But my critique would be on a sentence by sentence basis. That's a wonderful speech. There are so many turns of phrase and so many delights on a paragraph by paragraph basis. He does a great job. There are themes, and you can see where the paragraphs exist independently. But as an overall whole, there is an exhausting element to it in that Jesse Jackson can never take an analogy or can take a example and leave it at one, two or three iterations. He always plays it all out so that whether you're left wing or right wing, whether you're a hawk or a dove, we all need to fly. And then the left wing and the right wing become something else in the analogy. And then the common ground becomes the search for higher ground. And he came here in an immigrant ship, and my parents came here in a slave ship. But we're all in the same boat. There are Four different parts where there is the repetition, common ground being the most famous. But there are three other parts where different phrases are repeated. And by the end it's rousing. The crowd was on their feet. Of course, we're comparing it to, you know, Mike Dukakis and Walter Mondale, but it's unbelievably rousing. I just think it's a little exhausting. And if you're not on board, I don't know, you could say that's good, but I don't know how convincing it is. But I'm just, I'm speaking of it from my perspective today. And at the time it might have been totally and 100% work.
- [40:59]
D
Yeah, well, you know, I think it's fair to say that first of all, he's the master of alliteration and the kind of, the rhyming and the sort of sing, the almost like sing song dimension to how he turns a phrase and that made him famous. I would say though, that I believe it was the 1988 speech. You know, when, when he got to the end, it was like a 45 minute speech. Oh yeah. And he got to the end of that speech. I think there were 35 million people watching on TV at home. The audience numbers hit a peak at the. Not the beginning or the middle, but the end of the speech. And I think that says a lot about how, how engaging it was, but also how different it was from what all else people were hearing from politicians at that time. And in many ways, I don't know that you need to like it or not, but I think that what he was was unique. He brought to mass, you know, mass populations, this tradition of the black church, which is in fact the sort of layered analogies, the sermon like speech. And it was just different. And some of those 35 million people were just curious. They just had never really seen or heard a black man in the political context talking the way Jesse Jackson did. And they did that for the very first time. And so. So that to me is one of the many ways that I think he broke barriers and not to bring everything back to Obama. But if we think about Obama and the way that he was able to take that and actually refine it, he borrowed from that black sermon tradition, but he refined it as a speaker. And his speeches had elements of that, but they weren't as indulgent as Jesse Jackson's were. And. But you know, the first time, the first iteration of this thing was incredibly unique. It was incredibly differentiating and it really introduced an entire generation of Americans to a different kind of politician. And I will say that so many people have told me people who are today very establishment Democrats are not like big lefties or whatever. Many of them say the very first time they remember sitting down in front of a television and watching a convention speech was watching Jesse Jackson speeches either in 1984 or 1988. And it has such an imprint on the minds of so many people that I spoke to, whether they are liberals or conservatives or what have you. It was just memorable. And I think that shouldn't be left out of the conversation.
- [44:08]
A
So my analysis is that even though Jesse Jackson looked at his performances in the political conventions, in the races primaries of 84 and 88 and especially in 88, thought he was made the case he was screwed over, even tried to push things to the limit to get Lloyd Benson disqualified as vice president so that he would be vice president, he told himself that some version of he was done dirty. I would say that he because of in a true kudos and compliments to him, he reached the ceiling that someone could have reached without ever having serving served elected office with having these documented ties to Louis Farrakhan, which we haven't talked about. But maybe in our last couple of minutes, I do have a question about that. With having all the baggage that he did and not just the baggage that racist people would hold against you and not just the baggage of not believing that you could win, but baggage that is legitimate that politicians should answer for, you know, lack of depth on policies and and a campaign itself that was a little ramshackle, not always the greatest analogy for how you'd serve as a leader. But what else do people have to go on? That's my and it might not be the most generous interpretation, but I am wondering what you think of that. Is that fair at least? Is that in the realm of fair?
- [45:42]
D
Well, I think that he reached the ceiling to your point of someone with that biography, unless you are Donald Trump.
- [45:51]
A
Right.
- [45:52]
D
In which case.
- [45:52]
A
Yeah, I know. Well, I'm taking it in the context of Democrats.
- [45:57]
D
Yes. In which case you can become president. But for a Democrat running in the 1980s. Yes, he did. And I think that it is all of those things that contributed to where he ended up. And as I alluded to, but before, he did not see himself that much as a politician. And so there were moments when it comes to Farrakhan, for example, where what was asked of him was to say I denounce Louis Farrakhan. I'm going to leave him over there even before he was running for president. He was not willing to do those things that would have, I don't know that it would have solved all of the problems, but it might have helped him overcome some of these issues. And I think some of it comes down to the way that he saw himself, especially in 1984, was as an anti politician, a movement leader, a religious leader, a moral leader. To some extent by 1988 he was thinking more specifically about actually performing well in this campaign and, and maybe this becoming something. But it was by that point kind of too late. The mistakes of 1984 had compounded. They were not fully resolved and America was America in 1988. And so, yeah, I mean, I think he had a ceiling. You could argue as I spoke to several people about that the civil rights era figure would never have ascended to the presidency because as much as maybe now the average American thinks of the civil rights as a moment of America sort of being or living, finally living up to its greatest moments in that in the 80s, that was not a sort of necessarily widely held view. I think it was still incredibly controversial. The tactics, I mean, even to this day there are many who say that, okay, the king and others had ties to communism and so on and so forth. It was controversial to be from that tradition. And so he was going to hit a ceiling. And he did. And some of it was of his own making, some of it was because of the times that he came up in and also his biography. But I also think that one of the things about Donald Trump is that he kind of makes that idea that you can't have any political experience and you can't use rhetorical flourishes to paper over not having a 20 point plan. That's not really the reason that Americans won't elect someone president of the United States.
- [48:44]
A
The name of the book is A Dream, Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power. Abby Phillip, who hosts Newsnight on cnn, I think it's the highest rated show there now, has written this really interesting in depth book. Thank you so much.
- [48:59]
D
Thank you so much, Mike. Great talking to you.
- [49:07]
A
The Gist is produced by Cory Wara. We had help today from Leah Yan. Kathleen Sykes helps me with the gist list. Text Mike 233777 and you could see what's behind today's paywall pageant chicanery in the Philippines. Jeff Craig does so much with the video and the socials and the visual. He's a master of the visual in this a primarily audio form. Michelle Pesca also works with the visuals but is mostly the visionary Improve Do Peru. And thanks for listening.
- [49:51]
G
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