In 1988 the narrator left a campaign trail to visit a comatose grandfather in Wichita. The narrator repeated Jesse Jackson's campaign refrain, "Great days just keep on coming," and the grandfather responded with a thin smile and a squeeze of the hand. Jackson went on to win 11 primaries and nearly seven million votes, finishing as runner-up to Dukakis. Jackson energized cooks, janitors, housekeepers, construction workers, and housing-project tenants. The piece contrasts that capacity to inspire widespread hope with contemporary politics, which feels coarse, tawdry, and uninspiring at high levels.
"Day and night, I held his hand hoping he would make it. I knew he had admired Jackson's first presidential bid in 1984 and the courage-some called it audacity-required to run at all. So I told him about the huge, overwhelmingly white crowds Jackson was drawing in places like Iowa and Wisconsin. There was a refrain Jackson had been using in Iowa to convince"
"Ga-Ga didn't make it. But Jackson came much closer to winning the Democratic nomination than anyone had expected. He won 11 primaries and caucuses, doubled his 1984 combined-vote total to nearly 7 million, and finished as runner-up to Dukakis. His impact in that hospital room-and he wasn't even there-eliciting a glimmer of life from my dying grandfather, has always stayed with me."
Read at The Atlantic
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