Jackson’s campaigns built black voting power while his operatives moved the party rightward.

Evidence

By 1988, though, that vision had morphed into a clear effort to transform the black freedom struggle into the left wing of the Democratic Party. The 1988 campaign had a decidedly different feel from the 1984 campaign. Jackson had more money and a better organization. This wasn’t the same grassroots effort as the first campaign. Jackson attracted close to seven million votes and won several primaries. The success of his campaigns helped change the Democratic Party by eliminating winner-take-all primaries and challenging the power of super-delegates. His campaigns also helped elect black politicians, as the voter registration campaigns brought black voters to the polls. Sadly, though, much of this didn’t translate into substantive improvement in the everyday lives of black people. Instead, Jackson and his cronies asserted their individual influence within the party. In 1989, Jackson’s campaign manager, Ron Brown, was elected the chairman of the Democratic National Committee and in 1992 he played a key role in the election of Bill Clinton. Ironically, Brown would help develop the Clinton strategy to contain the African American base and move the Democratic Party to the right and firmly into the hands of big money. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 472

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s goal of explaining why black electoral loyalty to Democrats is a trap - the Jackson-to-Brown-to-Clinton arc is the concrete causal chain.