Did you know Bernie and Jim Hightower were Jesse Jackson backers in 1988? I did not.

What We're Seeing with Bernie Sanders Was a Long Time Coming
The deep progressive roots have finally surfaced in Iowa.​
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
FEB 1, 2016

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"The interesting thing is that Bernie was a Jackson supporter, and was one of the two white officeholders to risk their jobs across the color line, so Jim Hightower (the longtime Texas populist firebrand) and Bernie were the two that did that, and he helped us win the Vermont caucus in April of '88, which is actually when I met Bernie.

"The two Jackson campaigns are certainly subsumed. You'll hear people say, 'I never had a candidate that's run a campaign like Bernie's in my life.' And, when Howard Dean ran, they would always say, 'There's never been a challenge to the establishment like this one since Bobby Kennedy. I'd go, no, it wasn't. The Jackson campaign was right there—seven million votes, 1200 delegates. We won 13 states, all over the country, including Michigan. At the time we won Michigan, at the end of March in 1988, Jesse was ahead."

In 1988, Jackson ran on a platform that included a new Works Progress Administration to provide jobs and rebuild an American infrastructure that even then was perceived to be crumbling. He advocated for the Equal Rights Amendment, free community college education, a stricter enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, and a single-payer system of national health care. Not one of those proposals was included in the party platform that emerged from the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Today, with the exception of the ERA, which has been replaced somewhat in progressive politics with pay equity and family leave, not a single Democratic candidate is opposed to any of them.

The disappearance of the Jackson campaigns from the history of modern progressive politics is not an accident. By 1992, when Bill Clinton teed up Sister Souljah as a direct slap at Jackson, who was sitting not 10 feet away on the dais, the exile became complete. The Jackson campaigns—and the populist forces that were their energy—became something from which serious Democratic politicians were obliged to distance themselves. Race was soft-pedaled and class simply was not mentioned at all.


http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a41691/bernie-sanders-iowa-progressive/