Chicago Minister Hopes to Upset Scandal-Scarred Jesse Jackson, Jr.

From the moment federal prosecutors indicated last week that Jesse Jackson, Jr., was aware that one of his supporters, a prominent Illinois Democratic fundraiser, promised to raise $1 million for then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich in return for Jackson’s appointment to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President Obama, the widely-watched Blagojevich trial has suddenly focused on the eldest son of civil rights leader Jesse L. Jackson.

The younger Jackson, a 45-year-old Democratic congressman who first won his seat in a special election in 1995, hasn’t been charged in the alleged pay-for-play scandal and has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing.

“I reject and denounce pay-to-play politics and have no involvement whatsoever in any wrongdoing,” said Jackson shortly after the governor’s arrest in December 2008.

Nevertheless, the embattled Illinois lawmaker has reportedly spent more than a quarter of a million dollars in campaign funds on legal fees related to the Blagojevich criminal investigation and the corresponding congressional inquiry, which has been temporarily put on hold pending the completion of the criminal case.

This latest revelation, however, casts a long shadow on Jackson’s once-promising political future that some believed might have included the Chicago mayoralty and possibly a shot at the Illinois governorship.

While a potentially devastating blow to Jackson’s future political ambitions, this latest development in the Blagojevich saga has breathed some desperately needed life into the long-shot candidacy of his outmanned Republican rival in the Windy City’s 2^nd congressional district — an overwhelmingly Democratic district on the city’s South Side that hasn’t elected a Republican congressman since 1950 when industrialist Richard B. Vail, a wealthy steel manufacturer, regained the seat after losing narrowly in 1948.

It also continues a disheartening trend in a district where Jackson’s immediate predecessors — Gus Savage and Melvin J. Reynolds — both left office under a cloud of controversy and scandal.

The temperamental and fiery Savage, a six-term congressman who compiled one of the worst records of absenteeism in the U.S. House, notoriously flaunted Federal Election Commission disclosure requirements, and was later accused of making improper sexual advances to a young female Peace Corps volunteer during a fact-finding trip to Zaire in 1989, was handily defeated in 1992, losing to Mel Reynolds, a former assistant political science professor and the state’s first African-American Rhodes Scholar.

Savage, who enjoyed the support of controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan while fending off a spirited challenge from Reynolds two years earlier, blamed his 1992 defeat on the “white racist press.”

The Mississippi-born Reynolds, in turn, resigned in October 1995 following his conviction on twelve counts of sexual misconduct and obstruction of justice — charges stemming from his 1992 campaign against Savage when he reportedly engaged in sexual activity with an underage female campaign volunteer. He was later convicted on fifteen counts of bank fraud.

Savage, Reynolds, and now Jackson.

 The scandals never seem to end in that largely underserved and compact district — it’s only 184 square miles — that includes Chicago’s far southeast side and south suburbs while stretching northward for several miles along Lake Michigan’s shoreline.

The Rev. Isaac Hayes calls that sad legacy a “3-peat of political corruption.”

It’s a phrase that’s beginning to catch on in the majority black district.

Not to be confused with the legendary soul singer and songwriter who passed away two years ago this summer, Jackson’s famously-named Republican challenger is hardly a household name in the district but is well known among his parishioners.

Hayes is making Jackson’s integrity — or lack thereof — a central theme in his effort to unseat the son of the nation’s best known civil rights activist while becoming the district’s first Republican congressman in sixty years.

Assiduously hammering away at Jackson’s ethical lapses and the general issue of corruption, Hayes titled his campaign website http://www.isaac4honesty.com and has been unrelenting in his criticism of the beleaguered congressman‘s role in the Blagojevich scandal.

“A pattern has emerged with Mr. Jackson,” the Republican hopeful declared in a statement issued last week, shortly after federal prosecutors asserted in court that the congressman was present when cash was discussed in exchange for an appointment to the vacant U.S. Senate seat.

“First, he denied any involvement in the Senate seat scandal,” said Hayes, “but then we learned he was ‘Senate Candidate 5’ in the Rod Blagojevich indictment. Next, he denied any knowledge of an offer by his acquaintances, but today we learned he was sitting at the head of the table when the bribe was first offered.”

Hayes argues that the residents of the 2^nd congressional district have suffered enormously as a result of the scandals involving their last three congressmen. “Corruption places an unwanted tax on communities leading to no jobs, no business and no hope for economic development,” he said. “It is time to put an end to insider politics and create openness, transparency, honesty and integrity.”

While pushing the limits of propriety, Jackson has provided his conservative challenger with ample opportunity to make integrity a major campaign issue. In September, the Chicago congressman was named one of the “fifteen most corrupt members of Congress” by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit watchdog group founded in 2003.

“It’s all about the Blagojevich matter,” said Melanie Sloan, the organization’s executive director. “That made him a natural for the list. He’s not cleared, and the allegations are pretty serious.”

But there are other troubling signs to suggest that Jackson ranks fairly high on the list of ethically challenged members of the 111^th Congress.

In the spring of 2009, Bloomberg News reported in painstaking detail that the seven-term Illinois congressman had showered his wife, Sandra Jackson, with at least $247,500 in federal campaign funds since 2001, including at least $95,000 in consulting fees after she was elected to the Chicago City Council in 2007.

He also donated $298,927 in cash and in-kind contributions to his wife’s campaign fund from his own political committee.

Sandi Jackson reportedly earns more than $100,000 as a member of the Chicago Board of Aldermen.

“Mr. Jackson is availing himself of the full range of loopholes by which he can transfer money to his family,” Sloan told Bloomberg‘s Timothy J Burger.

Most of those payments appear on Jackson’s FEC reports as being made to J. Donatella & Associates, which is his wife’s consulting firm, named after the couple’s oldest child. From 2003 through mid-2005, however, the recipient is listed on Jackson’s FEC reports as “Lee Stevens” or “Lee Steven” at the J. Donatella firm. Sandi Jackson’s middle name is “Lee” and her maiden name is “Stevens” — leading some to believe that the congressman was deliberately trying to hide the true identity of the recipient.

A member of Jackson’s congressional staff told Bloomberg that the reporting ambiguity was unintentional, the result of a “software glitch.”

Sandi Jackson, an attorney and the other half of the powerful Jackson duo, has continued to pull in big money from her husband’s federal campaign account since the Bloomberg story broke in the spring of 2009.

In examining Jackson’s four latest FEC quarterly reports, Uncovered Politics found $50,000 in additional payments to J. Donatella & Associates — his wife’s firm — for the periods covering April 1, 2009, through March 31 of this year. The payments are listed as “salary” on Jackson’s FEC disclosure forms.

Jackson’s latest FEC report, covering the period from April 1 through June 30, is not yet available.

In addition, the “Friends of Sandi Jackson” — his wife’s principal campaign committee — received a payment of $15,000 from Rep. Jackson’s political committee for “polling” on July 15, 2009.

Rep. Jackson also continues to shell out substantial amounts from his campaign committee for legal services, including a $50,000 retainer to the 300-member Steptoe & Johnson law firm last October and several recent payments to the Brand Law Group, a Washington-based firm specializing in defending witnesses involved in government investigations.

Jackson, who spent nearly $1.7 million while amassing more than 89 percent of the vote against token Republican opposition in 2008, has apparently made an art out of raising large sums of money in a district in which he has never been seriously challenged since narrowly defeating state Sen. Emil Jones, Jr. — a longtime Chicago politician who was later instrumental in helping jump-start Barack Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign — in a five-way Democratic primary in 1995 for the unexpired term of the jailed Mel Reynolds.

Jackson may need that kind of war chest this time around, especially if his little-known 36-year-old challenger continues to make inroads as he did a few months ago when he was publicly endorsed by the Kankakee City News, an African-American-owned newspaper with a circulation of 37,000 that had long been supportive of the Democratic congressman.

Raised in the poverty-stricken neighborhood of Woodlawn, the mild-manner Hayes is an ordained minister with the 20,000-member Apostolic Church of God — Chicago’s second-largest African-American church and the site of then-Senator Obama’s much-heralded 2008 Father’s Day speech — and was a lifelong Democrat before experiencing a political conversion in 2006.

In 2008, the young community activist managed the campaign of Republican Antoine Members against longtime Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush in the Windy City’s neighboring first congressional district. A member of the U.S. House since 1993, the 63-year-old Rush — a former Black Panther and ex-alderman — is the only person to have ever defeated Barack Obama in an election when he crushed the future President in a congressional primary ten years ago.

Like Obama, Hayes’ candidate was snowed under by Rush, losing to the eight-term lawmaker by a lopsided margin of 233,036 to 38,361.

Hayes, who’s only raised about $30,000 as of June 30 — a fraction of what Rep. Jackson reportedly pays his wife as a “consultant” — wasn’t discouraged by that experience.

Nor does he lament the fact that, other than some logistical support, he has received little in the way of help from the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, chaired by Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas.

He’s hoping rank and file Republicans across the country will hear the fire bell and race to his aid.

Jackson is wounded, he says, and anything is possible — particularly in a volatile election year like this when dissatisfaction appears to permeate across the political spectrum. 

Citing a recent poll that 56 percent of the district’s voters feel that Jackson doesn’t represent their needs and that fully 79 percent feel that the seven-term congressman hasn’t been truthful about his role in the Blagojevich scandal, Hayes is campaigning vigorously, decrying the district’s “lack of real leadership” while reminding voters that the same problems that plagued the district when Jackson first took office 15 years ago — widespread joblessness, poverty and crime, especially rising gang violence — are still rampant in the district where unemployment exceeds thirty percent and poverty rates hover around fifty percent in some communities.

Ford Heights has a poverty rate of 53 percent.

“Jobs are the best deterrent to crime,” he says.

“The role of government is to create the conditions to spur innovation and sustainable economic growth,” explains Hayes, noting that Illinois is currently 48^th in job creation, ahead of only Massachusetts and Ohio.

“We need a trickle-in economy that reduces the barriers to producing goods and services, stimulates investment in business infrastructure and equity markets, and provides business training, seed capital grants and support to help aspiring entrepreneurs launch a micro-enterprise,” said the slender and soft-spoken pastor. “Congress must work to free up the credit markets so that families can once again finance a new home, a new car, or a college education for their kids.

“It is time to get America moving again and that starts by helping families through these tough times,” he said.

Interviewed by Uncovered Politics earlier this month, shortly after returning from a luncheon meeting with seven community activists who are seriously considering supporting a Republican congressional candidate for the first time ever, Hayes acknowledged the uphill climb confronting his candidacy, but said winning wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.

“Our chances are good,” he said. “Will it be difficult? Yes.”

Coupled with what he describes as “fifteen years of failure” on the part of Congressman Jackson, the affable yet determined Republican candidate believes that a combination of factors, including the widely-watched trial of ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, could lead to an improbable victory on Nov. 2.

If he fails, he added, it won’t be for lack of effort.

Green Party nominee Anthony W. Williams of Dolton, a conservative preacher who defeated his party’s endorsed candidate in the February 2 primary, is also in the race. Williams, a political gadfly who has run repeatedly for this seat under various party labels, was the Republican nominee in 2008.