That Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger endorsement

That endorsement that Bob McElvaine highlighted by the Jackson Misssissippi Clarion-Ledger, Election '08: Obama choice for future 11/02/08, is a long one and an interesting one. And it's even better for making a direct and favorable comparison between Barack Obama and Andrew Jackson:

But the American public doesn't always judge candidates on their paper accomplishments either - whether that's Andrew Jackson's roughhewn populism or Reagan's folksiness, or John F. Kennedy's charisma.

Jackson, Mississippi, was named after the great man, by the way. I once heard someone say that the city was named after Stonewall Jackson and I about flipped. (I also gagged a bit seeing Reagan named in the same sentence as the General.)

Yes, Andrew Jackson was a slaveholder. And, unlike Thomas Jefferson, he was no opponent of slavery. He was an opponent of slaveholders and their advocates like John Calhoun who were willing to undermine democracy and destroy the country to defend the "peculiar institution". And Jackson saw his mission as defending (white) working people against the tyranny of concentrated wealth and expanding democracy. Both of which he did. Very effectively.

Later democratic reform movements, the abolition movement not least among them, used the organizing and mass-mobilization techniques that the Jacksonian movement pioneered. And they were the real heirs of the best of the Jacksonian tradition.

Tags: andrew jackson, barack obama, old hickory

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