At Arm’s Length

There was a time when Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama were, to all appearances, good friends. In the '90s, as Obama was rising in Illinoispolitics, he and Jackson would often attend community events and fund-raisers together. They went out to dinner and invited each other to family birthday parties.

In private, though, the relationship was more complicated, and not as close as it seemed. The men had different approaches to politics: Jackson was old school, an unyielding civil-rights-era fighter ever on the lookout for injustice to denounce. Obama—like other younger black politicians who came up after Jim Crow—was less heated, a results-oriented pragmatist who was willing to compromise and who saw the old guard's combative style as obsolete. Obama did not consider the reverend as his mentor; when Obama ran for Congress in 2000, Jackson backed his rival. Yet Obama was careful not to push Jackson away. He was a powerful figure in Chicago, a man better to cultivate than alienate.

Now it's Jackson who has to worry about alienating Obama. After Jackson—foolishly assuming his mike was off between segments on a TV talk show last week—was caught whispering to another guest that he wanted to "cut [Obama's] nuts off" for "talking down to black people," he quickly turned contrite. He said his words were "crude and hurtful." But it was clearly more than just a vulgar offhand remark. As Jackson saw it, Obama's recent comments urging black men to take more responsibility at home were themselves vulgar—not because Obama's sentiments were necessarily wrong, but because Jackson seemed to believe the candidate was publicly demeaning blacks to win favor with whites. In that brief whisper, Jackson conveyed both his own long-simmering misgivings about Obama's style of politics, and the misgivings of one generation of black leaders about the next.

"It's unfortunate that it had to come out this way, but it did have to come out," the Rev. Al Sharpton tells NEWSWEEK. "There's definitely a generational divide going on in the black community, and it's been happening for a while. People who deny it aren't seeing clearly."

Nowhere is that divide more visible than in the relationship between Jackson, 66, and his 42-year-old son, Jesse Jackson Jr. While Jackson Senior somewhat tepidly endorsed Obama's candidacy, Jackson Junior, an Illinois congressman, serves as a national co-chair of the campaign. Last week he delivered an extraordinary rebuke to his father, saying he was "deeply outraged and disappointed in Reverend Jackson's reckless statement." Jackson Junior seemed to take his father's words personally. "Reverend Jackson is my dad and I'll always love him," he said. "He should know how hard that I've worked for the last year and a half [for Obama] … So, I thoroughly reject and repudiate his ugly rhetoric."

Reflecting on the dustup to NEWSWEEK, Rep. Jackson said that his dad's way of doing things is a throwback to another time: "My father and others before him came out of a different tradition and the rules were different, because it was a different game. Sometimes I think the older school loses sight of that. But the point was for us to get to this place, where we were elected to our positions, and that also means following the rules as they are."