When the Reverend Jesse Jackson was inadvertently heard saying that he would like to castrate Barack Obama, it was simply the latest manifestation of Jackson’s career-long narcissism. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. recognized early on that Jackson’s ego interfered with his success, and many African-American leaders in his home base of Chicago have long kept their distance from him. Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition was a great idea that dissolved when activists realized that Jackson refused to be held accountable to any group, and that he was all about elevating himself, not building a bottom-up grassroots democratic organization. It was fitting that Jackson’s latest verbal gaffe occurred during an appearance on Fox News—the former civil rights leader is so desperate to stay in the limelight that he even accepts appearances on a right-wing Republican news network.

In both 1984 and 1988, Jesse Jackson gave speeches at the Democratic National Convention that are among the greatest I have ever heard (and they have been recognized as among the nation’s top 100 speeches by American Rhetoric.com, where they are available at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jessejackson1988dnc.htm and http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jessejackson1984dnc.htm).

Jackson’s primary campaigns had helped galvanize a battered political left, and some activists hoped that his “Rainbow Coalition” would become a national progressive grassroots activist organization. Many good people committed time to the Rainbow Coalition project, only to learn—as others did previously—that Jesse Jackson was chiefly concerned about promoting himself, and was not interested in building a movement that he did not completely control.

Harold Washington, Chicago’s first African-American mayor, never trusted Jackson. He made it clear he wanted Jackson to stay away from his historic grassroots campaign, knowing Jackson could not control his need to seize the limelight. Washington was the quintessential movement-builder, and succeeded locally where Jackson had long failed (Gary Rivlin’s classic Fire on the Prairie about the Washington campaign is strongly recommended.)

Even Jackson’s core organization—Operation PUSH—was not without controversy. Critics noted that Jackson would no sooner declare a boycott against a corporation for not doing enough business with African-Americans before a highly publicized settlement was reached that funded PUSH to help address the problem. One has trouble recalling a single sustained PUSH campaign that involved national grassroots organizing.

Adolph Reed, a left-wing African-American professor then at Yale and now at U Penn, wrote a scathing critique of Jackson’s 1984 campaign in The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics. Reed’s chief contention was that Jackson sought to be appointed “National Black Leader,” avoiding any effort to mobilize the people behind a concrete agenda.

Reed had previously argued that unelected and unaccountable ministers who assumed leadership without democratic accountability limited the black community’s political growth. Jackson became the perfect example of Reed’s thesis.

Barack Obama, like Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., is an elected black leader. Unlike the elder Jackson, neither has their leadership been defined by – or dependent upon – the corporate media.

So those who analyze Jackson’s latest gaffe as based on jealously, or a reluctance to accept the loss of the limelight, miss the broader point about Jackson’s career. Unlike Obama, he never sought to be a movement or organization builder – and he never accepted the structures of accountability necessary to bring progressive change.