I think of the political arc of Jesse Jackson as a small American tragedy.

When I was 27 and a reporter for The Associated Press, I interviewed Jackson in the kitchen of his apartment on the South Side of Chicago. Jackson, then a graduate student in divinity at the University of Chicago and only 25 or 26 himself, swept me away with his vision, moral grounding and articulate passion. I have never been in the presence of a more charismatic individual. I went back to the office and wrote more than 2,000 words. The piece had been assigned as a feature for Sunday-morning papers, a special distinction; but my editors, seeing I’d totally lost my vaunted reporter’s objectivity, slashed it to 750 words and sent it out for Wednesday-afternoon papers, very few of which ever published it.

Over the years, though, Jackson seemed to lose his lustre. When the arc of his career culminated in seeking the presidency, he didn’t have a chance. There was his dreadful “Hymie-Town” slur, of course. And in 1984 and 1988, America surely was less “ready” to elect a black than it may (or may not) prove to be in 2008. But I think the core reason Jackson didn’t become a contender was where he came from. He started out as one of Doctor Martin Luther King’s inner circle, and had devoted his career to civil rights and agitating for the well-being of African-Americans — who are roughly 12% of the American population. It’s not a big enough base from which to be elected president of all the people.

After Jackson we had Al Sharpton and he wasn’t electable for similar reasons, I think. (Let alone the shameful Tawana Brawley episode that made him famous or notorious, as you please.) Sharpton has charisma to burn and possibly the slyest sense of humor since JFK. But to be elected president in the U S of A, you need more than that. You need to be able to reach beyond your base.

Now comes Barack Obama, who, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have a base. Indeed, the base you’d expect — the Jackson-Sharpton base — has been giving him are-you-black-enough flak. Grin and bear it, Barack. If you’re the candidate on Election Day, where else can these voters turn?

Allow me to digress. My daughter Shawn has a lot of girlfriends, both black and white. We were talking about the presidential race and Shawn said her white girlfriends think Hillary Clinton is electable. But her black girlfriends think Barack Obama is not.

Hmm.

The black girlfriends are expressing a deep though realistic pessimism about American society, Shawn thinks (so do I). But, I asked, why aren’t Shawn’s white girlfriends equally pessimistic about a woman’s chances?

I put this question the wrong way. I ought to have asked: ‘In America today, could this black man or this white woman be elected?’

I’m going to get a raft of you-know-what for saying this but … because Obama enters the race not identified with “black” interests the way Jackson and Sharpton were, I think he could be.

He’s a very credible candidate of course, with an unusual resumé (community organizer!) and a Senate seat. In the Obama-vs.-Hillary matchup, Obama wins the charm-and-good-looks award. Where Hillary seems up-tight and scripted, he seems confident and relaxed. But Hillary wins on experience, gender and, yes, possibly toughness. On Iraq, hard to tell. On money, a wash (so far). On brains … probably a wash too.

Only 4% of Americans say they would be “less likely” to vote for a candidate who was black, according to a February Pew survey reported in today’s New York Times. The survey says 11% would be “less likely” to vote for a woman candidate. People tend not to be truthful when asked such questions and I suggest taking both numbers with a big grain of salt … but still. If Pew asked the same questions two decades ago when Jesse Jackson was running, I bet the negatives were a lot larger.

Are we ready for a woman or an African-American in the White House? For this woman, this African-American? Time will tell. At least this African-American isn’t lugging the baggage that burdened, and finally may have broken, a guy who could’ve been a contender … Jesse Jackson.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Read the first chapter of To Walk Humbly, the sequel to To Love Mercy. Visit http://frankjoseph.com/to_walk_humbly.html.

When I was in college, I was a creative writing major; at age 21, my ambition was to be a novelist. But I also had an ambition not to starve, so when I graduated I took the practical course. I became a journalist instead.

Over the years I’ve worked as a journalist, a publisher, a marketer, a copywriter, a consultant — a wonderful career, a career I was lucky to have — but I didn’t write fiction. I thought about it though. Looking back, there wasn’t a single day in those 40+ years when I didn’t have at least a fleeting thought about the fiction I was not writing.

In my mid 50s, I read an article in the Washington Post with the headline “50 Things I Want to Do Before I Die.” This article changed my life. It said, basically: You don’t want to go to your grave with regrets; so make a list of the 50 things; and when you’re in the neighborhood, do them and check them off the list.

I made the list and couldn’t come up with 50 things, couldn’t even come up with 30. I came to view that as the sign of a life at least fairly well lived. One big thing on the list was to travel to Europe, which Carol and I had not done and both wanted to do. Over the next few years, we went to Italy and France — great trips.

But the more I thought about the list, the more I realized there was really only one important thing on it: my dream to write a novel.

So I did it. Over the next three years, while working a day job (running our home-based publishing company), I wrote the draft of To Love Mercy.

For me, the big moment was when I wrote The End. Sure, I wanted to be published, and when the day arrived that To Love Mercy was accepted for publication, I was ecstatic. But the biggest deal — the achievement of my youthful ambition — was completing a real novel, or anyway a novel I felt was real.

I didn’t think about publishability much while I was writing it, because I thought it would be unpublishable. Its concerns seemed so obscure — blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, how children view the world, Chicago in 1948. Why would readers care? I couldn’t imagine. So I just wrote the story that seemed to want release from my heart.

Many who read To Love Mercy in draft asked whether it was a young-adult novel, since it has kids as protagonists. I answered no. In my mind, it was, if anything, an old-adult novel. Turns out I was mistaken. To Love Mercy starts with the White Sox and ends with the White Sox; the year it was published the White Sox led the league. Schools are dying to find books with boys as protagonists, to get boys interested in reading. Schools are interested in books that raise issues of race in a serious way. To Love Mercy has gone onto reading lists at several high schools and middle schools already, and more have shown interest. So much for my commercial instincts.

I think I wrote a better novel because I wasn’t thinking about the market, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope for commercial success. Now To Love Mercy has won six awards, collected 23 five-star reviews on Amazon, and gone into a second printing. More importantly, it has attracted the attention of a fine literary agent, Michele Rubin of Writers House, who now represents me. I haven’t made a nickel from my fiction yet, but for the first time it seems possible.

Michele has encouraged me to write two sequels — the “Chicago Trilogy” — and I’m hard at work. What situation could be more commercial? Now I’m struggling to avoid thinking about the market, and just try to keep things as real as when I was writing To Love Mercy from the heart.

The sad reality for most fiction authors these days is that most of us will never be published, at least not by the Simon & Schusters of the world. Chances are we won’t even be published by a small independent press, as I was. Sure, because of advancements in technology, we now can be published by companies like iUniverse, but that amounts to glorified self-publishing. You get a physical book to show friends and family, but little more. In most cases, iUniverse can’t get your books into bookstores, and bookstores are still where most people buy fiction.

I am encouraging you to face these facts, but with a smile. If you feel a story inside you, why not just write it for the sake of writing it — for yourself? Lightning still may strike. If you write from the heart, it might even be likelier to strike. Even if it doesn’t, you’ll still have something good for your tombstone — ‘He (she) wrote a novel.’

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. The first (of four) sections of “To Walk Humbly,” second novel in the “Chicago Trilogy,” is all but finished. In case you’d like to read a bit of it, visit www.frankjoseph.com in a day or so.