Frustrated But Jacqueline liked Kitty

By Michael Duffy/Washington

Long before he was a presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson made a name for ^ himself as an able negotiator. He knows instinctively how to bluff and bargain, when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.

At least, that is what Jackson would like everyone to think. In fact, he has been coming up empty-handed of late. The platform and rules concessions he has won from Michael Dukakis since June hardly matter very much. Jackson wanted to deliver the keynote speech or name an alternate. But Party Chairman Paul Kirk chose Texas Treasurer Ann Richards instead, causing Jackson to fume, quite rightly, that he at least deserved to be consulted before the choice was made.

Last week Jackson's plans to mount floor fights in Atlanta over 13 minority platform planks backfired. Dukakis aides grew so exasperated with Jackson's continued demands for control of seats on the Democratic National Committee that they told Jackson's people that if he did not limit the floor fights to three or four, he might be speaking to delegates well past prime time. Said a Dukakis staffer: "We'll do the floor fights, and you'll speak at midnight." Jackson threatened that he might just speak outside the hall, knowing the cameras would follow.

This week Jackson seems headed for a self-propelled crash in his public quest for the vice-presidential nomination. Party leaders blanched when he started insisting on the slot, but Dukakis has played along coolly. The Governor invited Jackson over for a July 4th dinner and a fireworks-filled Boston Pops concert.

Neither candidate left the holiday session satisfied: Dukakis failed to win an endorsement from Jackson that could have spelled unity before the Atlanta convention. Jackson left Brookline, Mass., without the job offer he'd been seeking for a month. Kitty Dukakis and Jacqueline Jackson hit it off well. "They both smoke behind their husbands' backs," said a friend of both. But relations between the husbands remained cool. Jackson pressed his views about the vice presidency and the need to expand the party's horizons. Dukakis barely acknowledged his rival's arguments, nodding politely but hardly seeming to hear.

Jackson is plainly needled by Dukakis' apparent bias toward older and less compelling public men, whom Jackson caustically regards as either in "semiretirement" or capable only of "gestures without very much importance." Jackson won't openly criticize a Dukakis-John Glenn ticket, but will say the ticket should be "one step in the present and one in the future, not one step in the present and one in the past."

Even more frustrating to Jackson is the possibility that the nomination might go to an also-ran who finished well behind him in the balloting: "I have more white votes than ((Richard)) Gephardt got before he dropped out." And aides mutter that the choice of Al Gore would set Jackson seething.

Such late-inning remarks won't make it any easier for Jackson to chart a graceful end game and earnestly endorse the eventual ticket. Finding the right exit lines may be the biggest challenge of Jesse Jackson's campaign.