Jesse Jackson Jr., promising political scion, resigns

U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) speaks at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, in this August 25, 2008 file photo.

Credit: Reuters/Mike Segar/Files

By James B. Kelleher

CHICAGO | Wed Nov 21, 2012 5:14pm EST

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Jesse Jackson Jr. is the namesake son of one of the most prominent black men in the United States, a progressive-minded activist whose ascent into public life prompted talk of a new era of African-American political power.

In the early years, speculation swirled around the Democratic representative to the U.S. House and his appetite and ambition, almost all of it positive. Would he be the next mayor of Chicago? The next U.S. senator from Illinois?

Two years after he was elected to Congress, Newsweek magazine asked if the then 32-year-old Democrat would one day capture the prize that eluded his father, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, and become the first black president.

The sky's-the-limit speculation didn't appear to unnerve Jackson. "I grew up in a house with great expectations," he told the Chicago Tribune in 1995.

In recent years, the expectations withered and the speculation took a more sinister turn, especially after Jackson's name was linked to the political corruption scandal that brought down former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

In recent weeks, it was rumored and reported that Jackson would resign from the House in a plea deal with prosecutors.

On Wednesday, the 47-year-old's political career came to a halt. Weighed down by mental illness and the investigation, Jackson submitted his resignation to House Speaker John Boehner.

His career was book-ended by scandal. Jackson was sent to Congress in December 1995 after winning a special election to replace Representative Mel Reynolds, a Democrat forced to resign after he was convicted of sexual assault and other charges.

During a 17-year House career, Jackson was a reliable liberal vote, supporting minimum wage increases, expansion of environmental regulations and gay rights and the 2008 bailout of the teetering financial system. He was also an early advocate of a strict timeline for the U.S. exit from Iraq.

But Jackson sponsored little successful legislation and in recent years he repeatedly introduced a series of quixotic constitutional amendments guaranteeing rights he said were grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The amendments never got anywhere.

His other pet project was pushing for a third major Chicago airport - a facility opposed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Mayor Richard Daley. Critics considered it a boondoggle.

His fight with Daley over the airport was among the matters that led Jackson to criticize what he characterized as a "smog of corruption and cover-ups" at City Hall. He appeared to be positioning himself to run against the long-serving mayor.

But when Democrats took control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, Jackson sensed opportunity in Washington and squelched talk he was interested in unseating Daley.

BORN DURING CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE

Jesse Jackson Jr. was born on March 11, 1965, in Greenville, Alabama, in the middle of America's civil rights struggle while his father was marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery.

He was active in his father's unsuccessful presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. In between, he spent his 21st birthday in jail after being arrested during an anti-apartheid demonstration at the South African Embassy.

Jackson spent his 20s working for the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the rights group founded by his father. He earned a master's degree from the Chicago Theological Seminary and a law degree from the University of Illinois. Shortly after turning 30, he ran for the congressional seat vacated by Reynolds.

After an initial burst of media enthusiasm that greeted his election in 1995, his work rarely generated national headlines.

He continued, in many ways, to be overshadowed by his father, who served as an adviser to the family of President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and then, a few years a later, admitted he had fathered a child out of wedlock.

The younger Jackson was thrust into the spotlight after Blagojevich was arrested on corruption charges.

The Illinois governor was convicted on multiple counts, including a charge that he tried to sell the Senate seat vacated by then president-elect Barack Obama to the highest bidder.

Jackson's attorney acknowledged his client was "Senate Candidate No. 5," an unnamed politician Blagojevich - in a conversation wiretapped by federal prosecutors - said had sent an emissary who promised to raise more than $1 million for the governor's campaign war chest in exchange for Obama's seat.

Jackson acknowledged his interest in the seat but denied authorizing any offer to Blagojevich on his behalf.

In June of this year, Jackson went on medical leave and has been treated twice at the Mayo Clinic for bipolar disorder, a psychological condition marked by extreme mood swings.

In recent weeks, media outlets reported Jackson had hired a lawyer to handle talks with the U.S. government on a possible plea deal to settle allegations he misused campaign funds.

(Editing by Greg McCune, Cynthia Johnston and Jim Loney)

View the original article here

In presidential campaign ads, political science meets excess

By Alina Selyukh

COLUMBUS, Ohio | Thu Nov 1, 2012 1:04am EDT

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - It's 6:10 p.m. on a Thursday in October, just days before the U.S. elections. Before the clock hits 6:29 p.m., 11 political ads will have aired on the local NBC channel in Columbus, Ohio.

One tells voters that Democratic President Barack Obama has not proposed a legitimate economic plan for the country. Another suggests that policies of Republican candidate Mitt Romney would undermine the future for America's children.

Yet another says Romney would effectively deny many women crucial cancer screenings by proposing cuts to Planned Parenthood. The very next ad calls Obama an extremist on abortion who supports leaving babies "out to die."

Ohio is being inundated with such dueling ads in the final days before the November 6 presidential election, as Obama and Romney both look to the state's 18 electoral votes as a crucial step toward the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.

The presidential race is now a fight in eight or so politically divided "swing" states, but nowhere more so than Ohio. Amid the chaos of the campaign's closing days, the state has become an arena for credibility-stretching banter, and a testing center for the growing science of political advertising.

The most expensive campaign in U.S. history (nearly $2 billion) and the free-spending independent groups that have poured more than $200 million into political ads - many of them directed at Ohio - have given analysts a high-profile chance to examine some simmering questions about such ads.

Among them: How many ads is too many, before viewers tune them out? And what do campaign ads lead voters to do, exactly?

Election-year political ads are a meticulously studied subject, and increasingly are used to target specific groups and encourage specific outcomes.

Some research, for example, suggests that pro-Democrat ads are particularly effective at swaying voters' opinions, while pro-Republican ads typically are more effective at getting party supporters to show up at the polls.

For all the analysis that has been done on campaign ads, academic and commercial research has yielded few answers on the precise impact that ads have in determining who wins an election.

That is especially true, analysts said, in the type of advertising free-for-all that Ohio residents are seeing on their televisions now - wave after wave of ads with overlapping and similarly dark, daunting messages.

Campaign ads became tiresome long ago for many Ohio residents, but some viewers figure that the ads must be working, or the campaigns wouldn't keep running them.

"I think poorly of those ads and don't think they work, but there are so many of them I think it must be not so," said JoAnne Harvey, a Columbus small business owner who, as an undecided female voter is much coveted by both campaigns.

In a reflection of how so many ads can essentially nullify one another, Harvey and another dozen Ohioans interviewed generally could not recall the details of a single campaign ad that stood above the others. Those who could acknowledged that they weren't sure which side the ad was meant to benefit.

TARGETING VIEWERS

Political advertising has become a multibillion-dollar market that some television station sales managers predict soon could be a year-round category of advertising.

It has become increasingly sophisticated in "micro-targeting," the art of going after specific groups of viewers.

For example, Democrats have been found to be more frequent television watchers than Republicans, and Democrats candidates in 2008 ran more than twice as many ads as Republicans during science-fiction shows, reality dating programs and telenovelas, according to research by Washington State University professor Travis Ridout and others.

Those programs as well as talk shows and court shows tended to skew Democratic in viewership while crime and sports programs skewed Republican, Ridout's study found.

But does the science of political advertising work?

One study completed last month found Obama's ads moving voters away from Romney, while Romney's ads were much more likely to encourage Republicans to vote, rather than shift preferences among voters.

The findings were based on a survey of more than 2,300 registered voters who said they were independents or not deeply committed to one party. They were shown one or several of the campaigns' ads by the research software company Qualtrics and the research firm Evolving Strategies.

"Romney doesn't seem to have a lot of ability to have people moving in and out of the independent pool, but he has a lot of room to change the equation in determining who turns out to vote," said Adam Schaeffer of Evolving Strategies.

'THEY CAN'T STOP NOW'

If the targets of this year's campaign ads are any guide, the presidential election will be decided by middle-aged and older white women, according to a survey of more than 1,000 buying agencies done by STRATA, a software firm whose systems help air some $50 billion worth of ads a year.

The question is whether the barrage of ads - the vast majority of them attacking a candidate, rather than promoting one - will become so overwhelming that they provoke a backlash.

Such ads "did work on me at first, and then I became a lot more cynical and realized that a lot of it is political warfare," said Harvey, who added that she voted for Obama in 2008 but was leaning toward Romney now. "It seems almost epidemic; they can't stop now that they've started."

A rule of thumb in advertising is that an ad needs to be viewed at least three times and up to 10 to be effective, said STRATA Chief Executive John Shelton.

"There's no question that once you start to go over (10), you start to, well, at least bore people," he said. "Then they might tune out. Then they might actually get ticked off."

Barbara Berry, a healthcare professional and Obama supporter from Columbus, said she pre-records TV programs and skips ads.

"I don't pay attention anymore," she said.

Since late August, more than 915,000 presidential campaign ads have aired on broadcast and national cable TV, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. In Columbus during October, ads by the campaigns and outside groups aired more than 7,000 times.

"Some of them just disappear in the noise," said Dan Bradley, general manager at the Columbus NBC affiliate WCMH-TV.

Each presidential campaign has been producing about a dozen new ads a week, basing them on daily news events - a practice that ensures that most of the ads have a short shelf life.

Romney in particular tends to place and replace ads at the spur of the moment, often in response to the news of the day.

Obama's campaign runs two ad tracks: one that changes every one or two days, the other every couple of weeks.

Ads this year "just seem to be rushed," said John Geer, a political ad researcher at Vanderbilt University. It's "almost like they've fallen prey to the fact that the campaigns have so much money, and the ability to make all these ads."

(Editing by David Lindsey and Lisa Shumaker)

View the original article here