Too Bad Both Could Have Faded

From the Sacramento Bee: When Barack and Michelle Obama were married in Chicago two decades ago, Santita Jackson, a daughter of Jesse Jackson, sang at their wedding. When Obama ran for his first national office, he made sure he was not stepping on the ambitions of her brother, Jesse Jackson Jr., who later became a co-chairman of his 2008 presidential campaign.
Now the younger Jackson, 47, who served 17 years as a congressman representing his hometown, is most likely headed to prison for campaign fraud, trailed by problems from an extramarital affair to mental illness.
Although the fates of Jackson and Obama could not be more different, their stories, and those of their families, are bound together. The rise of the current leading black political family in the United States is inextricable from the unraveling of an older one, with the two tangled in shifting alliances, sudden reversals of fortune and splits.
Decades ago in Chicago, Jackson was seen as a far more promising figure than his friend Obama – one the heir to a legend, the other an outsider seeking to surpass the father he barely knew.
If Jackson had run for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama likely would not be president. That year and again in 2008, Obama, seeking to boost his credibility with African Americans, sought key help from the younger Jackson.
But along the way, the Jackson father and son helped define what the future president did not want to become: a black politician mired in the old urban-ethnic mold; a leader tainted by personal transgressions or a dysfunctional family.   http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/25/5214459/as-obamas-career-rose-the-jacksons.htmlOne good thing President Obama has done, for the good, has been to neuter the likes of the Jacksons and Al Sharpton and other race baiters.

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