Thunder in America: the improbable campaign of Jesse Jackson.

• Author: Branch, Taylor

Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms. Thunder in America: The Improbable Campaign of Jesse Jackson.

Both these men spend a lot of timein churches castigating devils, including each other. In the spring of 1984, presidential candidate Jesse Jackson flew to Raleigh to support Gov. Jim Hunt, then challenging incumbent Jesse Helms in the most expensive campaign in Senate history. "With 200,000 more blacks registered, Jesse Helms could be put out of work,' Jackson declared. He toured black churches, then flew out of the state and left the registration work largely to Hunt. In direct response to Jackson, Jesse Helms toured the white churches of North Carolina with Jerry Falwell and a honey-voiced preacher named Lamarr Mooneyham, whose Moral Majority workers managed to register more Helms conservatives than Hunt registered Democrats.

Helms won narrowly, running well behind theReagan landslide. These books* suggest that his margin of victory lay in mobilized white antipathy to Jesse Jackson. Similarly, in five states where Jackson's freedom train inspired a massive upsurge of black registration, adding some 400,000 new black voters, white registration jumped 1.2 million. The obvious lesson is that in primitive contests of racial solidarity, the numbers tell heavily against American blacks. Jackson, while drawing as much as 85 percent of the black vote, never received more than 9 percent of the white vote in a presidential primary. This is why those Democratic politicians who look eagerly toward a Jackson re-run in 1988 tend to be from districts that are overwhelmingly black. No one else can afford the psychic boost.

* Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms. Ernest B. FurgursonNorton, $18.95.

* Thunder in America: The Improbable Campaign of JesseJackson. Bob Faw and Nancy Skelton. Texas Monthly Press, $16.95.

The two Jesses are outsiders of oppositestripes. Helms holds real power--he has built a national money machine, he practically writes the Republican platforms, he owns a score of ambassadors and an oversized toehold in the Senate--and yet clings to his self-image as a victim. He protests against persecution by the "elite media,' appeasers of communism, and faint-hearted conservative pragmatists. He fillibusters. He stands on his hind legs. Whereas the Reagan administration projects pained tolerance for South Africa and Pinochet, Helms loves them. He pushes his position to an obstreperous extreme and then complains of the result. Ernest Furgurson is...