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While getting dressed for work this morning, I had the news on, as I always do. A breaking alert announced that Rev. Jesse Jackson had been hospitalized. The timing was uncanny.

I’ve been reading Abby Phillip’s new book, “A Dream Deferred: Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power,” which reexamines Jackson’s legacy and his complicated relationship with Barack Obama.

It’s a revealing story about two men who shaped Democratic politics in profoundly different ways. Phillip writes that Jackson believed he had laid the movement’s foundation, “the political scaffolding Obama later climbed. “Jac

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