HOW much player-hate can fester in one man’s heart?
Apparently, quite a lot if you’re the Windy City’s World-Class Windbag.
Jesse Jackson has spent his entire life in love with the microphone. He knows them intimately.
He’s such an aficionado of the mike that Detroit’s beloved late mayor, Coleman Young, dismissed one of Jackson’s failed vanity bids for the presidency by noting that “all he’s ever run is his mouth.”
Jackson’s claim to have been caught unbeknownst by a “hot mike” slurring and threatening Barack Obama is complete hogwash.
Somewhere, deep down, he wanted the world – and Obama – to know how much he wants to “cut his nuts out.”
Veterinarians and doctors talk about cutting nuts “off.” Only a thug or a gangster cuts a man’s nuts “out.”
And Jackson knows better than most the vicious symbolism of castration and its blood-soaked link to lynchings in the Old South.
Nor is this the first time Jackson bared his anger. Last year, when Obama wasn’t sufficiently politicizing the beating prosecution of six black teens in Louisiana known as the “Jena Six,” Jackson said Obama was “acting white.”
What accounts for Jackson’s latest animosity toward the Democratic nominee? He said it’s because Obama was “talking down to black folks.”
In a Father’s Day speech, Obama told black churchgoers that a father’s responsibility “doesn’t just end at conception.”
“What makes you a man is not the ability to have a child – any fool can have a child,” Obama said. “It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”
Maybe this struck a little too close to home for the Rev. Jackson, who just a few years ago finally owned up to fathering a child outside of his marriage even as he was busy counseling President Bill Clinton on his dalliances with a White House intern.
Perhaps the real reason for Jackson’s hatred is that Obama has shown that unifying and uplifting campaigns succeed in American politics where the divisive failed campaigns waged by Jackson become history’s footnotes.
And this is where Obama comes out ahead once all the dust settles.
By publicly accepting Jackson’s apology, Obama floated above the whole sordid mess.
For everyone watching – especially those blue-collar white voters who were so elusive for him in the primary – this is a powerful reminder that Obama is not cut from the same cloth as the militant race-baiter Jesse Jackson and his ilk.
Charles Hurt is The Post’s Washington Bureau chief.
churt@nypost.com