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| Who’s Afraid of Al Sharpton? | |||||||
| Our columnist explores why a big-talking but little-known candidate from Harlem has Democratic strategists worried about their party’s prospects in the 2004 Presidential race | |||||||
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| Jan. 27 — President George Bush’s approval rating is still near 60 percent, the Democrats’s biggest issue is attacking SUVs and the best the party can muster in the way of 2004 Presidential candidates are Tweedledum, Tweedledumber and the sanctimonious Jewish guy that not even sanctimonious Jewish guys like me will vote for. |
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AND THE DEMOCRATS’S greatest nightmare is the Rev. Al Sharpton? Yes, to hear the “experts” describe it, a bloviating street preacher from Harlem with a murky past, mammoth self-importance and a self-immolating campaign office holds the key to the future of the Democratic Party. The conventional wisdom holds that Sharpton is a vibrant new voice for a rainbow-hued umbrella group of disaffected Americans—everyone from urban blacks to rural gays to suburban Latinos to Native Americans to abused Roman Catholic altar boys. And this conventional wisdom says that all those disaffected groups—who’ve never managed to amount to more than a few stray votes on Election Day or a few stray lines in the Democratic Party platform—will rise up against politics as usual and give Sharpton a bloc of delegates with which to play kingmaker at the free-for-all 2004 Democratic convention (never mind that there hasn’t been a brokered convention since the Pleistocene Era). “If Sharpton does well,” one Democratic strategist told my beloved New York Post last week, “it’s going to be hard to deny him a place at the podium at the Democratic convention—in prime time.” Such a prospect is a nightmare, the strategist said, because white voters may cringe when a black man—who doesn’t merely play the race card, but deals from a seven-deck racial shoe—speaks out for Affirmative Action, for social programs and for a multilateral foreign policy (funny, it didn’t bother white voters when Colin Powell said the same things at the 2000 GOP convention). But I am here to tell you that the conventional wisdom is wrong because the conventional wisdom is written in New York City, a town where Al Sharpton has spent the better part of two decades schmoozing the very reporters and editors who—you guessed it—write the conventional wisdom. All of us New York-based media elitists are so bored out of our minds with the prospect of covering presidential prospects Howard Dean, Sen. Joe Lieberman (CT.) and Rep. Dick Gephardt (MO.) that we can’t wait to cover the always-quotable Sharpton. On Saturday, after his campaign office nearly burned to the ground from an overloaded extension cord—how quaint! how inept! How bush league!—Sharpton was back to his old tricks, even joking that reporters should chip in for repairs. “Y’all got to give me something, all them papers I help you sell!” he said. And therein lies the entire media strategy of the Al Sharpton Presidential Campaign: let the New York media provide you with free press and a free pass. See, all of us in New York labor under the notion that Al Sharpton is an important, nationally known figure. That’s because he is omnipresent in the local media. If a New York City policeman so much as stares down a minority teenager, you can be sure that Al Sharpton will be on your TV that night condemning police brutality. Hey, it’s a noble cause, don’t get me wrong. So was ending the Navy’s bombing on Vieques, that crater-covered rock off the coast of Puerto Rico. But aggressive policing typically shows up as 177th on Americans’s list of concerns and the test-bombing of Vieques is usually in the 400s. Both of Sharpton’s signature issues tend to trail things like the economy, unemployment, the environment, taxes, crime and even highway speed limits as issues that Americans actually vote on. Sharpton’s poll numbers are so low that he doesn’t even register, his approval rating trails his disapproval rating 4-1, and even Lieberman outpolls him among blacks. But the New York media will continue to cover him as if he’s actually a legitimate political leader and all the “Democratic strategists”—the same people who told Al Gore to wear earth tones—will keep saying that Sharpton could walk away with Deep South primaries where black voters are half the electorate. Really? To gauge Sharpton’s support outside New York, I started calling random people in South Carolina, an early primary state where Sharpton supposedly has a leg up (although it may be just to relieve himself against a fire hydrant). After an hour of frenetic dialing, I managed to interview 15 people. If that doesn’t sound like a lot to you, you try dialing hundreds of random numbers. You know, pollsters get a lot of money to do these things (money, I might add, that Al Sharpton doesn’t have). | ||||||||||||||||||
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In my survey, six people had never heard of Sharpton. Four people had heard of him, but didn’t know a thing about him. One woman, who volunteered that she was African-American, had heard of Al Sharpton but could not remember why. And the four people who did know something about him couldn’t stand him. So, the man who is supposedly going to win the South Carolina primary couldn’t even get one vote out of 15. Now, granted, the results of my little poll are pretty much useless. But so are most polls. I mean, if the Gallup Organization called up 10 random Americans and asked them what the weather was like outside, at least six people would respond, “Butter.” That’s how useless most polls are. Still, the informal survey does seem to tell us that down South, Sharpton is—at least at this point—a non-entity. Yet one week into the Sharpton Presidential Campaign (slogan, “No justice, no peace, but how about a cruller?”), Democrats are plotting behind-the scenes on how to neutralize his supposed impact among the disaffected. Donna Brazile, who was Al Gore’s 2000 campaign manager, is nervous enough about Sharpton that she’s calling on local black elected officials to run as favorite-son candidates in their state primaries and cut into the out-of-state Sharpton’s appeal to blacks in those areas. Sharpton didn’t return my calls, which surprised me because I’m one of those New York-based reporters with whom he’s bonded. I recall fondly laughing the night away over dinner during his 1998 defamation trial. Oh, yeah, did I mention that defamation trial? The Democratic Party’s supposed biggest nightmare is a guy who perpetrated one of the greatest racial hoaxes in the post-Civil Rights era and, eventually, had to pay $65,000 in damages to a white man whom he publicly named as the rapist of a black teen who had never actually been raped. |
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Every day, he showed up at the courtroom carrying a book about trials of Martin Luther King, as if he was living out the sequel. And every day, two busloads of supporters made the trip from Harlem to upstate Poughkeepsie to perpetuate the myth of Sharpton’s power. A guy who needs to transport his backers like some kind of circus ringleader is no threat to the Democratic Party. No, this party has nothing to fear except fear itself—namely, the fear that each of the Democratic candidates has about standing on a stage and publicly declaring that this Emperor is wearing ill-fitting clothes. Will Joe Lieberman risk alienating black voters by pointing out, say, that Sharpton failed to pay state taxes in 1986? Will John Edwards remind people that Sharpton once wrote that Fidel Castro is “brilliant,” “absolutely awesome” and “a great leader”? Will Dick Gephardt mention that ugly incident in 1995 when Sharpton called a Jewish storeowner in Harlem a “white interloper” which led to the man’s store being burned to the ground by a Sharpton supporter? Maybe not, but Tim Russert pointed out all of these things on a recent “Meet the Press” and asked Sharpton, “If a white candidate had that background, do you believe people would take him seriously as a candidate for president?” Sharpton just turned the question around: “I think you’ve got white candidates with worse backgrounds.” “Who?” asked Russert. “Well, I’m not getting into name-calling,” said Sharpton just as time ran out on the show. And that was the end of that. Sharpton even found a way off Russert’s hook. Another bamboozled member of the New York media elite. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His website is at www.gersh.tv © 2003 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||
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