Site Presented By
Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Rev. Al Sharpton explains why Condi Rice and Colin Powell are not "black leaders," and how his presidential bid can save the Democrats.
Nov 21, 2002 | Al Sharpton knows he has baggage. He wants his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 to evoke memories of Jesse Jackson's historic campaign 20 years earlier. But he's well aware that the only person his name will evoke in others is Tawana Brawley, and every bit of race-baiting that ugly episode represented.
And he's done plenty to add to that baggage through the years. He is a ubiquitous presence in New York -- whenever there is an allegation of police brutality or racial discrimination, you can bet that Sharpton will be smack in the middle of it. But Sharpton also demands attention from mainstream politicians. Sharpton received one-third of the Democratic vote in the 1997 New York mayoral primary, and 2001 mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer credits Sharpton's support as helping boost him into the runoff against Mark Green. When Hillary Clinton wanted to run for Senate, she set up a meeting with Sharpton. When Al Gore came to New York during his presidential campaign, a meeting with Sharpton was arranged.
But Sharpton the candidate should expect a much colder reception from the political world. "The Democrats would avoid him like the plague if he decided to run," said David Bositis, of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who monitors African-American voting. "There is very little comparison between Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. In '84 and '88, Jackson was totally accepted by the white candidates in the race. They didn't think he was going to win, but they thought they benefited to be associated with him. When Sharpton's around, there is a tendency for the Democratic candidates to be someplace else."
Also, Bositis believes Sharpton's impact will be limited because, unlike Jackson, Sharpton is an urban Northerner without Jackson's Southern civil rights movement appeal. "In terms of support in the Democratic primaries, the black vote is most important in the South, by far," Bositis says. "That's the area of the country where he's least well known. I do not anticipate that Sharpton is going to get significant black support in the South."
Sharpton answers these criticisms by pointing out that Jackson was shunned by most black-elected officials, and did not even earn the support of Martin Luther King's family. Still, he says he's all too happy for people to dismiss his candidacy as a joke, promising to catch the field by surprise when they start counting the votes in early primary states. If nothing else, he says, his White House run could help reshape the Democratic Party. On a recent trip to Washington, in his hotel room at the Ritz Carlton, Salon talked with Sharpton about the legacy of Jesse Jackson, Sharpton's disdain for the moderate Democratic Leadership Council and that other Al running for president.
There's a lot of talk about what's wrong with the Democratic Party? What's your sense of the party's problems?
I would say the problems started way before the election. It's disconnected from its base. The base of the Democratic Party has been workers -- labor and minorities and women. The leadership of the party doesn't reflect any of that. Until Rep. Nancy Pelosi, [D-Calif., who was elected House minority leader] the other day we didn't have a prominent woman in the party. Who's the prominent black in the party? Who's the prominent Latino? And what's more important than the personalities -- what are the positions of our leaders? We're an opposition party that doesn't oppose anything.
Most of the people who are running for president supported Bush on the vote on Iraq. Some of them supported him on tax cuts. There has been in my judgment a conscious shift over the last decade or so to the right -- the DLC [the centrist Democratic Leadership Council] matrix. And it has failed. It captured the White House for Clinton because Perot was there, but never did capture Congress, never did capture the Senate. What is funny to me is when they say, "We can't go the old liberal way." They're the ones who have been in charge for the last decade. If anything has failed it is not the liberals, it's them. Because for the last 10 years, three national elections, how long are you going to keep this experiment going before you say, "You know, this don't work, fellas"?
I was the only prospective candidate who spoke at the antiwar march [in Washington on Oct. 26]. How do you ignore 200,000 people? It just doesn't even make sense. They say our problem is, well, we can't get the independent, white male voter. No, your problem is you're not energizing your own voting base.
Had the black vote come out in key states, had women voted more with us, had Latinos voted more with us, we'd have won. They keep going after a vote that they never had, and may never get, ignoring the vote they had that is dwindling every election because they're being taken for granted.
