by Mark Bowden
John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Losing the Race (2000) and Authentically Black (2003), believes that Sharpton is part of a culture of victimology. Like Dickerson, McWhorter sees traditional black protest politics as a kind of theater in which all blacks, under pain of being labeled a race traitor (as he has been), must play along.
McWhorter sees Sharpton as an “inveterate liar” and an “opportunistic cartoon” who sits, with Congressman Charles Rangel, “at the gates of Harlem like the lions at the library on Forty-second Street, more interested in trying to steer development efforts in the old Big City Boss style than in lifting Harlem out of its misery at all costs.” His politics and even his goals are as anachronistic as his straightened hair, and—here’s the farce—he appears oblivious. He has chosen to define himself as the Negro Spokesman, and by God, the rest of the world will have to come around. He proceeds on the principle that if you insist loudly enough that the broomstick between your legs is a pony, eventually the thing will whinny and gallop.
THE VIRTUAL CAMPAIGN
“Fund-raising is going badly,” Frank Watkins said when I visited him at
“Sharpton National Campaign Headquarters,” just weeks after the disappointing Spike Lee event.
“The campaign is going to hell.”
Watkins is a serious fellow. A lifelong Christian activist who has devoted himself to left-wing politics ever since his hopes of playing for the Philadelphia Phillies fell through, he worked on both of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. I traveled briefly with Jackson in Texas during the 1984 campaign, and saw the excitement he generated everywhere. Jackson is a born politician. On the road he attracted crowds wherever he stopped, and usually spent time warmly meeting and greeting. He would stop at the local high school and work out in the gym with the basketball team—he still had a mean baseline jumper, and when he moved to the paint, few schoolboys dared get in his way.
Watkins is the one who encouraged Jackson to run. If anybody knew how to sell a black candidate with somewhat mixed appeal to the political mainstream, he was that man. The strategy now was specific: If Sharpton could win the District primary in January ( Jackson had won it with 80 percent of the vote in 1988), it might bump his numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire enough to surprise people. That would position him to possibly win the primary in South Carolina, where more than half the voters were black, and where polls then showed Sharpton running strong. And that would crown him a serious candidate, and put him in the game right up to the convention.
But nothing was playing out according to the script. The money raised so far was well short of that needed for federal matching funds: at least $100,000 in contributions of no more than $250 apiece, and from a total of twenty states. The target for each state was twenty contributors and $5,000. In Alabama the campaign had raised only $45.
Watkins sat in his shorts and slippers in front of a computer in his living room, notepads and folders scattered at his feet, wearing a telephone headset, answering my questions, and fielding two or three calls a minute. It was hard to tell when he was talking to me. He would be telling me about his failure to secure a church after graduating from divinity school (the church elders objected to his activist methods) and then, without segue, would answer a question from someone on the phone; then he’d slide right back in where he had left off with me. He did this with ease. At that point he was campaign manager, speechwriter, researcher, receptionist, scheduler, chief fund-raiser, accountant, strategist…“You name it,” he said, and took another phone call.
“Al is doing great in one sense,” Watkins said, his attention focused on me again. “People love him in the debates—he’s a terrific speaker. None of the other candidates can touch him. But we’ve raised about two hundred thousand [nearly all of it in a few contributions too large to meet the FEC (Federal Election Commission) requirements], which is next to nothing. It’s already spent. We need a campaign structure, an organization in each of the states. We need a political director, a press person, someone to coordinate fund-raising, a research-and-issues person. I told Al when we started that we would need at least three million dollars for 2003, and double that for 2004.” He considered those figures to be modest. Jackson had raised $11 million in 1984, and $21 million in 1988. But not even Watkins’s low goals had been met.
“He should be spending three hours a day on the telephone,” Watkins said. “He ought to have one hundred prospects lined up, and he should just move on down the list, one call at a time, asking for contributions. Every day. But he doesn’t like to ask people for money. Who does? But you can’t campaign without it.”
He took another phone call. I noticed that he still had a large album collection from the sixties and seventies, and a turntable.
“I identify with people who identify with the left out,” he said, to me again. “And Sharpton identifies with the left out. He polls highest in the black community, and I understood when I joined up that he wouldn’t get a lot of pull beyond it. But my religious background says that God can take a crooked stick and hit a straight lick.”
Watkins had big plans. He wanted to run a real campaign. The office he had wanted to rent over the Greek restaurant would have cost $11,000 a month—a bargain. He had envisioned a staff of twenty-five, although he could have managed with just twenty. He has a computer program to help him do targeted fund-raising and build an organization on the Internet, but without funds—perhaps $2,500 a month—he hadn’t been able to make use of it. He wanted to prepare a fifteen-minute videotape, something that campaign workers could use as the centerpiece for small gatherings or rallies. He envisioned twenty or thirty such gatherings around the country after each debate, raising maybe $1,000 per event. But he didn’t have the money to prepare, copy, and distribute the tapes, or a list of people to receive them. He wanted to do a direct-mail campaign, soliciting donations from Black Enterprise and Jet and from thousands of elected black officials, but…His biggest frustration was Sharpton’s idiosyncratic schedule.
“I tell him, ‘Rev, every day counts,’” Watkins said. “‘You are doing the schedule, and the schedule should be doing you.’ His appearances should make political sense.” Strategy, he told me, “is my strong suit.” A yellow legal pad on the floor charted the number of days left until the District primary—158. Watkins had calculated how many days Sharpton needed to spend in the city and in each important state. The most important state was South Carolina. On his computer he showed me a graphic display of the state; using voting records from 2000, he had broken it down county by county. After fielding another phone call, he explained the color coding, which showed the counties where Sharpton could hope to run strong, those where he didn’t have a prayer, and those where he might still make progress. With the days counting down rapidly now, Watkins thought his candidate ought to be working South Carolina the way a catcher breaks in his mitt, pounding it again and again. Instead…“He’s off in California, preaching in Oakland and meeting with the mayor of San Francisco, speaking about the [Gray Davis] recall campaign.”
Sharpton is irresistibly drawn to cameras and lights, and few of those were to be found along the hot, dusty back roads of rural South Carolina. Yet if he hoped to make an impact, a real impact, something more meaningful than those fleeting moments of TV time, that’s where he needed to be.
Except…Sharpton was not actually campaigning in the real world. His run existed only on TV and radio, in newspapers, and on the Internet. Watkins never got that, or never accepted it. When he left, on the last day of September, along with Kevin Gray, the South Carolina coordinator (the only paid coordinator in any state), the last vestige of real campaigning vanished. The wheels had entirely left the road. Sharpton’s run had become an idea of a campaign. It had gone virtual.
A ROLLICKING GOOD TIME WITH AL
Early in the morning on Tuesday, January 13, the day of the District primary, Pastor Melvin G. Brown was sta
nding by himself, cradling a cup of steaming coffee from 7–Eleven, looking out expectantly toward the entrance to the Fort Totten Metro-station parking lot. According to Sharpton’s daily agenda, the one posted on his cool Web site (www.sharpton2004.org), Rev was to have begun this important day greeting commuters before dawn at the busy station, the first event in a projected day of classic get-out-the-vote campaigning. Brown had showed up on time. The sun was just a dull orange glow over the treetops when I met him there, about a half hour after Sharpton was supposed to have arrived. The pastor, a broad-beamed man with salt-and-pepper hair and a big jeweled golden cross hanging around his neck, looked peeved but hopeful.
“He should be here in about fifteen minutes,” he said.
Commuters streamed past us and through the subway turnstiles, hundreds of unshaken hands per minute.
Brown, too, had worked for both of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. He had been asked days earlier by a local disc jockey, Mark Thompson, to help with Sharpton’s primary push. So far he seemed only marginally impressed.
“Jackson had a few more connections,” Brown said. “He was able to attract a little more enthusiasm and excitement. He also had more financial resources.”
And he tended to show up. In the months since I visited Watkins, things had continued to go badly for the campaign. Representative Jackson had decided to endorse Howard Dean, then the front-runner—a decision that the congressman would most likely not have made without his father’s approval. This was a blow. Sharpton had campaigned in Chicago for Jesse Jr.’s successful congressional run, and had long depicted himself as a political heir to the elder Jackson. His whole campaign had been conceived in that spirit. Sharpton lashed back with a bitter public statement to the effect that Jesse Sr. was over the hill and Jesse Jr. was an Uncle Tom. “You are not doing nothing but playing with yourself,” he said, addressing the Illinois congressman. “These people are not discussing you; they need a few cosmetic pictures to add to their profile. I’m ready to put out ads telling all Uncle Toms, At least send me part of the money you get from selling out, because if I wasn’t in the race they wouldn’t be offering you nothing. I put a whole new generation of Toms in business.” In the midst of this spat Jesse Sr. called Sharpton “over the top,” “mostly inaccurate,” and “ridiculous.” There had been embarrassing stories just that week about how his penniless campaign was paying for him to stay at four-star hotels all over the country—a practice that Sharpton defended (“We’re holding fund-raisers. Do they expect us to host them in a dump?”) but nevertheless promised to curtail.
He had shone in his December appearance on Saturday Night Live, in which Sharpton demonstrated a strong singing voice, a willingness to poke fun at himself, and some mean dance moves. But an hour in the comedy spotlight was a far cry from having his candidacy taken seriously.
He was the only candidate whose strategy turned on doing well in this District beauty contest, and he was the only one in town for it. He had replaced Watkins with Charles Halloran, a veteran political manager, and claimed to have raised sufficient money to qualify for federal matching funds, although the Federal Election Commission had not approved his application. Wesley Clark had received $7.5 million, John Edwards $6 million; even Lyndon LaRouche had qualified for more than a million. Sharpton had borrowed $150,000 in anticipation of getting the funding. (Eventually the FEC would give Sharpton $100,000, and would then initiate an investigation with an eye toward taking it back, claiming that the candidate might not have played entirely by the rules.) He had finally opened a proper campaign office in the District, with much fanfare, just over a month earlier. The excitement was mostly manufactured. Michael Doyle, of The Sacramento Bee, noted the striking paucity of Sharpton supporters at the event, and quoted a drum major with the 120-piece marching band from nearby Bowie State University as saying, “To be honest with you, this is just a performance for us.” The headquarters was a small room on the second floor of a brown brick building in Anacostia, over a hair salon and adjacent to a dentist’s office.
A win or a big showing in the District was critical. Washington voters are 70 percent minority, 60 percent African-American. Five of the nine candidates had decided not to run here; with Sharpton, only Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, and Carol Moseley Braun were on the ballot, along with seven obscure hopefuls. It was a chance—one of the only chances—for Sharpton to win something, to show that he could rally and inspire black voters as Jesse Sr. had.
A young woman entering the Fort Totten station eyed the waiting group of reporters and cameras and approached Pastor Brown. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Reverend Al Sharpton is going to be here,” he said. “He’s running a little late.” The woman waited for a few minutes and then pushed on through the turnstile to catch a train. A half hour later there was still no sign of the candidate. “His schedule is kind of fluid,” Brown said.
Eventually we got word that he wasn’t coming. Brown made a few calls on his cell phone and determined that Sharpton’s campaign day was actually going to begin about two hours later than planned, at a nearby polling place. So we all drove over there.
There weren’t many voters at the Bertie Backus Middle School. “Most everybody has come and gone before they went off to work,” said an elderly gentleman guarding an invisible line atop the steps leading down to the playground and polling place, which campaign workers dared not cross. A small group of reporters, some of the same ones who had been at the Metro stop, waited, bouncing from foot to foot and trying to keep warm. Mark Thompson, the DJ and Sharpton’s point man for the day, arrived with a megaphone. He was a young man with a basketball-sized knot of dreadlocked hair bundled behind his head. Using the megaphone, he belted out a few amplified words to the empty alleyway behind the school.
“Come meet Reverend Al Sharpton, the only man to campaign in D.C.!”
The candidate finally arrived in a gigantic tan Lincoln Navigator. He stepped out into the cold and paced around for a few moments, scowling. This absence of voters to greet was evidently confirming his worst suspicions about the wisdom of visiting polling places early on a winter morning. With nobody around except a Dean volunteer, it was looking like an unfortunate TV photo op. He huddled with Thompson, strategizing. When a radio reporter approached to ask a question, the candidate growled, “We’re talking!” She backed off.
A solution to the photo-op difficulty materialized when a herd of middle school students appeared below, walking across the playground. Thompson was after them like a border collie.
“All you students who want to meet Reverend Al Sharpton, come on up!” the megaphone barked.
None of the students stopped walking.
Again, the megaphone: “Y’all want to meet Reverend Sharpton?”
“No!” one of the students, a boy, shouted back.
Undeterred, Thompson and the eager candidate barreled right past the elderly guardian at the top of the steps and chased down the somewhat bewildered-looking students, most of whom got away. One or two submitted to having their hands shaken for the TV cameras, and then quickly scampered.
It was a little better at the next polling place, where Sharpton chatted with two voters. Then he moved on to Anacostia Senior High School for a prearranged meeting with Fredericka Freeman, an eighteen-year-old senior about to cast her first vote. Freeman was the only voter in sight. There was a little problem with getting all the cameras past the guards and metal detectors at the front doors, but (in brazen violation of polling-place rules) Sharpton accompanied the newly hatched voter down the aisle of the school auditorium and stood proudly by for the cameras as she filled in her ballot and deposited it.
“This is what my campaign is about,” he said.
After that Sharpton broke for breakfast. When he got out of the Navigator at the restaurant, he gestured for me to join him.
Like many men used to being at the center of an entourage, Sharpton has a way of being with you without fully acknowledg
ing that you are there. As I hovered in his space, he chatted on the phone, shook hands with the restaurant staff, picked out a table, huddled with Marjorie Harris-Smikle, and placed his order (eggs, turkey bacon, and grits). Not until his plate had been delivered and he had taken his seat did he turn his attention to me. There is something pugilistic about the way Sharpton sits for an interview. He squares himself in his chair, shoulders back, head up, gazing off into the middle distance, the heavy lids of his big eyes drooping. (His wife calls him “Eyes.”) He rolled them balefully to me, as if to say, Okay, I’m ready—give me your best shot.
I asked him about Watkins’s departure, and about Jesse Jackson Jr.’s decision to endorse Howard Dean.
He regarded them as the same betrayal. “I think the fact is, the day after Frank resigned, Junior went with Dean,” he said. “I think that maybe Frank’s leaving had something to do with them deciding to go with Dean…I was disappointed [about Junior’s decision] more for him than for me, because Illinois is way down the road on the list of primaries. I would have thought that he would have wanted to continue the tradition that gave his name the validity it did in the first place. So I was disappointed for him…. Politically, it meant very little to me.”
Politically, it had been disastrous for him, actually. I asked him whether he thought black politics in America had changed since the civil-rights years, and he said no, in so many words. He felt it was still about young leaders’ operating outside the system and battling the more entrenched mainstream blacks. The one difference he did see was that certain young elected black officials from the North (he did not actually mention Jesse Jackson Jr. by name here), who have had no experience with the movement, overestimate the significance of their “enfranchisement.” He told me, “So they keep saying, ‘Black politicians, it’s a new day.’ But their status is no different than those before them. So the question becomes, Is it their illusion or is it their reality? And I think in the gap between illusion and reality, a lot of times, they lose their constituents, and I think that’s the problem…. It wasn’t about new. It was about whether they were ‘establishment’ party politicians.”
