by Mark Bowden
He still seemed genuinely enthusiastic about his prospects.
“We’ll do well in South Carolina…. Let me just put it this way: If forty to forty-five percent of the voters in South Carolina are African-American, you have nine candidates. Let’s say, theoretically, I get fifty percent of the black vote. If there’s not a major go for one of the white candidates, you win just with that. I don’t think anyone is looking at that…. The next primary is the Michigan caucus, which is the same week. Then that Saturday is Virginia, where I’m the only person of color on the ballot. If we do the scientific delegate-processing that we intend, I could come into Super Tuesday with as many delegates or more than the front-runner…and when you get to the convention, he who has the delegates has the leverage.”
Sharpton won just 34 percent of the vote in the District primary that day, finishing second to Howard Dean (43 percent) and ahead of Carol Moseley Braun (12 percent). He could boast about finishing second, but it did not bode well for a man trading on the color of his skin to be bested on what might be called his own turf by a white former governor of Vermont—especially considering that Dean hadn’t even bothered to campaign in D.C. The “victory party” that night was an anemic affair at a nightclub. Notably absent were any of the “grassroots” supporters Sharpton was always talking about. Most of those present were from the press, waiting for the candidate to make a statement. In contrast, 150 Dean supporters were packed into another D.C. bar awaiting their candidate’s victory phone call.
When Sharpton swept in, the TV lights switched on. He arranged his paltry entourage around him in a corner, which made the event seem crowded.
“The fact that I won one third of the vote where there were only four major candidates on the ballot speaks volumes about what we can do in South Carolina, Delaware, Missouri, and Virginia in the coming weeks with nine in the race,” Sharpton said. “I am quite sure that the candidates not on the D.C. ballot will take away many more votes from the front-runner in the upcoming primaries in states with heavy minority populations. Our grassroots efforts and progressive message will continue to be a decisive factor in communities of color across the nation.”
I was on the other side of the cameras, in a thin semicircle of reporters, aware that the real audience for this moment was millions of Americans at home—who were no doubt thinking they were missing a rollicking good time with Al in downtown D.C.
SOUTH CAROLINA
I was surprised to see a pretty good crowd of poll workers gathered around Sharpton’s campaign office in Columbia, South Carolina, early on February 3, a chilly gray morning. It was the day of truth for Sharpton’s campaign, whose bankruptcy few could fully comprehend. Where had poll workers come from?
With mounting debts (they would total nearly half a million dollars by spring), without a campaign staff, without an organization, without funding, and without any real popular support, Sharpton had, in effect, struck a deal with the devil. In a remarkable story that would run a week later, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett documented how the candidate had increasingly leaned on Roger Stone, a notorious Republican Party operative. Stone and Sharpton were kindred spirits on different ends of the political spectrum, in that neither man was a stranger to public outrage. Stone had been scheming for Republicans since the days of Watergate, when as a young functionary allied with Richard Nixon’s “plumbers” he made a donation to the New Hampshire primary campaign of Nixon’s rival Pete McCloskey in the name of the “Young Socialist Alliance.” More recently he had been a leader of the effort that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount, a step on the path to George W. Bush’s being awarded the presidency. Everyone has heard of politics and strange bedfellows, but why would Sharpton, who rails against Bush at every opportunity, be in league with a man who helped put Bush in the White House?
There would be plenty of speculation in the coming weeks that Sharpton had planned it all along. He certainly was not above playing spoiler, and his antipathy for the current national leadership of the Democratic Party was well-known. He had feuded with the party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, and had bragged about using his influence in New York to undermine the Democratic mayoral bid of Mark Green. But the timing of his alliance with Stone, who had been quietly bailing out the sinking ship of Sharpton’s campaign, suggested that it had less to do with strategy than with desperation. Sharpton was flailing. He was accepting support wherever he could find it. At first he had just accepted Stone’s advice. The old Republican prankster is said to have suggested the now infamous debate challenge to Dean about the dearth of African-Americans in Vermont’s gubernatorial cabinet, and to have furnished Sharpton with an ax handle to wield as a prop in the July NAACP debate, when the candidate accused the party of harboring the old segregationist mentality of the former Georgia governor Lester Maddox, who had used an ax handle to roust blacks from his restaurant. The candidate had gone from accepting debating tips to, reportedly, accepting $200,000 from Stone to keep his campaign afloat. He still owed Frank Watkins just under $60,000, and Kevin Gray $38,000. Charles Halloran, Watkins’s replacement, had managed the Stone-run independent New York gubernatorial campaign of the billionaire Tom Golisano in 2002. There could be only one plausible reason for Stone’s helping Sharpton, and that was to undermine the mainstream appeal of the Democratic Party by forcing whoever became the front-runner to deal with Sharpton’s ostentatiously leftist agenda. There was no plot—just a marriage of convenience, albeit one of the more bizarre in modern politics. Stone simply wanted Sharpton to be Sharpton, which coincided perfectly with the candidate’s own plans. But the alliance would pay off for neither man unless the candidate could deliver votes on this day in South Carolina.
I wondered again where the crowd of poll workers at Sharpton’s campaign office had come from. It was bigger than any I had seen at his rallies. So I started asking questions. A tall, toothless man with gray hair and a week’s worth of gray stubble over a sallow complexion explained that he and most of the others had been approached the night before at a homeless shelter and promised $75 each for a day’s work handing out Sharpton pamphlets. Another man nearby said the same. They were a little disgruntled to learn on arriving that the amount would be only $50, but they were undeterred.
“Are you Sharpton supporters?” I asked.
Both men rolled their eyes and laughed. “Hey, fifty bucks for ten hours, that’s five bucks an hour,” the toothless man said. “I’d hand out pamphlets for anybody for five bucks an hour. That’ll buy me cigarettes and a good meal.”
“I got no political interests,” the second man said.
With the others was a group of young women from Benedict College, where Sharpton had visited the previous Friday. They, too, had been promised $50 to $75 for the day. One of them said that the candidate “came to our school and…spoke about issues important to the black community”—but clearly the money was the draw. Eddie Harris, the filmmaker who is part of Sharpton’s traveling entourage, was shuttling cars full of these workers out to various districts around the city.
It didn’t look good. Sharpton had been bragging about his “grassroots” strategy in this state for months, about the enthusiastic support he had been finding here, especially in black communities, and this was supposed to be the one place where he had a measure of organization. “I fully intend to win primaries in the coming weeks,” he had said in the South Carolina primary debate, just days earlier. There was little evidence of this momentum.
The night before, he had held an impressive gospel rally at Reid Chapel AME, a simple clapboard house of worship with a congregation of about five hundred. The church was packed and rocking. Its own Voices of Unity choir put on a magnificent performance, swaying, clapping, and electrifying the overflow audience with cascading, rhythmic choruses of infectious hymns. It was followed by the University of South Carolina’s Touch of Faith choir, and then by the main attraction, the gospel singing star John P. Kee. Kee was the man most people had come to see, so Sharpton to
ok over before bringing him out.
“We decided to end this campaign right where we started, in church, the black church in South Carolina,” he said, rocking back and forth. “Tomorrow we’re going to make history! I believe in taking the possible out of the impossible. I started this morning at a slave market in Charleston, and I stood there in a place where a few hundred years ago black men stood to be assessed as slaves, and this morning I stood there to be assessed as a candidate for president of the United States. We’re going from property to president!”
“Amen,” said a voice in the congregation.
“Disgrace to Amazing Grace!”
“You tell it!”
“They can’t poll us because they can’t find us. To just vote for who they tell you to vote for is to waste your vote!…You know, I’ve been black all my life. I’ve been black three times. I’ve been a black baby, I’ve been a black boy, and now I’m a black man! I’ve been black three times!”
And on he went, warmly received. Then Sharpton asked for a show of hands. “How many of you all are going to vote tomorrow?”
About two thirds of the hands in the audience went up.
“Okay, now how many of you are going to vote for me?”
A much smaller number of hands went up, about a third of the earlier showing.
“Be honest now,” Sharpton said.
It looked to me as though the congregation was being painfully honest. A clipboard was being passed around the church for people to sign up to work the polls the next day. When it had made the trip down every pew, two names were on it. Two.
“I was contacted about setting all that up only a week ago,” said the church’s pastor, the Reverend James R. Glover. “I think most people came out to hear the music.”
The next evening, after the polls closed, I sat with Sharpton’s South Carolina public-information coordinator, Cheryl Washington, at the bar of the Sheraton Inn during Sharpton’s “victory” party, waiting for the early returns. Washington seemed tired, and was disappointed that the band that was supposed to come had not shown up. Most of the people at the party were reporters. A few camera crews were setting up in one corner for the ritual postprimary speech. The large room was mostly empty.
“There really was just a few of us volunteering,” she said. “I would love to get a job at the U.S. Capitol. I did an internship there with Congressman [James] Clyburn’s office, and worked there for a few years. I’m impressed with the way Reverend Sharpton handles the press. They are always trying to trip him up and they can’t ever do it.”
The returns were not good. Sharpton had won only 9 percent of the vote. The estimate on various TV channels kept swaying between 9 percent and 10 percent, but eventually settled down to the single digit. John Edwards had won 45 percent of the vote, John Kerry 30 percent. Sharpton’s hopes—that white candidates would split the white vote at least four ways and he would carry half of the black vote, or more—were dashed. I thought of the paltry show of hands at the church the night before. That crowd had demonstrated about the same level of support as South Carolina’s blacks as a whole. Sharpton had received only one of every five votes cast by African-Americans. He had won exactly one of South Carolina’s fifty-five delegates. It wasn’t just a loss—it was a repudiation.
I called up Lloyd Hart on Martha’s Vineyard.
“This is a great victory for us!” he said. Then he said some other things, but I confess I was too astonished to take notes. (Hart abruptly switched his support to Ralph Nader three weeks later.)
The defeat was so resounding that the New York papers speculated about Sharpton’s having hurt his standing as a black power broker in the city—something no one (certainly not Sharpton) would have imagined when he dreamed up this campaign. He had been fond of saying to black audiences, “We can’t lose!” Well, maybe they couldn’t lose, but he could. The revelations of his ties to Stone broke a week later, and people all over the country began questioning his motives.
In the following weeks Lieberman, Clark, and Dean bowed out. By the end of the month the Democratic race was a contest between Kerry and Edwards, with Sharpton and Kucinich flapping like scraps of colorful cloth on the tail of their kite. The FEC had still not awarded Sharpton any matching funds (there were suspicions about some of the reported donations), and the campaign was reportedly $500,000 in debt. Sharpton had still not paid Watkins or Gray. Less than a month earlier he had outlined for me his strategy of arriving at Super Tuesday, March 2, with “as many delegates or more than the front-runner.” When Super Tuesday rolled around, he had just 16 delegates, compared with 754 for John Kerry and 220 for John Edwards. Even under the terms Sharpton had set for himself, South Carolina was the end.
Or so it seemed. The crowd at the Sheraton Inn victory bash never filled out that night. Sharpton made his appearance in time for the eleven o’clock news, strutting in with his usual small entourage, resplendent, smiling, light gleaming off the sheen of his slicked-back hair. He squared himself in front of the array of microphones, and to the small clump of reporters and cameras declared, “Tonight we started a movement that will transform the Democratic Party…. This is an astonishing boost in the arm for the Sharpton campaign.”
GORE’S STIFF COMPETITION
AUGUST 2000
As a reporter for The Inquirer, I was assigned to help cover the GOP 2000 convention in Philadelphia. All the newspaper wanted from me were fairly standard daily reports, so I contacted Salon and talked them into this essay about the whole surreal experience, my first with a national political convention. It made me pine for the days of smoke-filled back rooms, the days when real decisions were made at the conventions, and when reporters could unearth real news.
There was a moment on the second night of the great carnival of hooey held here last week, as I sat about two stories up in the shadows of the First Union Center looking out across the exuberant throng of delegates pouring forth a great tide of partisan affection for former President George Bush, when I experienced a flash of pure historical synchronicity.
The picture was familiar from old prints, black-and-white newsreels and TV broadcasts: one man standing before a crowded hall of cheering people, many waving flags and wearing funny hats. At intervals in the crowd there were placards with the names of states listed vertically. In that moment, I might as well have been watching another Republican National Convention a century ago in this very city when Teddy Roosevelt strode into Exposition Hall wearing his “acceptance hat,” or have been a reporter in Chicago fifty-two years later when another war hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower, rose to receive his own ovation. George Bush’s standing O was part of a continuum stretching backward and forward in time, a ritual that connects us to the whole sweep of American history and reassures us of its continuance. And in that moment I felt cheated. If I had been a reporter at those earlier conventions I would have had a real story to cover, real news to break, floor fights, backroom deals, delegate swapping and defections, appalling acts of betrayal, Turkish mazes of subterfuge…the whole pageant of hardball national politics and plunder. Instead, born too late, I was trapped in the world’s most lavish, prolonged infomercial.
Even that synchronicity I felt was, of course, by design. I would feel it again with even more intensity two nights later when Bush II, George W., stepped out onto the stage to his own thunderous ovation, a thing so loud, long, and heartfelt that it seemed it might simply rend the vault of the arena, split the sky, and lift the anointed one from his spotlighted foothold on center stage straight to the ever-loving lap of the Christian (no, make that ecumenical) God Almighty. I felt the connection because it was what I was supposed to feel. Everything at the convention is by design. It is stagecraft preserved and perfected by people who know how to produce desired emotions and to make desired connections, just as surely as Steven Spielberg knows how to make you scream or cry on cue.
Where politics is concerned, we are blessed to live in boring times, and where there is no passion, there mu
st be artifice. W.’s convention took the ritual of the national convention to a new level. It was salesmanship of the highest order, and it was attempting something particularly hard. It was trying at once to remake (in four days) the party of privilege into the party of diversity, while nominating for president the patrician son of a patrician president—And, lo! a Yalie shall lead us to the multicultural promised land!
No detail was overlooked. To give you an idea of how carefully scripted it was, how thoroughly thought-through (and socially inclusive): There was this little plot of grass off one of the vast parking lots outside the arena roped off and designated as the place for guide dogs (for the blind) to poop. All this masterful orchestration was designed to help us look past W.’s rather thin resumé, to forget the often harsh truths of modern Republicanism, and to see instead a Rainbow Coalition of corporate decency with lovable W. himself, with his playful wink and crooked smile, firmly in the current of historical inevitability.
The Republicans, tired of getting beaten by Bill Clinton, have turned the tables, have dropped their more divisive social priorities (or at least have agreed to soft-pedal them), expropriated the Democrats’ “We Are the World” rhetoric and at least some of their issues (education, Social Security reform), and have nominated a charming, moderate, Southern governor who can beat up on the Washington establishment and promise a fresh start.
