Memo to: Mary Beth Cahill, John Kerry's campaign manager
Re: New York primary
Danger ahead, Ms. Cahill. The New York primary looms. And the danger doesn't come from John Edwards. His anti-NAFTA message may play well in beleaguered upstate New York, but in a Democratic primary, there aren't enough votes upstate to worry about. No, your New York problem is going to be Al Sharpton, who will have you on his home turf.
Ready yourself.
I was a political writer in New York City for 15 years or so, and I had a front-row seat to the Sharpton theater. You might even call me a repeat season subscriber, albeit by force rather than by choice. Let me tell you a little bit about what I saw.
Sharpton has only one great expertise in life: creating a controversy in which he is the offended party. The offending party is almost always a white Democrat, who often enough happens to be the front-runner in a campaign. The offense is "racial" in nature. It is typically minimal or even nonexistent. But that doesn't matter. Sharpton elevates it into a major attack on his honor, and he then converts it -- here's the real trick -- into an attack on all African Americans everywhere, whom he of course represents.
The New York Post blows it up to world-historical proportions, because a Murdoch property has an obvious interest in highlighting Democratic distress. (You're familiar with your hometown Boston Herald? Take what it does and multiply it by five or six.) The Daily News follows suit, if mainly for the sake of keeping up with the competition. And Democrats, petrified of being called "racist," make nice-nice with Al, acquiescing to his demands, never calling his stunt for what it is.
Go read up on the 2001 mayoral election. The campaign of white Democratic front-runner Mark Green -- your campaign's New York co-chairman -- circulated a flier in white outer-borough neighborhoods that reproduced a Post cartoon of a grotesquely overweight Sharpton having his derriere kissed by Fernando Ferrer, the mayoral candidate whom Sharpton was supporting.
Were the fliers racist? Sure they were. But Green denounced them immediately -- and agreed that he would fire anyone in his campaign associated with them. (To this day, despite certain New York journalists' dogged efforts to the contrary, no one has established conclusively that Green approved of -- or even knew about -- the fliers.)
And that should have ended it, especially given Green's track record on racial issues. He'd always received huge percentages of the black vote, and during the Rudy Giuliani years, he -- more than any white elected official in the city -- regularly and insistently pressed the mayor on police-brutality issues and race relations.
But that didn't end it at all. To make a long story short, Sharpton and Ferrer withdrew their support from Green in the general election. The Republican, Mike Bloomberg, won; the papers the day after the election ran photographs of Sharpton and Ferrer smiling almost as contentedly as if Ferrer had won. And, in the process, Sharpton got Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, who was way out of his league in dealing with the savvy reverend, to agree in principle to the notion that attacks on Sharpton -- virtually any criticism of him at all, really -- are beyond the pale.
This is the Sharpton pattern. He finds the small, racial Achilles' heel of the Democratic front-runner, exploits it with the help of the right-wing press, turns the offending party into Bull Connor, and sees to it that a Republican wins an election rather than a Democrat who isn't beholden to him.
You've already seen how he did it to Howard Dean. Sharpton's challenge to Dean at a pre-Iowa debate about the latter's lack of African-American cabinet officers was adevastating moment for the former Vermont governor. And for that moment, Sharptonenlisted a co-producer: The idea for the question to Dean was fed to the reverend byRoger Stone, the veteran Republican consultant with a long history of campaign tricksthat culminated in his leading the infamous right-wing mob that shut down the MiamiDade Board of Elections around Thanksgiving 2000, when the board was attemptingrecanvass of presidential ballots. The great investigative reporter Wayne Barrett of TheVillage Voice has documented the Sharpton-Stone connection -- and many other dubious aspects of the current Sharpton campaign, from its shady finances to its appallingly shabby treatment of respected Democratic campaign veteran Frank Watkins. He even documented that Sharpton ran up an $18,000 tab on one of Stone's credit cards. Ms. Cahill, read those pieces
So, what might the next two weeks hold? I'd be thrilled to be wrong in mysuspicion that Al Sharpton will find some minor incident from John Kerry's track record and turn it into an example of blatant racism. It may be that he's not in much of a position to do anything. One of the unremarked-upon pleasures of this campaign so far is how miserably Sharpton has performed. Last year he was making boasts about topping Jesse Jackson's 1988 total of 7 million votes; he has yet to garner 100,000. In some states, he has racked up such impressive totals as 28 (in North Dakota -- no, not 2,800; just 28), 27 (Maine), 25 (Nevada), and 19 (Washington).
But Sharpton's history suggests that he's got something in store for your candidate. If I were you, I'd be thinking preemptively. This might be a good time toproduce David Alston, the African American who was on Kerry's swift boat in Vietnam,and get him up to Manhattan to offer testimonials on behalf of Kerry before Sharpton andStone have a chance to start something.
Whatever you do, get ready. The worst is almost surely yet to come.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
