The Black History of the White House (43 page)

Neither in his speech nor in the abbreviated campaign did Wilder focus on race or issues of special concern to the
black community. Only once did he address the issue stating, “Washington seems to have lost the passion to fight the deterioration in race relations in this nation.”
⁴²
Wilder's moderation on race concerns was not surprising given his affiliation with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) at the time. The Council arose as a rival to Jackson's National Rainbow Coalition. In fact, there were suspicions in the Jackson camp that Wilder's long-shot bid was to reposition another African American to vie for black votes. Those fears were reinforced by the celebration of Wilder's run as a blow to Jackson's political future by the
Boston Globe'
s Robert Jordan, who wrote, “We may be seeing the sun beginning to set on the ‘Jesse Jackson era.'”
⁴³

Washington Post
reporter Juan Williams, a conservative black writer who was often critical of Jackson, rejoiced at Wilder's bid. Referring rather ridiculously to Wilder as the most important “black American politician of the 20
^th
century,” Williams opined, “It is not just that Wilder is an alternative to the best-known black spokesman, Jesse Jackson: his success is a rebuke to Jackson's 1980s political vision of Blacks as America's victims.”
⁴⁴

Beside missing the point that Wilder's success was largely driven by the black voters that Jackson's campaigns generated, Williams' flawed assertion of him as an alternative collapsed rather quickly. Wilder ran a very poor campaign, raised little money, and garnered very few endorsements of note. Four months after jumping in, on January 8, 1992, before a single primary or caucus, Wilder jumped out.

Although Jackson bowed out in November 1991, he became a part of the winning politics for candidate Bill Clinton. In a May 1992 interview with the
Washington Post
, rap artist Sistah Souljah discussed the uprising in Los Angeles after the exoneration of four white Los Angeles police officers in the beating of
black motorist Rodney King. She stated, among other remarks, “If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill White people.”
⁴⁵
The statement was pulled out of the context of the overall interview and incorrectly promoted to say that she advocated murdering whites. Few critics noted that she was a widely respected youth organizer and active on a wide range of issues. In June, based on her activism, Souljah was invited to participate in Jackson's National Rainbow Coalition conference in Washington, D.C. So was Democratic Party's presumptive nominee Bill Clinton. Jackson was holding the gathering to strengthen his and the Rainbow Coalition's ability to influence the platform and strategy of the Democratic Party in the fall elections. To burnish his conservative credentials as he sought votes from the political center, Clinton decided to use the event to not only criticize Souljah but to also chastise Jackson for inviting her to the conference. At the time, Clinton was trailing in the polls behind President George H. W. Bush and independent upstart, Ross Perot. In his talk, Clinton compared Souljah to white supremacist and former Klan leader David Duke. Jackson was blindsided. Clinton's strategy of distancing himself from Jackson and the progressive wing of the party, and presenting himself as a centrist to win moderate white voters was successful enough to win him the nomination.
⁴⁶

Al Sharpton

In 2004, New York's Reverend Al Sharpton ran in the Democratic primaries. Like Jackson, he also tried to position himself not as a black candidate, but one representing a broad range of constituencies. He told CNN, “I'm not running an African-American campaign. We're running a broad-based campaign that includes African-Americans and Latinos and gays and lesbians and laborers and others.”
⁴⁷
Sharpton built his reputation
as a rabble-rouser in New York politics taking strong stands on a number of racial and non-racial issues and incidents. He morphed, however, into a respected and savvy political insider in Democratic politics. And he was seen by many, including himself, as the heir to the Jackson throne. Lacking Jackson's reach and connections, but more willing to engage others as equals, Sharpton was taken seriously when he decided to enter the race although he had no chance of actually winning.

Although he won no states (but nearly 400,000 votes) and came in far behind, his high quality performances at the debates during the two months he campaigned were well-informed and quick-witted. The debates went a long way in shedding the image of him as a confrontational extremist and racial rebel that the media had built over the years—an image that Sharpton himself helped create. Nevertheless, few people watched the debates or read campaign literature—not that those would have been decisive anyway—so the old Sharpton image remained for many Democratic voters. And even those who agreed with what Sharpton had to say and with his policy proposals had little doubt that if he miraculously made it through the primaries and Convention and emerged as the nominee, that the Democrats would go down in a historic defeat. To his credit, Sharpton was aware of these politics and used them to his advantage as he attempted to leverage a progressive and pro-civil rights agenda.

Since the 2008 election, Sharpton has emerged as Obama's favored black leader, having visited the White House at least five times by mid-2010. He has been described as the president's “go-to man” when it comes to responding to black politicians, media personalities, and civil rights leaders who are critical of the administration's policies as they relate to the black community.

From issues ranging from civil rights to agricultural policy, Sharpton has provided the administration space to present its
point-of-view primarily on his radio show, and debated black opinion-makers such as black talk show host and activist Tavis Smiley, who is a harsh critic of Obama and now Sharpton. Smiley said it was hard for Sharpton “to speak truth to power about the suffering of black people on the one hand, and then to be running in and out of the Oval Office and trying to run the president's agenda or express White House talking points.”
⁴⁸
Sharpton argued in response, “The president does not need to get out there and do what we should be doing,” and there should not be a double standard where African American leaders “expect more from a black president” than from a white one.
⁴⁹

While Smiley, Rev. Jesse Jackson and others have fumed at what they believe has been a poor response by the Obama administration to black concerns, Sharpton and other black leaders, such as NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, National Urban League President Marc Morial, and Harvard's Charles Ogletree have met with Obama on a number of occasions including a snowy February 10, 2010 meeting with Sharpton, Morial, and Jealous, regarding the economy.
⁵⁰
Smiley criticized that gathering for not focusing more strongly on a black agenda. He and Sharpton continued to clash publicly on several radio shows. Sharpton refused to participate in Smiley's March 20, 2010 “We Count! The Black Agenda is the American Agenda” symposium that included Jackson, scholars Michael Eric Dyson, Michael Fauntroy, Cornel West, and Ron Walters, economist Julianne Malveaux, and Minister Louis Farrakhan among others. Sharpton viewed it as an Obama-bashing session and a diversion from addressing a real program for change.
⁵¹
Sharpton has directly engaged with the White House, even partnering with former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich on the issue of education access for minority youth as part of a Obamasupported initiative, the Education Equality Project.
⁵²

Carol Moseley-Braun

Former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun (D-IL) also announced that she was running for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. She stated, “I'm in this race to ensure that the American dream finally gets extended to all Americans without regard to race, color, or gender.”
⁵³

Some felt that she was convinced to join the race to be a spoiler to stop Sharpton getting a monopoly on black votes. However, she was still relatively unknown despite having been an U.S. senator, the first African American woman to achieve that position. She left office after one term, a tenure wrought with controversy and generally seen as a disappointment. One high point of her time in Congress was her challenge to Senator Jesse Helms, one of the Senate's most anti-civil rights legislators. Unafraid to be brazenly racist, sexist, and homophobic, Helms was one of the institution's most powerful members. In his 1990 campaign for reelection, he ran the infamous “white hands” advertisement against African American Henry Gantt, which showed a pair of white hands crumbling a rejection notice for a job that had been given to an unqualified person of color.
⁵⁴
A states'-rights advocate and segregationist until the day he died, Helms' defense of racist Southern habits went unchecked by his Senate colleagues until he ran into Moseley-Braun. In July 1993, Helms proposed an Amendment to the National Service Act that would have renewed the patent for the logo of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Helms described the group as “24,000 ladies” who work as unpaid volunteers at veterans' hospitals. In fact, it is an organization that seeks to preserve, defend, and even make-up Confederate culture and history. It protects a manufactured image of an idyllic pre-Civil War white South that minimizes or denies the brutality and racism of slavery, an objective Helms embraced.
⁵⁵
Moseley went
to war with Helms over the issue and after a fiery speech on the Senate floor, a number of Senators including some from the South and Republican colleagues of Helms changed their vote and the legislation was defeated.

Similar to Chisholm many years earlier, there was also a hope that she would garner support from women's organizations and voters given that she was the only woman in the race. But due to her lack of popular support, inability to raise funds, and media snipes, she dropped out of the race early.

Alan Keyes

On the Republican side, political nuisance and far-right extremist Alan Keyes, who more often than not has bordered on the fanatical, has run three times, in 1996, 2000, and 2008, for the Republican nomination. He left the GOP campaign in March 2008 to run for the nomination under the banner of the Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based ultra-conservative Constitution Party, which he lost finally running as an independent. His campaign themes have remained unchanged: an end to all abortion rights, elimination of the income tax, opposition to gay rights, and anti-socialism and other far-right positions. In an almost comical fashion, he generated a barely hidden contempt from other Republican candidates who, unlike Democrats, felt a need to tolerate his sideshow. His participation in debates always generated a tension not as much due to race—although despite his pathological opposition to civil rights and racial justice, he complained that he was being slighted because of it—but because his views were outside that of the main party candidates who needed to try to both appeal to the highly motivated right wing of the party, but also moderate and independent voters. Most—well some—understood they could not win a national election with only the party's right wing. Keyes, on the other
hand, most clearly and aggressively sought support from the far right end of his party's base. The results were fairly predictable. He won little support and was more an embarrassment than anything else. Like many black Republican candidates, he wanted to be seen both as non-racial and still get special credit for his insights into blackness.

Keyes's extremism seems to be boundless. As a youth, he was defending the Vietnam War long after even most hawks had given it up. Although he holds a Ph.D. from Harvard, he has failed at nearly every endeavor, from hosting television or radio shows to running for countless offices. His angry denunciations of everyone that disagrees with him often take on a personal dimension.

During a 2004 interview, Keyes launched into a tirade against gays. Mary Cheney's name came up. She is an active Republican and the openly gay daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Keyes said that she, like other gays and lesbians, was a “selfish hedonist.” In this instance Keyes would later prove that he was no hypocrite. Sometime later when his daughter Maya announced that she was a lesbian—and had liberal views—he and his wife Jocelyn kicked her out of the house, both referring to her as a “liberal queer.” This was after Maya had delayed her entrance into Brown University to work on his 2004 Senate campaign although she disagreed with virtually every position he articulated except for abortion. Even more disturbing, if possible, after his slur against Mary Cheney, Keyes also volunteered—unprovoked and while his daughter was sitting there—“if my daughter were a lesbian, I'd look at her and say, ‘That is a relationship that is based on selfish hedonism.' I would also tell my daughter that it's a sin and she needs to pray to the Lord God to help her deal with that sin.” At the time, Keyes actually did know that Maya was a lesbian, but, as she
noted in an interview, as long as she was quiet about it, she got along okay with her parents. Keyes's family values went out the window after Maya came out and he fired her from her job in his political organization and refused to pay for her tuition.
⁵⁶

The always furious Keyes holds the distinction of being the last candidate to run against Barack Obama before he ran for president. In the 2004 Illinois Senate race, Keyes parachuted in at the last moment after all of the Illinois Republican hopefuls dropped or fell out of the race. His farcical campaign was only notable for the historic margin of defeat—73 percent to 37 percent—that he suffered. Obama won 90 percent of the black vote, 70 percent of the white vote, 75 percent of the independents, and even 40 percent of the Republican vote.
⁵⁷
The campaign did make history in that it was the first time that two major party candidates running against each other for the U.S. Senate were black, although Keyes was hardly celebrating that fact. He declared during the campaign, with some insider knowledge no one else had, that “Jesus would not vote for Obama,” and he refused to call and congratulate him on the win.
⁵⁸
Since the 2008 campaign, Keyes has been one of the leaders of the so-called “birther” movement that questions the citizenship of Obama. Keyes and others ludicrously claim that Obama was born outside of the United States, either in Kenya or Indonesia, and that his Hawaiian birth certificate is a forgery, and, therefore he is not legally qualified to be president. The grand conspiracy that they weave is knee-deep in racist and nativist assumptions that involve multiple governments, major media, political leaders, and even law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and is further spread by the Fox News network and faux “journalists” like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs. He has also argued that Obama is a socialist and Marxist “on the verge of outright dictatorship.”
⁵⁹