Al Sharpton, power player
“Check out this,” the flamboyant civil rights leader told me during breakfast at his organization’s annual meeting this week. He flipped through the program until he found a full-page ad with the logos of Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. “News Corporation Proudly Supports National Action Network’s 2012 Convention,” it said.
Sharpton grinned. “They bash me on Fox News,” he said. “But they sponsor my conference.”
Everybody wants to be on Sharpton’s good side these days. No fewer than five Cabinet officers and a senior White House official went to this year’s convention to kiss his ring. President Obama spoke at last year’s conference and has sought Sharpton’s advice on policy. Sharpton has a show on MSNBC five nights a week, and he doles out airtime to a procession of politicians and journalists (including me).
Wednesday night brought the sweetest moment yet in Sharpton’s long and controversial career: the announcement that Florida authorities would charge Trayvon Martin’s shooter. Sharpton, at the request of the boy’s parents, had done more than anyone else to bring the case national attention.
Just hours before the announcement that George Zimmerman would be charged with second-degree murder, Martin’s parents held a joint news conference with Sharpton — and a few hours before that, Attorney General Eric Holder, also at the convention, praised Sharpton for his “tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless.”
It was confirmation that Sharpton has pulled off one of the rarest second acts in American public life: from pariah to power player.
And you are surprised. A quick look at what brought him onto the national stage.
A quarter-century ago, Sharpton burst onto the national scene as the mouthpiece for Tawana Brawley, a black teenager from Upstate New York who falsely claimed that she had been raped by white men. His image worsened a few years later when Jewish leaders in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, accused him of inflaming anti-Semitism. Then came the 1995 Harlem protest at which he called a Jewish landlord a “white interloper” — followed by an attack on the landlord’s store that left eight people dead...
...Without question, he is a kingmaker in Democratic politics...
After Brawley and Crown Heights and a 67-count indictment over financial problems, Sharpton ran twice for the U.S. Senate, and once for mayor of New York; he tried for president in 2004. He latched on to some of the most visible racial cases of the era and went on a 40-day hunger strike in 2001 after being arrested for protesting U.S. military bombing exercises on Vieques, Puerto Rico.
But he established himself as a team player with his speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004, and by 2008 the Democratic presidential candidates were flocking to his annual convention...
Why not? The leader of the party has few more credentials than this man. He is welcomes with warm embrace from the Democratic Party leadership and the media (pretty much redundant) and I for one want him on the cover. His race baiting is rejected by most of the people in this country and I want him working for the reelection of B Hussein Obama as much as possible.
In this article Sharpton compares himself to Glenn Beck. Sorry, but no one is dead because of Beck and the Restoring Honor Rally. Sharpton can't say people haven't died because of his actions. Hopefully he's put on the Democrats like the anchor he is.
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