Men overboard!
By Lawrence Henry
web
posted January 21, 2002
The signs are clear. The Democratic Party is actively beginning to destroy
the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton - particularly Sharpton, who plans
to run for President in the 2004 election.

Sharpton |
In one of the earliest pointers to the plank, liberal high priestess
Mary McGrory, commenting on the Larry Summers-Cornel West head-butt at
Harvard, wrote this previously unthinkable paragraph in the January 6
Washington Post:
"The two premier demagogues, Jackson and Sharpton, had wretched
childhoods and came on the national scene as frauds. Jackson appeared
on television in 1968 wearing a shirt that he said was stained with the
blood of Martin Luther King Jr., who he claimed had died in his arms.
That was not true. Sharpton made his debut as the defender of Tawana Brawley,
a Dutchess County teenager who falsely claimed she was raped in 1987.
Sharpton identified a local district attorney as one of the alleged miscreants,
and was later found liable when the wrongly accused man brought a defamation
suit."
With two weeks arrived the approving nod from across the pond, a little
more carefully couched, but unmistakable nonetheless. The Economist's
American commentator, Lexington, wrote a column titled, "The Dangerous
Quest of Al Sharpton," filled with words like "radioactive"
and "loathe."

A clay rendition of the politically correct statue |
After the dustup that occasioned McGrory's remarkable denunciation came
the flap over the commissioning of a statue for the headquarters of the
New York Fire Department. The statue, based on a famous photograph of
three white firefighters raising an American flag over the ruins of the
World Trade Center, would recast, in bronze, those firefighters as icons
of diversity - one black, one Hispanic, one white. As of this week, New
York fire commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta had apparently put the kibosh
on the diversity statue
The second of these hugely publicized controversies points straight to
the Democrats' main concern: The formerly anonymous working class male
voters who once voted for Ronald Reagan now have a world-famous public
face, in the heroes of the New York fire and police departments.
But even offending this newly famous, potentially Republican constituency
wouldn't have bothered the Democrats except for one thing: Al Sharpton,
and the politics of race, have already lost them one election. Sharpton's
ego, and Sharpton's voters, injected into the New York City mayoral race,
spoiled the chances of either Freddy Ferrer or Mark Green, and instead
elected Mike Bloomberg.

Jackson |
What's more, the same conflicts threaten the chances of VID (Very Important
Democrat) Andrew Cuomo in the race for the New York State governorship,
because there is a black candidate in that race, Controller Carl McCall.
Sharpton could blow that contest for the Democrats, too.
A goodly number of Republican ideologues will wonder what the big deal
is to the Democrats. Lifelong Dem Bloomberg switched parties just to run
for the mayor's office, but did not change his extremely liberal views.
New York Republican governor George Pataki is the very image of what conservative
Republicans call a RINO, a Republican in Name Only - big taxer, big spender,
favors gun control and abortion.
But Democrats don't care about anything but winning. After a decade of
playing the politics of racial arson, they've finally set fire to their
own house. In the post 9/11 world, New York's firemen and policemen, and
the people throughout the country who identify with them, are seriously
in play as potentially Republican voters, on the basis of their patriotism.
The Democrats fear, with good reason, that Operation PUSH and Sharpton's
National Action Network could end up pushing enough formerly union-sympathetic
voters to push enough Republican levers to lose the Presidential election
in 2004 - and the Congressional elections two years before that. So they
can't push Jackson and Sharpton to the sharks fast enough. 
Lawrence Henry is a senior writer for Enter Stage Right.

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