Return of the kingmaker

Buttigieg is known on the campaign trail as “Mayor Pete,” partly out of faddish familiarity and partly thanks to the burden of a last name that doesn’t roll off the tongue. (His supporters have taken to wearing T-shirts that serve as pronunciation guides, BOOT-EDGE-EDGE.) He has rocketed up the Democratic presidential charts to No. 4, behind former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Not bad for the 37-year-old Rhodes scholar, Navy intelligence veteran, and mayor of South Bend, Ind.

But even as he drew larger and larger crowds, the candidate’s support was, well, pale. When asked in April about his lack of support from black voters, he said, “I think we need to do better.” Buttigieg’s plan to boost the diversity of his backers was centered on a breathtakingly cynical ploy. The really dispiriting part is that it worked.

“It’s not rude to eat with my hands?” Buttigieg asked as he looked at fried chicken, collard greens, and mac and cheese at Harlem’s famous soul food joint Sylvia’s. He took the subway uptown in late April. Sitting across from him was Al Sharpton, a controversial figure who should have lost any legitimacy long ago, but who has now found himself more influential than ever. The two made a show for the cameras, with Buttigieg beaming and Sharpton in command. Buttigieg would soon have more reason to smile. The most recent poll in the crucial early state of South Carolina found he had surged to 6% among black voters, up from 0% the month before.

Buttigieg wasn’t the first 2020 candidate to make the pilgrimage to beg for the blessing of the man who first came to national attention with a race hoax and led anti-Jewish riots in New York City that evinced the Eastern Europe of a century or more ago. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., made the trip in February. Nor were Harris and Buttigieg the only ones to beg for his blessing. Most Democratic presidential wannabes attended a conference of Sharpton’s National Action Network in early April, and many gave speeches designed to appeal to the man who has turned racial tensions into a lucrative corporate protection racket. Nor is this the first year of such groveling. Sanders has done it before, just as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did before him.

But there are two aspects of the issue that make this year’s march to Sharpton particularly ghastly.

The first is the timing. Sharpton’s elevation comes amid an uptick in reported incidents of anti-Semitism. Just days before Buttigieg’s public celebration of Sharpton, a man fired shots at a Chabad synagogue in Poway, Calif., killing one person. In chilling echoes of the 1991 Crown Heights riots, in which Sharpton played a leading role, there’s been a rash of anti-Semitic assaults in Brooklyn. In New York on the whole, CBS reported, “According to police, hate crimes were up 67 percent in the first quarter of the year, January through April. There were 145 incidents, compared to 87 in the first four months of 2018. Of those, 82 of the 2019 incidents were anti-Semitic, an 82 percent increase.” The embrace of Sharpton isn’t coming in a vacuum. It accelerates a trend of enabling anti-Semitism in the service of an all-consuming #Resistance.

The second is the way Sharpton’s comeback was helped along massively by President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. The latter is also running for the Democratic presidential nomination this year. Sharpton was marginalized by their predecessors and by his actions, but Obama and de Blasio arguably made him more powerful politically than he’s ever been. Sharpton’s return to respectability surprised fans and critics alike. “Why are we still talking about Al Sharpton?” asked a writer for Vice in 2014. A better and more accurate question is: Why are we talking about Al Sharpton again?

To understand the exasperation behind that question, you have to go back to why we ever talked about Sharpton in the first place.

Sharpton’s respectability ebbs and flows, but his gimmicks have remained consistent. A friendship and partnership with the “Godfather of Soul” James Brown in the 1970s sparked ambitions in Sharpton to break into the music business in a bigger way via concert promotion. In the early 1980s, Sharpton saw Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” tour as his big opportunity. He threatened protests and boycotts unless black promoters were given more of a role in the tour. This, according to Sharpton’s own account and backed up by court documents and reporting, earned him a threat from a mafioso. Using that, Sharpton engineered a role as an FBI informant against the Genovese and Gambino crime families.

That’s the first of three recognizable pegs of the Sharpton modus operandi. The second would take shape in 1987 when Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old African American girl from Dutchess County, N.Y., accused a group of white men of abducting her, dragging her into the woods, and raping her over several days. In addition to her attorneys, her advocacy fell into the hands of Sharpton. Then ensued, recalled Gregory Kane in 2014, “a year of naked race-baiting in which Sharpton accused then-New York Gov. Mario Cuomo of being a racist and claiming that Brawley talking to the state attorney general about her allegations would be akin to having a concentration camp inmate talk to Adolf Hitler.” A jury concluded the story was a hoax concocted by a runaway, likely fearing for her safety at home if she returned from a four-day absence with no good explanation. Brawley was then successfully sued by the prosecutor for defamation.

Instead of discrediting Sharpton forever, this sordid and disgraceful affair boosted his standing as a defender of African Americans mistreated in the court of public opinion. His fame gave him the ability to organize ever-larger marches and protests. That led to the third and final facet of the notoriety of “Rev. Al,” which is anti-Semitism.

On the night of Aug. 19, 1991, a Hasidic driver struck and killed 7-year-old Gavin Cato, the son of Guyanese immigrants. Several hours later, amid cries of “There’s a Jew!” and “Kill the Jew!” African American assailants beat and stabbed to death an Orthodox Jew named Yankel Rosenbaum. Anti-Jewish riots continued to build. That’s when Sharpton stepped in and poured gasoline on what was already becoming America’s first pogrom. “No justice, no peace!” became his hypocritical slogan. Sharpton egged on the protesters. At Cato’s funeral, he turned it up a notch: “Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. The issue is not anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid. … All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no kaffeeklatsch, no skinnin’ and grinnin’.”

Ari Goldman, who covered the riots for the New York Times, recalled in 2011: “Over the next three days … I saw police cars set on fire, stores being looted and people bloodied by Billy clubs, rocks and bottles. One woman told me that she barricaded herself into her apartment and put the mattresses on the windows so her children would not be hurt by flying glass.” Unfortunately, the Times was fixated on promoting an “evenhanded” view of the events at the expense of the truth. Goldman says his and other stories would be taken by the rewrite editors at the paper and mangled to suggest Jewish culpability in the violence against them. “In all my reporting during the riots I never saw, or heard of, any violence by Jews against blacks. But the Times was dedicated to this version of events: blacks and Jews clashing amid racial tensions.” Two days into the riots, “as I stood in a group of chasidic men in front of the Lubavitch headquarters, a group of demonstrators were coming down Eastern Parkway. ‘Heil Hitler,’ they chanted. ‘Death to the Jews.’ Police in riot gear stood nearby but did nothing.”

One editorial in the Forward began: “Jewish homes were being attacked, windows broken. Jewish residents were cowering in the safest rooms of their homes. Sympathetic gentiles in the area were sneaking word to some of their Jewish neighbors to keep their lights turned off.

“Marauding bands of outside agitators were roaming around, blaming Jews. This was taking place not in, say, prewar Poland or the Pale of Settlement back in an even earlier time. This was taking place in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.”

Four years later, Sharpton was at it again, ginning up increasingly heated protests and demonstrations against the Jewish owner of Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem, along with his National Action Network colleague Morris Powell. At an Aug. 19, 1995, rally, Powell said: “We are not going to stand idly by and let a Jewish person come in black Harlem and methodically drive black people out of business up and down 125th Street. If we stand for that, we will stand for anything.” The owner, Fred Harari, had his rent raised by his landlord, a black church. Harari, in turn, raised the rent of a black tenant of his. In September, Sharpton declared, “I want to make it clear to the radio and audience and to you here that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.”

The message got through. In December, a gunman entered Freddy’s and set it ablaze, killing seven, before shooting himself. Harari eventually reopened the store under a new name. In 1998, Powell was back leading protests near the shop, telling people to “return fire” because “Freddy’s not dead.”

Sharpton was and remains unrepentant. “You only repent when you mean it, and I have done nothing wrong,” he insisted in 2001. In 2011, on the 20th anniversary of the Crown Heights pogrom, he blamed “extremists in the Jewish community” for setting a dishonest racial narrative.

Nor have Sharpton’s methods changed. In 2008, the New York Post reports, a massive donation from a hedge fund to a Sharpton-affiliated recipient essentially served as a backdoor lobbying payment in the fund’s quest to obtain a racetrack license. The donor “viewed its payments to Sharpton as more of an insurance policy so he wouldn’t scuttle its chances by criticizing the group, said a source familiar with the racino controversy.”

Corporate donors, the New York Post notes, tend to line up to pay Sharpton to be on his good side. Here’s a good example of how the ploy works: “NAN had repeatedly and without success asked [General Motors] for donations for six years beginning in August 2000, a GM spokesman told The Post. Then, in 2006, Sharpton threatened a boycott of GM over the planned closing of an African-American-owned dealership in The Bronx. He picketed outside GM’s Fifth Avenue headquarters. GM wrote checks to NAN for $5,000 in 2007 and another $5,000 in 2008.” He pulled a similar trick on Honda, and the organization has Chrysler as a donor too. National Action Network’s other corporate donors included AT&T, McDonald’s, Verizon, Pfizer, and Walmart.

All of which makes Sharpton’s continued corporate influence explicable, if sordid. Why has his political stock recovered and even reached new heights? No doubt it is due to a confluence of factors, including concern over racial bias in policing and the lack of a true Democratic Party leader, either inside or outside the White House, as the Clintons were. But the men who did more than anyone else to put Sharpton in the driver’s seat were Obama and de Blasio.

On Jan. 15, 2018, Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., was asked about President Trump’s penchant for making controversial comments. Grothman responded that he thought the president’s comments were unhelpful but that he gets more scrutiny than his predecessors: “The past president brought Al Sharpton into the White House something like 80 times. That was kind of stunning to me, but nobody ever made a big ruckus out of it.”

Those comments themselves caused a minor ruckus and set the fact-checkers to task. PolitiFact concluded that Grothman had undercounted, finding “a total of 118 visits, through September 2016.”

Indeed, Sharpton had become a fixture in Obamaworld. The seeds for that alliance were planted in 2007. Obama had been getting flak from Jesse Jackson and others for supposedly not supporting black activism enough. Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett was looking for someone from the world of civil rights advocacy to fill the void. That’s when Rev. Al stepped up, reported Jillian Melchior, then at National Review, in 2015. “In late 2007 or early 2008, Jarrett negotiated a simple deal with the reverend: Sharpton would discreetly support Obama for president, working mostly behind the scenes; he wouldn’t publicly criticize Obama, but he also wouldn’t back him in a way that aroused attention.”

That helped change the narrative that the black establishment was with the establishment candidate, Clinton. But Sharpton’s value to the campaign would skyrocket when controversial comments by Obama’s family pastor, Jeremiah Wright, became too much of a headache to be ignored. Obama distanced himself from Wright. “Behind the scenes,” Melchior reported, “the Obama campaign relied on Sharpton to reach out to influential black pastors across the U.S., persuading them not to revolt against Obama for his treatment of Wright.” That earned the trust of “Team Obama,” and the relationship continued into the White House.

“His counsel was invaluable,” Jarrett recently told Evan Halper of the Los Angeles Times, especially when it came to “pushing back on people he thought were not constructive and unfairly criticizing President Obama.”

Just having Sharpton around, in fact, was a boost for Obama’s standing among black activists, according to Emory University expert on African American politics Andra Gillespie. “There were some concerns that Obama would be symbolically important but would not advocate for substantive change to help the African American community,” Gillespie told the LA Times. “The fact that Rev. Sharpton, who clearly came from an activist background and put race at the forefront and was unafraid to speak out on behalf of African Americans explicitly, put him in a position to lend an air of credibility to the Obama administration.”

The alliance did the same for Sharpton’s credibility. Some activists worried that cozying up to power would dull the blade of the National Action Network’s street politicking. But instead, Sharpton’s advocacy on behalf of black victims of police violence came with the president’s perceived imprimatur. As Sharpton told the LA Times, “So if they are saying, ‘He stopped doing those things,’ not only did I keep doing them, a lot of these issues that became national concerns under Obama, I was the one leading.”

In January 2014, as Sharpton was preparing to fly to Washington for a private birthday party for Michelle Obama, he was in his office talking to Politico’s Azi Paybarah about de Blasio, another politician who’d given him unprecedented access. Sharpton had helped de Blasio during the 2013 mayoral election, when he refused to endorse de Blasio’s African American primary opponent. “De Blasio and Sharpton are known to speak often in private, with the result that they’re closely in sync in public,” Paybarah reported.

They were about to become even more so. Later that month, de Blasio would appoint Rachel Noerdlinger, a longtime adviser and publicist for Sharpton’s organization, to be chief of staff to his wife, Chirlane McCray, who also served as the mayor’s closest adviser. That meant it wasn’t just full access Sharpton got to the mayor’s office; his network would have input on everything from policy to personnel. When either would find themselves in a burgeoning scandal, the other would make a public show of support. “I know there hasn’t been a thing that we have asked Mayor de Blasio to do that he hasn’t done,” Noerdlinger told Newsday.

This was something Sharpton never had in his home city. Mayor Ed Koch kept him at a distance. So, to a lesser extent, did Mayor David Dinkins. When Rudy Giuliani was mayor, his relationship with Sharpton was downright hostile. Michael Bloomberg, as mayor, took the more corporate road of directing some of his private philanthropy toward causes favored by Sharpton, which kept the rebellious reverend from open antagonism toward City Hall. But de Blasio practically made Sharpton part of the team. At a press conference on policing minority communities, de Blasio seated the NYPD commissioner to his immediate right and Sharpton to his immediate left. The 2014 National Action Network conference had two especially notable speakers: the mayor of New York and the president of the United States.

Cozying up to Sharpton is about more than black voters, too. After Buttigieg’s trip to Sylvia’s, Fredrick C. Harris, director of Columbia University’s Center on African American Politics and Society, told Esquire that it was about sending a holistic message to the party, using Sharpton as a proxy for black voters, and outreach to black voters as a proxy for liberal priorities. That element is crucial to understanding why, as the LA Times put it, “all paths to the White House run through the House of Sharpton.”

“Part of this is sort of signaling to black voters,” Harris said, “but also I think to liberal white voters in the Democratic Party who may like him but are troubled or unclear about what his legacy of race relations have been in South Bend. So by going to Al Sharpton, this is also sending a symbolic signal to them as well.”

What is that signal, specifically? On June 11, Sharpton gushed to MSNBC’s viewers, “I was impressed that he was self-assured, comfortable in his own skin, and really knew what he was talking about.” A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released a week later had Buttigieg just a point behind Warren. The “House of Sharpton” is likely to be a busy place for the next 17 months.

Seth Mandel is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.