Nine candidates are preparing campaigns to win the Democratic presidential nomination and challenge President George W. Bush for the White House in 2004, and for the first time, two black candidates — the Rev. Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun — are competing for the nomination of a major party. But what strategies can we expect from the civil rights leader and the former ambassador and senator as they eye the same prize?
Central to the campaigns of both Sharpton and Moseley Braun is placing civil rights and social justice back on the national agenda. Since the mid-1980s, Sharpton has drawn national attention to racially motivated crimes, racial profiling, criminal justice, and police brutality. With the fall 2002 release of his book, Al on America (Kensington Publishing Corp.; $27), Sharpton launched his candidacy for president as a platform to fight for those who are not empowered. “I’m running for the people who have been excluded,” says Sharpton. “Everything that the Civil Rights Movement has achieved and everything I have fought for over the years is at risk.”
But Sharpton is running for more than the Democratic nomination. He intends to make his campaign a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. He contends that the party has strayed from its modern roots in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Great Society that grew out of the Kennedy-Johnson administrations. “The Democratic Party must be defined by what it stands for,” says Sharpton. “Too many centrist Democrats have moved the party to the right. As demonstrated by the elections last November, the base of the Democratic Party has felt abandoned — minorities, women, Progressives, and young people.”
The legacy of discrimination is very much what Moseley Braun is campaigning against. She describes how her grandfather, a decorated veteran of the Battle of the Argonne Forest in World War I, returned to America where he couldn’t vote and was denied basic civil liberties. “I’m in this race to ensure that the American dream finally gets extended to all Americans without regard to race, color, or gender,” says Moseley Braun.
Until the start of next year’s primaries and caucuses, the campaigns of the Democratic candidates will largely focus on Bush, the presumptive GOP nominee in 2004. Among the field of Democrats, Moseley Braun and Sharpton are among Bush’s harshest critics. “The Bush administration has been a disaster,” says Moseley Braun. “Americans are losing jobs, many are without healthcare, and Bush has given massive tax cuts to the richest 1% in our society.”
Reparations are likely to be addressed by both African American contenders. “I support reparations,” says Moseley Braun, “not 40 acres and a Lexus, but a program that brings Americans together to resolve the nation’s contradictions between the society’s commitment to equality and opportunity and how minorities are actually treated. Affirmative action is one way to do that. Another approach is to provide more equity capital to minority entrepreneurs. But education is the silver bullet; we need to rebuild crumbling schools.”
For his part, Sharpton would
address the agenda that has apparently been forgotten by the Bush administration — public education. Sharpton, who proposes a $2 an hour increase in the minimum wage, says America should address the disparities in the criminal justice system, eliminate racial profiling, and make sure that judges appointed to the bench are not insensitive to women and people of color. “Too many political figures want to direct public resources to private education through vouchers,” says Sharpton. “We cannot afford to write off the majority of America’s children that way. And I would have a foreign policy that recognizes that we are part of the global village. America should be an international healer not a bully.”As the candidates stake out their positions on the issues, it will take more than a well crafted message to carry one of them to the Democratic convention in Boston next year. With Al Gore, the Democrat’s standard-bearer in 2000, out of the running, the race for the nomination is wide open. But Sharpton and Moseley Braun face special challenges. Both are party outsiders. And neither has access to the big money sources that other candidates can tap.
Even though it is early in the campaign, Moseley Braun, a newcomer in the race, must play catch-up. “She has to mature as a candidate. This includes developing a national campaign organization,” says Ronald Walters, professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland.
Donna L. Brazile, a senior Democratic strategist and Gore’s former campaign manager, urged African American leaders to run as favorite sons and daughters in their states to potentially lock up the black vote. She adds that “Moseley Braun will have difficulty competing for a talented and experienced campaign staff that tends to seek out candidates perceived to have a better chance.”
Walters says Braun has the added problem of convincing poll-goers to vote for a woman. He notes that white women did not support black former New York congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in her 1972 bid for the White House.
But Moseley Braun has clear advantages, including such standard credentials as a law degree, a term in the U.S. Senate, and a stint as ambassador to New Zealand. Moseley Braun asserts that her experience is on par with or superior to the other presidential candidates. “I’m running on my qualifications,” she says, “I am the only former diplomat in the race, and as a former state representative and Cook County recorder of deeds, I’m the only one with both state and local government experience.”
Brazile says that Moseley Braun’s service in the Senate, much like a governorship, makes her a member of an exclusive club as it places her in the pipeline for national office. Brazile asked rhetorically, “Who wins a Senate seat and says, ‘That’s as far as I’m going?'” The former senator has experience running and winning a statewide office in Illinois that has a more diverse population and is bigger than any of the states that the other candidates hail from except Florida.
Sharpton is the only candidate
who has never held public office, but Walters contends that his leadership skills are far from lacking. “He has demonstrated courage by leading street rallies in hostile white Brooklyn neighborhoods,” says Walters. “He’s good on the stump; he can excite a crowd and elicit emotional appeal.”Sharpton’s strategy is to connect with the people; he has spent many weeks on the road pushing his agenda. “I’m going to college campuses, to churches, to grassroots communities, to the streets — that’s where the people are,” says Sharpton, whose supporters include hip-hop personas Russell Simmons, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, and Jay-Z.
Both campaigns will have to be tight in an election rife with contenders. The other candidates include: former Gov. Howard Dean (Vt.), Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (Mo.), Sen. Bob Graham (Fla.), Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (Conn.), Al Gore’s running mate in 2000. With their unique styles and political backgrounds, Sharpton and Moseley Braun are waging insurgent campaigns in the struggle over who will lead the Democratic Party in the fight to recapture the White House.
With nearly a year and a half to go before the election, the candidates have a long struggle ahead of them. The first real tests will come when they face primaries with a significant number of black voters, perhaps beginning with South Carolina. But for now, Sharpton and Moseley Braun are jockeying for position in preparation for the fight to come.