NEW YORK -- His enemies, and they are legion, say it is just another ego trip that has the potential to fan the smoldering embers of racial discontent. To more black Americans than may publicly admit it, he represents a chance to send the power elite a stinging rebuke. Republican politicos salivate at the mischief he might sow in the Democratic primaries. And Democratic operatives -- at least those who know what to make of him -- understand that the GOP has reason to gloat.

There is -- for mainstream political America -- no comfort in the Reverend Al Sharpton's quixotic quest for the White House. There isn't even comfort in the fact that he doesn't stand a chance

to win, because along the way he may well stir the political pot as it hasn't been stirred in years.

Sharpton is waging a double-edged campaign. Through his presidential campaign, he hopes to bring together blacks, the economically disfranchised, and those on the left of the political spectrum. At the same time, he hopes to nudge himself closer to claiming the mantle of black leadership to which Malcolm X aspired and Martin Luther King attained. Currently, that mantle rests -- more tentatively now than in previous years -- on the shoulders of Jesse Jackson. But ultimately, Sharpton's quest is not about Malcolm or Martin or Jesse. It is all about Al.

Nothing about Sharpton's grand plan is evident at the corner of 125th Street and Madison Avenue, the site of his offices in Harlem. Customers line up in droves outside a corner fried-fish joint at lunch time. Street vendors sell incense to the strains of James Brown. Next door to a Caribbean roti place lies a dilapidated brownstone that houses the Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network.

It is here that Sharpton, a 47-year-old preacher who elicits controversy and exudes charisma in equal parts, is planning his bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. He ventured to New Hampshire two weeks ago, where he visited Dartmouth College and met local community activists. He was in Des Moines, Iowa, last Tuesday. And he has assembled an exploratory committee chaired by Cornel West and Charles Ogletree, both professors at Harvard.

Sharpton is planning to do on the national level what he has already done in New York. Three times, Sharpton parlayed New York electoral runs into power and influence in the state. His candidacies eviscerated the senatorial hopes of former attorney general Robert Abrams in 1992 and the mayoral hopes of Mark Green in 2001. (His endorsement of Alfonse D'Amato also cost Green his Senate run in 1986.) In 1994, Sharpton took 25 percent of the vote against Daniel Patrick Moynihan for the US Senate nomination, and his 1997 mayoral run damaged fellow challenger Manhattan Borough president Ruth Messinger so badly that by the time she ran against Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1997, she got trounced. "What he does in each of his runs is he positions himself as a guy who, unless you give him what he needs in prestige and standing, he'll take you down in the general election," says Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank linked to the Democratic Leadership Council.

Given this history, Sharpton threatens to give something that most of the purported crop of 2004 Democratic presidential hopefuls -- North Carolina senator John Edwards, Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, Massachusetts senator John Kerry, Vermont governor Howard Dean, Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman -- have never had to face: a spirited challenge from one of the most skillful and divisive political figures in modern American politics.

Both House minority leader Richard Gephardt and Al Gore remember all too well losing in 1988 to Jesse Jackson -- the last major African-American contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, and the man Sharpton calls "my father" and "my mentor." And while the point is frequently made that a new generation of African-American business and political leaders has arisen to replace the personality-driven model of black leadership forged by Martin Luther King Jr. and sustained by Jackson, it lingers on just enough to help Sharpton's candidacy, as long as he can achieve greater visibility. Besides, like prior "message" or "movement" candidates who used their candidacies to promote ideas -- the activist Jackson; socialists Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas who made eight tries at the presidency between 1900 and 1948; and even, on the right, Patrick Buchanan, who ran in 1992, 1996, and 2000 -- Sharpton must do well enough to sustain media interest in his campaign. (He has already been featured in a major piece in the February 18 issue of the New Yorker, which noted "the races he has taken on . . . have all been manifestly unwinnable. . . . Running is, for him, an absurd decision, and given the scope of his ambition, an irresistible one.") Sharpton has a credible plan: he has his eye on big states with large black populations, such as New York, Illinois, and those in the Deep South. Before he can get there, however, he needs to keep the press interested as he struggles through lily-white contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

To both attract media attention and garner votes beyond his base, Sharpton is packaging his campaign as a vigorous call from the left -- in a world where even the soporific Ralph Nader won almost three million votes in 2000. At least Sharpton keeps you awake. "The Democratic Party has floated way away from its roots," he says. "It is in many ways no longer the party of Roosevelt and Johnson and Adam Clayton Powell, a party that believes that government ought to be there to protect people. We began mimicking the Republican Party's endeavors toward big business, toward trying to be right-of-center, and I think there needs to be a challenge to bring the party back to its roots."

Of those names currently floated as potential Democratic candidates, Sharpton says he sees little hope. "If you have a Daschle, a Gephardt, John Edwards, John Kerry race -- they're all picking from many of the same ideological and political demographics," he says. They will appeal to the center and to the center-right of the party.

Wearing his political-analyst hat, Sharpton ticks off some of his competitors weaknesses. On Edwards, a former plaintiff's attorney: "Before he went to the Senate, what did he do? Get rich?" On Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran: "Kerry's an admirable guy, but I don't exactly think Kerry will electrify Bed-Stuy." On Lieberman, a founder of the Democratic Leadership Council: "He's pro-business and anti-affirmative action. I don't even think he's center. I think he's right-of-center."

All this means trouble for Democrats looking to rally the troops against a popular President George Bush in 2004. (Although his approval ratings have been dipping, they remain in the political stratosphere -- hovering in the 70s five months after September 11.) Poised to better Jackson's presidential campaigns of the mid and late 1980s, Sharpton believes he faces, at worst, the prospect of coming out in a position to play kingmaker -- a role he relishes. At best he could emerge as the country's top African-American leader and spokesperson within the Democratic Party.

The co-chair of his exploratory committee, Harvard's Ogletree, contends that Sharpton has a chance. "If you think about people who have come from relative obscurity and the fact that people have had long careers in politics that are unsuccessful, there is no formula," says Ogletree. "Politics are pretty quixotic, and this is one of the times people ought to pay attention. This is not a flash-in-the-pan campaign."

Ogletree, who describes himself as "very close to both" Jackson and Sharpton, dismisses the notion that Sharpton's run has anything to do with supplanting Jackson's leadership: "I don't see it as an either/or. I see it as a both/and. They may bump heads at times. But it doesn't prevent them from taking on the problems of the community."

For his part, Sharpton is undaunted by the fact that some have compared his chances unfavorably to Jackson's runs in 1984 and 1988. "Everybody keeps comparing me to Jackson, and that may be a fair comparison," he says. "But there aren't a lot of Gary Harts and Walter Mondales I'm looking at running against either."

Clarence Page, a nationally syndicated columnist based at the Chicago Tribune, sums up Sharpton's campaign as follows. "He hasn't got a prayer of winning, but it's interesting theater," says Page. "It keeps the Democratic establishment on its toes. He does wield enough clout that he can't be ignored."

KEEPING THE DEMOCRATIC establishment on its toes, so to speak, will be a major purpose of Sharpton's run. You have to go back at least 10 years to find a presidential candidate running for the Democratic Party nomination from the left. In 1992, Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, tormented Bill Clinton. More relevant -- and encouraging -- to Sharpton are the strong campaigns run by Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988: in '88, Jackson came in first or second in 31 of 36 state primaries and garnered seven million votes. But Sharpton contends that the absence of a "true progressive" in the last three election cycles has allowed the Democratic Party to be dominated by the centrist DLC, which he dubs "the Democratic Leisure Class." Even more worrisome, he says, is the insidious effect that the absence of an exciting African-American candidate has had on black political advancement over the past decade.

Sharpton likes to emphasize the point that, even though Jackson didn't win either the '84 or '88 election, those races nonetheless marked serious achievements for African-Americans in a number of ways. First, Jackson's candidacy resulted in the registration of two million new black voters. The increase in black voters helped propel a new class of African-American officials into elected office -- Douglas Wilder became the governor of Virginia, and Carol Mosely-Braun was elected a senator from Illinois. Wilder has since left office, and Peter Fitzgerald defeated Mosely-Braun in 1998. "What has happened since [Jackson] stopped running?" asks Sharpton. "All of that is gone. There are no black governors. No black US senators."

He further argues that since the last presidential election's Florida debacle, where the US Supreme Court permitted state election officials to cease counting ballots, the Democratic Party needs his candidacy more than ever. "After the 2000 election, you're going to have a hard job convincing a lot of young urban voters to come out and vote," says Sharpton. "The party that fears my run may find out that they need me to run more than they think to talk to the disaffected who're even more disaffected after the debacle of 2000."

Sharpton gives one final reason to justify his run. He contends that only his candidacy can generate among African-Americans enough excitement for the Democratic Party to counteract George W. Bush's small but potentially significant appeal among blacks. Bush garnered only five percent of the black vote in 2000, but with daily televised doses of Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, that number can only grow. "What is the black counterstrategy in the Democratic party?" Sharpton asks. "What are the Democrats going to show to counterbalance the black presence that Bush has shown? If he goes up to 12 to 15 percent of the black vote, there's no way he can lose."

All that is well and good. But Sharpton may have other reasons for running, and for doing so now. Depending on how he does, Sharpton might accrue enough power to force other presidential candidates to follow the lead of statewide candidates in New York races and kowtow to him. When leading a tour of the 500-seat auditorium in his headquarters, Sharpton motions to the aluminum chairs and wood paneling and says, "We've had everybody here from Hillary Clinton to Michael Bloomberg to Winnie Mandela." After a strong primary run, Sharpton might want to pressure Edwards or Kerry to show up here as well -- a potentially damaging moment for the Democrats in a national race.

At first blush, the notion that Sharpton could even match Jackson's performance in the 1980s primaries seems ridiculous. First, Sharpton lacks Jackson's authority -- more important at that time -- as the heir to King's legacy and a witness to his murder. Second, the Democratic Party has changed. Bill Clinton's unique brand of pragmatic politics has completely infused the Democratic Party apparatus. The only two-term Democratic president since Roosevelt, Clinton mastered the art of triangulation -- running successfully against the extremes of right and left, while robbing both of key issues. Sharpton argues, like many others, that what was good for Clinton is not good for the Democratic Party or the country as a whole. That said, he contends that it might be good for his presidential hopes.

Sharpton's plan is to distinguish himself from the other Democratic candidates, who are pro-business centrists, and who can't play to African-Americans. "All of the above do not come with a strong urban base. All of the above do not have a Southern-minority base," says Sharpton. "If I put together a coalition of center and center-to-left voters and a strong black and Latino turnout in a four-five man race, you could look at major upsets in many primaries."

While Sharpton isn't certain of the numbers -- he has his exploratory committee crunching them right now -- he's aware of the same general facts available to most political observers. The black vote is becoming increasingly important to Democrats. As the South, in particular, has swung Republican, blacks now make up a significant portion of the Democratic primary electorate. As Sharpton says, black voters already know him, while white voters are barely aware of most of the other Democratic hopefuls. "I don't think a lot of people have thought about this -- that Kerry, Edwards, and the rest are all going to have to try and become well-known to a base vote," he says. "I'm already well-known to my base vote. John Edwards will spend the next two years getting people outside of North Carolina to even know who he is."

But won't fundraising heavyweights, such as Kerry and Edwards, be able to overwhelm Sharpton in the primaries? No, says Sharpton. So long as he can qualify on the ballot as a Democrat in 20 states, he could be entitled to up to $16.75 million in federal matching funds. With this money -- more than he ever had in his New York Senate or mayoral runs -- Sharpton can leverage his quotability and talent for attracting media attention to match his opponents' paid advertising. If Sharpton qualifies for matching funds, he can make a claim to participate in the Democratic debates -- and who knows where he can go from there. "Giving me matching-funds money is like giving me Michael Bloomberg kind of money," he says, referring to the billionaire who spent $70 million of his own money to become mayor of New York City. "I've always had to do what I've had to do with shoestrings. Imagine if I had shoes."

Commentators say Sharpton will also be aided by black radio and the Black Entertainment Television network, which were not as developed when Jackson ran in 1992. He also boasts 22 chapters of his National Action Network outside of New York -- including three in John Edwards's home state of North Carolina -- that can boost his electoral efforts.

David Bositis, a senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, says his polling numbers indicate Sharpton will have a tougher time than Jackson had in '84 or '84. In a 2000 survey, Sharpton had a 37 percent favorability rating among blacks. His unfavorability rating was 29. Among the largely white general population, those numbers were 10 percent favorable to 41 percent unfavorable. Jackson, by comparison, enjoyed an 83 percent favorability rating among blacks with just nine percent unfavorable -- among the general population 47 percent favorable and 38 percent unfavorable. Of the Black Belt in the Deep South -- Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina -- where Sharpton hopes to do well, African-Americans make up between 35 and 50 percent of the Democratic primary vote, depending on turnout. "Sharpton might have one break-out," says Bositis, adding, "but it's probably going to be too little too late."

Despite these poll numbers, Sharpton is determined to attract left-leaning white Democrats, Latinos, and even members of the white working class. While it is now often forgotten, Jackson succeeded in cobbling together a populist coalition in 1988. Sharpton hopes to do Jackson one better by taking up populist issues such as Enron and campaign-finance reform. (The New York Post's February 14 Page Six reported on a meeting between Sharpton and Democratic political consultant Henry Sheinkopf, the main subject of which was Enron.)

"You have the chickens coming home to roost in terms of the deregulation of big business, Enron being a prime example," says Sharpton, who helped procure attorney Johnnie Cochran to represent a group of former Enron workers. "Deregulation is what led to this, and the fact that Enron and major companies are allowed to throw money around and influence, or at least have access to, people in government, and I'm going to talk about that fact." Sharpton singles out Vice-President Dick Cheney's secret meetings with Enron officials for special scrutiny. "How do you have a sitting vice-president talk about he's not going to tell us about six meetings?" he asks. "We knew about Bill Clinton's sex life. We can't know about official meetings with a private corporation when you're discussing government appointees?"

His new populist cry strikes a chord with historian and civil-rights activist Howard Zinn. "Given the one-party system that we have now developed, we're in desperate need of alternative voices -- people who will raise issues people in the two major parties won't raise," says Zinn. He warns, however, of the personal motives behind Sharpton's candidacy. "As for Sharpton himself as a person, I don't know. I've always been a little skeptical about individuals who have a very high profile, who put themselves forward very dramatically."

Sharpton's plans for primary success may be undermined by the fact that several states have decided to move up or front-load their election contests. This means more elections will take place earlier and be more clustered together -- something Jackson never had to face. "Al Sharpton has to ask himself, `Can I win Iowa or New Hampshire?' Because if he can't, he has no chance of winning the nomination," says Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist. "You don't have a six-month election cycle to catch fire. Candidates like a Sharpton or a Jackson aren't going to be helped by a shortened presidential primary cycle. A movement requires time to make its case."

SHARPTON HAS spent some 10 years preparing for his new role. He has helped lead protests against America's training runs on the Puerto Rican isle of Vieques ("an environmental issue and certainly not an African-American issue"); taken up the cause of Gideon Busch, a mentally troubled Hasidic Jew slain by police; and galvanized New York around the police killing of Amadou Diallou and brutalization of Abner Louima ("the most successful nonviolent civil-rights protest in this country in the last decade"). He has also been almost alone among African-American leaders to speak out about slavery in Sudan -- an issue many in the black community haven't wanted to touch. "I'll run the broadest campaign of everyone because most of my opponents have a very narrow, white-male campaign," says Sharpton. "Broad to them means white, broad to me means everybody."

Everything he says makes a degree of sense. But Sharpton's case for running a broad-based campaign becomes much harder to make in light of certain events in his past. He has gained national notoriety by pushing the envelope and involving himself with some less-than-reputable causes. Soon after Sharpton first burst onto the national scene as a civil-rights leader protesting the killing of Michael Griffiths in Howard Beach, New York, his reputation became blemished by his involvement in the Tawana Brawley case. Brawley claimed she had been raped by a gang of whites north of New York City. A grand jury found it could not bring an indictment based on Brawley's claims, but Sharpton had already made outrageous claims in the case, including the charge that prosecutor Steven Pagones had participated in Brawley's rape. In 1998, Pagones won a $65,000 defamation claim against Sharpton, which the latter says he is appealing. Later, in 1991, Sharpton helped fuel the flames of hate in Crown Heights, New York, following a car accident in which a Hasidic driver killed a Caribbean child. Sharpton urged protesters to converge on Crown Heights. The incident sparked three days of anti-Jewish violence in which an Australian rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, was stabbed. Sharpton also led protests against Freddy's Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned clothing store in Harlem not far from his office, referring to Freddy as a "white interloper." A deranged man later burst into the store and set it aflame, killing himself and seven others. Not exactly a promising résumé for a presidential candidate.

Sharpton has responses to each of these incidents. Regarding Brawley, he stresses that his comments about Pagones came before the Grand Jury ruled -- not after -- adding that he believes he will be vindicated on appeal. Of Crown Heights, he has told reporters that his protests there were nonviolent and peaceful. Of Freddy's, the most serious incident, he again distances himself from the perpetrator. "I called him an interloper. I shouldn't have referred to his race," says Sharpton. "Three months after I made the statement, a guy who was openly very critical of me and didn't believe in nonviolent protest went in there and killed himself and some people in the store." As for whether Sharpton had helped contribute to the "climate of hate" which lead up to the killings, he draws an odd analogy between his predicament to that of the Israeli struggle with the Palestinians. "That means, then, that if we support the state of Israel, then we're responsible if an Israeli soldier go kills a Palestinian," says Sharpton to the suggestion that he may bear some moral culpability for the Freddy's incident -- even if he himself did not light the match. "That's ridiculous. It's ridiculous," he says, stressing his commitment to nonviolent protest, even after he got stabbed during the period of the 1991 Bensonhurst protests.

Sharpton does his best to parse those incidents where his actions have been called into question. He is technically in the right when he makes the point that nobody has been able to find direct links between his "peaceful" actions and the violence that erupted in Crown Heights. But when somebody hopes to run for the highest office in the land, a higher standard is in play. USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham ably made that point in his column last July. "Sharpton wants to be viewed as more than a political gadfly," Wickham wrote, focusing on the Brawley case. "But to be a serious candidate, he has to rid himself of the taint [acting] as . . . Brawley's adviser has brought him." The same could be said of the Crown Heights and Freddy's affairs. Says Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League: "At times he seems to be a serious person. Then he has outbursts and reversions to the street guy. He still has not dealt with Crown Heights, Freddy's, or Brawley adequately."

Former New York mayor Ed Koch, who has worked with Sharpton on the Second Chance Program, agrees that Sharpton needs to come to better terms with his past to be taken seriously, but notes that Sharpton is not necessarily trying to become the next president. "I don't think he expects to win. I think that if he decides he's actually going to run, it is simply to have a venue -- opportunities around the country to speak and become known," says Koch, the first mayor to have Sharpton arrested.

That doesn't mean his dicey history will stop Sharpton from possibly playing a major role in the 2004 primaries. Sharpton himself makes the point that whatever anyone thinks of his past actions, other past and present presidential aspirants have their own personal crosses to bear. When discussing Freddy's and the Brawley case, he compares his situation to that of Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy. "You talk about me and Brawley -- look at what Ted Kennedy had to deal with, and he did very well against an incumbent Democratic president. He's now being lauded by the president of the United States, Mr. Bush," says Sharpton, implying a comparison between his past and, apparently, Kennedy's experience at Chappaquiddick. Sharpton is quick to state that he is not "anti-Kennedy": "I think Kennedy has been one of the holdovers who has stood up for some liberal programs. I'm not trying to kick Kennedy. But I think there is a double standard of how they treat not only me, how they treat others."

Adds the Chicago Tribune's Page: "We still have a role in our society for the gadfly or agitator. I'd put Jackson and Sharpton, where I'd put Ralph Nader. They still have a role in giving voice to the voiceless."

THE QUESTION of how to handle Sharpton's candidacy has not entered the thoughts of most political analysts. But a few have paid attention. Among them, the prevalent view is that Sharpton's candidacy will help centrist Democrats define themselves and make the eventual nominee stronger. If an Edwards or Kerry stands up to Sharpton, it could help the candidate play better in Middle America and the South in a general election. They point to Clinton's Sister Souljah moment in 1992, when the Arkansas governor, standing near Jackson, denounced a controversial female rapper, thus making an implicit bid for white votes. But judging by how Sharpton has been treated in New York -- as a power broker rather than as someone from whom to gain distance -- that may be wishful thinking.

In January, the New York Post reported that Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe had sent a letter to local New York politicians citing a new DNC "anti-bigotry" resolution and upbraided them for trying to discredit mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer because of his relationship with Sharpton. "The resolution reflects our disappointment that the tone and conduct of this year's New York mayoral race did not live up to our party's historic ideals," McAuliffe wrote. "Future divisiveness will threaten the electoral viability of our party and undermine our efforts to the cause of racial justice in society as a whole." McAuliffe's not-so-subtle message for future Democrats looking for a Sister Souljah moment: don't do it. Ultimately, however, that may not be a wise approach for the Democrats if they hope to retake the Oval Office in 2004.

For his part, Sharpton welcomes a tangle with other Democrats. He says that, unlike Jackson in 1992, he's not going to take it. "I'm next generation," he says. "You're not going to hit me like you did my father. His generation said, `We'll take the high road on Sister Souljah.' My generation is, `You hit me, I may not swing back, but I'm not going to help you either.' "

It was that sort of thinking that helped Bloomberg defeat Green in 2001. Conservatives and a prominent local African-American leader believe that such an approach will help Republicans in 2004. Conservative columnist Cal Thomas called a Sharpton candidacy "great news for Republicans" in a January column; George Will called him "the Democratic Party's nightmare." Reverend Gene Rivers of Boston says Sharpton's "candidacy is a Republican political operative's dream." He adds, "In fact, I suspect there are some Republicans who will send generous checks to support his political initiative. It weakens an already diminished Democratic Party by splitting the party further."

It may split the Democrats further, but it also may help Sharpton in his bid to supplant Jackson. "He is on a crusade to replace Jackson as the `premier black leader' in the media's eyes," says Page. "When it comes to rolling into town and rallying people, Sharpton can do it. He has that kind of rock-star appeal that Jackson had in his early days."

One thing is clear. A Sharpton candidacy in 2004 will certainly mean news.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com..

Issue Date: March 1 - 7, 2002