Black voters can have a key role

e-mail this story discuss this issue in our forums Leroy Chapman • Black voters can have a key role (01/20/04) • Neither pimp not player nor hustler (10/28/03) • There's poor and then there is poverty (10/14/03) • 40 years later, racism not menace it used to be (08/27/03) • Good luck defending free trade (08/21/03)

But this state's black voters can't afford to stand on ideology when they go to the polls Feb. 3 in a pivotal Democratic primary.

Nor is this the time to romanticize the doomed candidacy of the lone African American left in the race, the Rev. Al Sharpton.

A vote for Sharpton — the weakest, least-qualified and most-unelectable of the would-be challengers to President Bush — accomplishes nothing. Not when black voters have a historic opportunity to help decide who will stand as the most credible opponent to George W. Bush.

By some estimates, African Americans may comprise 50 percent of primary voters.

Whomever black voters choose in large number will be able to claim credibility in the South, a region important to winning the general election. But more useful to the winner is the "bounce" it would give his candidacy leading up to the Michigan primary and heading into Super Tuesday.

South Carolinians remember how George W. Bush's primary win here catapulted him to front-runner status for good.

With such stakes, African Americans mustn't cast a throwaway vote on Sharpton.

Personally, I hope to live to see the day when the candidate with the most buzz, the largest treasure chest and the best prospects of winning the presidency is an African American. But this isn't that election, and it's clear Sharpton most certainly is not that candidate.

Not that Sharpton isn't a champion of some worthy social causes — he is. And watch the upcoming debate here in Greenville, for it will be obvious the Rev. Sharpton is having a great time zinging his opponents.

But it's obvious, too, that Sharpton's candidacy is about, well ... mainly the Rev. Sharpton.

He is setting himself up to be the spoiler.

Sharpton wants badly to do well in South Carolina — well enough that the eventual nominee will have to listen to him as a power broker who can claim, legitimately, that he can deliver the strong black turnout needed to win a general election.

To do this, he's spent his comparatively scant resources to court black voters in this state to the exclusion of other state's primaries. A strong showing here positions him to become an ignore-at-your-own-peril influence peddler.

It's a role the Rev. Jesse Jackson assumed after his historic runs for the presidency in '84 and '88.

But similarities between these two end with the candidates' race and occupation.

Jackson, like Sharpton, was climbing uphill against history. But unlike the Rev. Al, Jackson ran a campaign fueled by a broad-based coalition of struggling Iowa farmers, embattled Rust Belt unions and Southern blacks and whites bound by common economic struggle. Sharpton blew off Iowa.

And while Jackson didn't win the Iowa caucuses, he had a strong, historic showing that won him credibility in a state with few black voters.

Sharpton, on the other hand, is almost exclusively campaigning within the black community to get the black vote. He's not running for the presidency so much as he's running to be elected the recognized spokesman for 30 million African Americans. It's a dubious role based on the myth that black voters are a monolith. In truth, we sit across the political and economic spectrum with widely diverse interests, concerns and opinions.

And for the first time in my memory, black voters — not elected and unelected black leaders — sit in a position of real influence.

The results from Iowa — where Howard Dean disappointed, Sens. John Edwards and John Kerry surprised, and Rep. Dick Gephardt called it quits — foreshadow a horse race here in South Carolina that will be difficult to call. Black voters may well be the kingmakers.

And if some are moved to vote for the Rev. Sharpton, they should. That is, if all they want to do is make a point.

E-mail Associate Editorial Page Editor Leroy Chapman Jr. at lchapman@greenvillenews.com