WHEN the Rev. Al Sharpton launched his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, no one thought he could actually win. But there were those who expected him to reconstitute the posse the Rev. Jesse Jackson left behind after his 1988 bid for the nomination, and use it to gain influence in the party.
In '88, Jackson turned in a spectacular performance, winning nearly 7 million votes and 30 percent of the delegates to the Democratic Party's convention. With stats like those, he was able to leverage himself into a position of power within the party and give African Americans an unprecedented voice in the organization, setting the stage for black voters' role as the kingfish of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign.
Sharpton may well have thought he could replicate those results to become the new leader of black America. After all, he reigns over a nonprofit organization -- the National Action Network -- with 22 chapters across the country that could serve as bases for organizing. He has a record as a formidable strategist from his work in New York politics, and he made substantive inroads into the Hispanic community when he involved himself in the fight against the U.S. Navy's practice bombing on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.
But a Jacksonesque showing has eluded Sharpton. When he arrives at the Democratic National Convention this summer, it is not likely to be as any newly crowned prince of blackness, but merely as a highly entertaining pol who barely made it to the finish line. What's more, his campaign may become the definitive historical marker for the end of "black politics."
Sharpton's poor showing reflects the evolution of a new kind of black electorate. This is a constituency that no longer views itself as separate from the broader political dynamics of the country, constantly needing to play the victim in order to gain entrance. These new, savvy voters are more discerning of candidates, and they are more deliberately assessing the role they can and should play in the democratic drama. In the Democratic Party, they see themselves as principal players, crucial to any candidate's victory.
Sharpton has made no inroads in this primary season. He lost South Carolina, a state with a large black population. He lost the District of Columbia, which is majority African American. So far, he has won only 16 delegates. He is nearly $500,000 in debt.
Some have suggested that this dismal performance is attributable to the fact that Sharpton isn't that well-known, and that what people do know about him -- his involvement in the Tawana Brawley false rape case, his exacerbation of racial conflicts in New York -- makes many uncomfortable. But if voters were still playing leverage politics, his race would be all that mattered.
Others say that Sharpton's tanking is due to the Democrats' urgent desire to unseat President Bush, which has everyone focusing on electability and on not squandering votes on a candidate who can't win. But when Jackson ran in 1988, African Americans and most Democrats were fixated on preventing the election of the first George Bush, who had been part of an administration that had eviscerated programs critical to poor and working-class urban Americans. Still, Jackson garnered more than 1,200 delegates.
The greater impact on Sharpton is the political change sweeping through black America. This change has been well documented by national think tanks, such as the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which in 2002 reported a significant number of African Americans leaving the Democratic Party and identifying themselves as independents or Republicans. It also found very little difference in the priority issues of blacks and whites.
It used to be that African Americans staked their claim to power on group unity. They voted in lock step for one of their own, ignoring an individual's history and arguing the proverbial "devil-you-know-is-better-than-the devil-you don't-know" point of view. It didn't matter if a candidate had no experience solving seemingly intractable socioeconomic problems. They reasoned that a black person could understand their pain better than any white. That was the strategy that helped get thousands of African Americans elected to office over the past 30 years.
But that era of indiscriminate black politics is over. "We're at a different point in the life cycle of black empowerment and black politics," says Democratic pollster Ron Lester. "The fact that you're black is less important today than it was 10 or 15 years ago."
The emergence of a crossover, hip-hop generation less obsessed with race and more concerned about economic advancement, the expansion of the black middle class, the election of young centrist leaders to replace old-guard civil rights stalwarts, the gains of the past 20 years, particularly during the two terms of President Clinton -- all these elements have converged to create a less friendly climate for politicians like Sharpton who traffic primarily in race.
The African Americans I talk to in my work as a journalist don't want to be marginalized. They believe that subscribing to racial politics in the 21st century does that. They want to be full participants in the game. Where once their world revolved around the many faces of discrimination, these days they are focused on the same issues as other Americans -- the economy, education, health, public safety and housing. Failing to understand this may be why Sharpton has bombed in places such as South Carolina.
With a population that's nearly 50 percent African American, South Carolina would seem like a perfect setting for black leverage politics. Instead, itproved this year to be a stunning example of its decline. Consider Rep. James E. Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and former head of the Congressional Black Caucus: When his candidate, Rep. Richard Gephardt, dropped out after Iowa,Clyburn looked around for someone else to endorse. But instead of giving the nod to Sharpton, he gave it to Sen. John F. Kerry.
In another time, that wouldn't have happened; Clyburn would have had to answer to the black community for what it surely would have perceived as dissing a black leader. Even now, University of Maryland political science professor Ron Walters, a political soul mate of Sharpton's who does not agree that black politics are finished, expresses this point of view. He accuses black politicians like Clyburn and New York Rep. Charles Rangel of playing "backyard politics" by refusing to support the African American candidate and choosing instead someone close to their home base. Rangel, who represents a congressional istrict that includes Harlem, has endorsed Kerry -- not his Harlem neighbor Sharpton. But neither Rangel nor Clyburn has caught any heat for his choice.
That's because voters also are playing the game differently.
Sharpton invested a considerable amount of time and resources in South Carolina.He preached in black churches, visited colleges and schools, and held rallies. In the end, he placed third -- after Edwards and Kerry. Even more tellingly, white candidates in that race won a combined total of 81 percent of the African American vote. Sharpton picked up a paltry 17 percent.
Joe Louis Ruffin, a Sharpton campaign coordinator, asserts that the right reverend's problem is that "African Americans have not been turning out the way they used to." This might be an acceptable explanation, except that blacks came out in record numbers in 2000, and in 1988, Jackson registered 2 million new voters. The job of the candidate is to identify and stimulate his base. That Sharpton hasn't been able to perform even this simple task would seem to indicate that the shrinking group that might be inclined toward his brand of protest politics remains uninspired.
Eric Easter, a political consultant who worked in Jackson's 1984 and 1988 campaigns, agrees that things were different then. "A black candidate doesn't have the same novelty and excitement" he once did, Easter says. "You have to work a whole lot harder. You can't just say, 'Vote for me because I'm the black candidate.' "
That philosophy has certainly seeped into the consciousness of many in black America. It has been evinced in various political contests in places such as Baltimore and Cleveland, where white candidates in majority-black cities beat out entrenched black politicians and activists. In the 1999 Democratic mayoral primary in Baltimore, Martin O'Malley trounced his two chief opponents, both black, winning more than 53 percent of the vote. He improved on that feat in the 2003 primary, pulling in 66 percent of the vote against his black opponent.
African American candidates who may have dismissed evidence of the shift among voters can look at Sharpton's campaign as a clear and indisputable line in the sand. In the future, they will have to do more than tout their civil rights records and blast the establishment with stinging rhetoric. Flaunting black skin and displaying wit or possessing celebrity will not be sufficient. If they want the black vote, they will have to do what other serious candidates do: offer a solid and effective political and public policy platform. Then they will have to sell it to voters not as piecemeal disenfranchisement jargon but as a viable program that can yield tangible results.
Sharpton's limping campaign proves most decisively that blacks are no longer happy with protest politics or simply having a seat at the table. The days of being a slave to race are behind them. On the horizon is nothing but shrewd,sophisticated politics.
And that's a good thing.
