“If Sanders is truly going to become a Barack Obama-style Clinton-slayer of 2016, he knows he’s going to need to start racking up Obama-level support among non-white voters, and quickly, because the Democratic primary is about to come down to race,” Politico noted moments after the Vermont Senator’s whopping victory over Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire Tuesday (60.7 to 39.3). And so, according to Politico, “the first campaign stop after his blowout victory in New Hampshire is a breakfast meeting Wednesday with the Rev. Al Sharpton in Harlem’s iconic Sylvia’s restaurant.”
In other words, “our” Bernie may be ready to change American politics on many different fronts — campaign finance reform, the $15 minimum wage, break up the “too big to fail” banks — except in one area: when you need the Black vote, you go to the traditional vote broker.
The fundamental math is all too real: Sanders is a white candidate from a white state who is barely known by non-white voters, and the next two battlefields in these primaries are South Carolina, which is more than 30% Black, and Nevada, which is 27% Hispanic. So it makes perfect sense for him to use the next couple of weeks making deals to get the endorsements of local “ethnic” leaders in both states. God knows Hillary has been doing nothing but that, and very successfully, too. On the night she was killed in New Hampshire she was already in South Carolina, receiving the endorsement of six Black state legislators.
The problem is not with the math, it’s with the choice of Al Sharpton, and the choice of Sylvia’s Restaurant, where the wily Crown Heights pogrom leader had met with Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in 2008.
To be fair, the Sanders campaign has been soliciting other African-American leaders with real records — the Daily Beast counted Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner, former NAACP president Ben Jealous and rapper Killer Mike. Sanders desperately needs more, much more Black support, especially in light of the fact that the average African-American today associates Bernie with his angry encounter last summer with Black Lives Matter in Seattle. They crashed his rally and invaded his podium, he gave up and walked off. It takes a lot of work to come back from that one — work Sanders hasn’t been able to do seriously while courting the white folks in Iowa and New Hampshire.
But his breakfast with Al on Wednesday is a signal that Sanders may be too busy to seek out serious, productive African-American supporters, with jobs and track records, and prefers instead to hire a clown to pick up those Black votes for him.
Few people in recent history have done more damage to the Black community than Al Sharpton (and Jesse Jackson, but he no longer matters). Remember Tawana Brawley?
In 1987, this 15-year-old African-American girl was found smeared with feces, lying in a garbage bag, her clothing torn and burned and curse words written in charcoal on her body, in Wappinger, NY. She claimed she had been assaulted and raped by six white men, including cops. Black attorneys Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, together with Rev. Sharpton, turned Tawana Brawley into their cause célèbre, even after a grand jury, following seven months of deliberations, found “overwhelming evidence” that Brawley had fabricated the whole thing. Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason then had the audacity to accuse Dutchess County prosecutor Steven Pagones of racism and of participating in the rape. He sued them for defamation and won $345,000 in damages, with the jury focusing on Sharpton’s liability for seven defamatory statements against Pagones. Sharpton refused to pay his share of the damages, which was picked up by attorney Johnnie Cochran (who later defended OJ Simpson).
In 2007, Sharpton said he would have handled the Brawley case the same way today. Which means that a career in Black Victimhood Management is still a thriving prospect for enterprising young African-Americans, and Al Sharpton, now with his own MSNBC and radio shows, is their role model.
Then there was the Crown Heights pogrom of the summer of 1991. On August 19 that year, after a car driven by an Israeli Lubavitcher was struck by another car in an intersection and hit and killed a seven-year-old Guyanese boy, severely injuring his cousin, Caribbean and African-American residents rioted for four days over rumors that the Hatzolah ambulance that came to pick up the Jewish driver refused to treat the Black casualties. Black youths looted Jewish stores, threw rocks and bottles at Jews and beat up Jews in the street. Eventually, an Australian Lubavitcher yeshiva student named Yankel Rosenbaum was murdered by a Black mob that chanted “Kill the Jew.” The pogrom can be at least partially attributed to Sharpton’s fanning the flames of anti-Semitic hatred. Then, after the Rosenbaum murder, Sharpton marched through Crown Heights and in front of the 770 Lubavitch headquarters leading 400 protesters who were chanting the infamous “No justice, no peace!”
It’s obvious that right-wing Jews won’t change their already negative view of Bernie Sanders because he picks Al Sharpton to be his link to the Black voters (the much more respectable and trustworthy NJ Senator Cory Booker has already pledged for Hillary, and so many respectable Black politicians harbor a deep friendship for Bill Clinton, the “first Black president.”). But his breakfast at Sylvia’s may cost Bernie the votes of self-respecting Liberal Jews.