Sharpton adds his own flair to debates

NEW YORK -- It was late in last week's raucous Faneuil Hall debate. A student rose to ask the Rev. Al Sharpton a question. "What's the first thing going through your head the morning you wake up in the White House?" the student said.

Sharpton paused for a moment. Then he deadpanned, "Well, I think the first thing going through my head would be to make sure that Bush has all of his stuff out."

The audience howled, and so did the other candidates. But Sharpton wasn't finished. "And that we changed the locks on the door, so none of his crowd can come back," he added.

Whether he is throwing out another one-liner or hushing hecklers in the audience, Sharpton has been a crowd-pleaser throughout the Democratic presidential debates, so adept at onstage delivery that he performs oral gymnastics over the rest of the contenders. But in recent weeks, the man New Yorkers simply call "Rev" has been more than a gadfly buzzing his challengers. By pressing his opponents on touchy issues ranging from affirmative action to the Confederate flag and the Middle East, Sharpton also has shown himself to be a politician with a strategic dimension.

The morning after he demanded an apology from a stunned-looking Howard Dean for comments the former Vermont governor made about courting Southern voters with Confederate flags on their trucks, Dean publicly apologized for the pain he caused and called Sharpton on his cellphone to express remorse.

Sharpton "wins just by running," said Sanford Rubenstein, a close friend who is also Sharpton's lawyer. "He brings to the table in his own way those issues that would not be as prominently on the table, were it not for the fact that he's in the race."

That this once-polarizing figure working from a small office on Sixth Avenue in New York City is emerging as a somewhat important player in a presidential campaign -- and enjoying relationships with nearly all of the contenders -- is amazing, considering his reputation as a race baiter, according to longtime observers.

Despite having a tiny grass-roots campaign organization and working with a staff of 10 paid employees, Sharpton's charm and frankness have drawn wealthy African-American backers, including Earl Graves Jr., president of Black Enterprise magazine; Cathy Hughes, the radio station guru whose business ranks as the nation's largest black-owned broadcast company; and Percy Sutton, who was Manhattan borough president from 1966 to 1977 and owns Innercity Broadcasting. Sharpton also has dozens of volunteers for his presidential campaign, from New York to Wisconsin, willing to assist him in everything from fund-raising to opposition research.

Sharpton "didn't wake up one morning at age 7 and say, `I am going to run for president,' " said Graves, the son of the magazine's founder. "This is an opportunity for him to bring to the table unique ideas and issues."

But Sharpton's apparent popularity -- which has landed him a guest spot on "Saturday Night Live" next month -- has not boosted his poll numbers or fund-raising, which may reach $200,000 next month, his campaign manager said. Sharpton has not spent significant amounts of time in such key early-voting states as New Hampshire and Iowa. While his staunchest supporters say that he wants to win and that he is motivated by what he sees as an opportunity to speak for voiceless black and Latino voters, political insiders say he also is motivated by an opportunity to transform himself from a street activist reviled by white America to the nation's most prominent black leader -- just as the Rev. Jesse Jackson raised his profile with presidential runs in 1984 and 1988.

"His goal is not to win the presidency. He has no expectation of that," said Edward I. Koch, former New York mayor. "His goal is to become a major national black leader with the same kind of response in the white community . . . as that of Jesse Jackson."

But Koch, who described Sharpton as intelligent, quick-witted, and devoted to civil rights causes, contends Sharpton will never be the crossover leader he craves to be until he confronts his past and repudiates the Tawana Brawley episode. Sharpton first stepped onto the national stage in 1987, when he supported Brawley, a New York teen who accused several white police officers and a prosecutor of a bizarre sexual assault. A grand jury found the episode to be a hoax.

Sharpton, in an interview, said it would be wrong to disavow Brawley: "I will not repudiate anything just to be a crossover or any other figure. I stood for a young lady that I believed in. I happen to think that it is not something you want to do -- speak against your conscience and speak against what you believed in. I have sense to know it would have been politically expedient a long time ago to do that, but then I couldn't be true to myself." A Brooklyn native who became an ordained minister at 10, Sharpton said he is pushing to revive the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He thinks the party has moved too far to the right.

"I've concentrated not only on winning votes but concentrated on trying to set a tone for the campaign," he said. "So now you got Democrats again discussing affirmative action, discussing the Confederate flag. I was the first candidate to come out against the war even before Dean. None of this would happen if we were not in the race, but I don't want this to end with me, whether I win, lose, or draw."

When Dean began touting his longtime support of affirmative action and his endorsement from a Democratic black leader, the Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois, Sharpton told researchers to thoroughly check Dean's past comments on affirmative action. A Sharpton researcher discovered that Dean had given an interview to CNN in 1995 in which he called for changing affirmative action from race-based to class-based, a move that would be harmful to the interest of racial and ethnic minorities. Sharpton issued a blistering news release, accusing Dean of promoting an "antiblack agenda." Sharpton said he is not going to go easy on other rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, either. He noted, for instance, that at another debate he asked Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut whether he would meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Lieberman said he would not.

"I don't think you have the right to go unchallenged, even though I think we should not get so ugly that Bush becomes the winner of the debate," Sharpton said. "I think that's fair game. I am not digging in anybody's yearbook; I am not trying to find out dirt on people."