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Akira Ono/AP Photo
Then-Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton speaks at the Human Rights Campaign forum in Washington, July 15, 2003.
Last week, Alex Seitz-Wald of NBC News reported that Dr. Cornel West’s pathetically unserious independent presidential campaign has become more of an empty shell. “His former campaign manager says he knows nothing about ballot access”; the campaign has no money left; and the always-alert California Target Book’s Rob Pyers discovered that West’s expenditures report listed $4,500 for “graphics & design” but only $3,250 for “petitioning services.” Seitz-Wald also reported that, simultaneous with this collapse, Republican partisans are making increasing efforts to get West on the ballot in key states. In North Carolina, “a prominent Republican activist was spotted … outside a Trump rally gathering signatures for West, telling rallygoers it ‘helps take away votes from Joe Biden.’”
The ratf*ck, of course, is a grand old tradition in the modern Republican Party. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) was the first Black person to run for president. In a famous meeting in the office of Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, who was about to take over the incumbent’s re-election campaign, G. Gordon Liddy laid out an elaborate plan of election sabotage named after various minerals. Operation “COAL” was a plan to funnel money to Chisholm’s campaign. That operation, unlike the one about breaking into Democratic offices, never came off. Nor did a separate proposal to take out ads claiming to be raising money for a draft of Jesse Jackson. The plan, chief of staff Bob Haldeman explained to President Nixon, was to barrage Jackson’s office with thousands of “old $1 bills” from around the country. “After his ego is going, then you can’t turn him off,” Haldeman assured him.
The principle, simple and enduring: Front a Black person to divide the Democratic Party, the better to tank its eventual nominee’s chances in the November election.
Neither Chisholm nor Jackson had any idea about this until it came out during the Watergate investigations. Another figure who later came to prominence in American politics, however, was surely paying attention: Roger Stone. In 1972, he played a minor role as young ratf*cker for the Nixon re-election campaign. In 2004, he brought out the old Nixon playbook again—financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of the Rev. Al Sharpton for the Democratic presidential nomination, as the late, legendary investigative journalist Wayne Barrett established beyond a shadow of a doubt that January in The Village Voice.
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The association had first come to public attention two days earlier in The New York Times, where Stone and his associates had no trouble spinning it as a fun lark. He just liked the guy: “Frankly, there has not been a candidate with this much charisma since Ronald Reagan.”
Tucker Carlson, “the conservative co-host of CNN’s ‘Crossfire’ and another unlikely friend of Mr. Sharpton’s,” was quoted in support of the nothing-to-see-here line: The two just shared a “disdain for white liberals.” (The Times’ Michael Slackman then helpfully offered a quote from a Sharpton autobiography to support the point.)
A considerably more undisciplined Sharpton friend queered the sale a bit. “Donald Trump, who has worked with Mr. Stone over the past two decades,” and “recalled introducing the two men years ago,” commented upon Sharpton’s most effective line, that then-Democratic front-runner Howard Dean, as governor of Vermont, never had Blacks or Hispanics in his cabinet: “I saw Roger’s fingerprints all over that,” Trump said.
“I talk to him from time to time on his perspective,” Sharpton said of Stone, defending himself. “Does he have a role in this campaign? Do I consider him an adviser? No.” Reading the Times, you might think it all was perfectly innocent.
Two days later, Barrett cut through the bullsh*t. Stone had provided Sharpton his campaign manager—ironically detailing the fellow off another Stone-run campaign in Bermuda for a “white-led party seeking to unseat the island’s first black government.” This campaign manager worked for Sharpton for no pay or expense reimbursem*nt. Stone associates also paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to Sharpton’s organization the National Action Network; myriad Stone friends, relatives, and business partners made contributions to boost Sharpton over the threshold ($50,000 in amounts of no more than $250 in at least 20 states) for federal matching funds.
The ratf*ck, of course, is a grand old tradition in the modern Republican Party.
Every time I tell someone about this, even political junkies, they can’t quite believe it. But read the report; tell me it is not bulletproof. There are many, many more details. Barrett had nailed the Sharpton-Stone axis dead to rights—and Sharpton could no longer deny the association. He responded to Barrett’s inquiries as “phony liberal paternalism,” said he would “talk to anyone I want,” brought up Bill Clinton’s disgraced adviser Dick Morris from a previous decade, and proclaimed himself “sick of these racist double standards.” And even alleged that “if [Stone] did let me use his credit card to cover NAN expenses, fine.” To hear Sharpton tell it, Stone was just supporting NAN’s work against New York’s draconian Rockefeller drug laws.
Except, Barrett then noted, “The finances of NAN and the Sharpton campaign have so merged in recent months that they have shared everything from contractors to consultants to travel expenses, though Sharpton insists that these questionable maneuvers have been done in compliance with Federal Election Commission regulations.”
Stone even gave Sharpton the idea to claim at an NAACP annual convention that there was “still an ax-handle mentality among some in the Democratic Party,” waving a prop axe handle provided to him by Stone. All present would have recalled how restaurateur Lester Maddox became governor of Georgia in the 1966 election by winning over racist voters after running Blacks off his property with a similarly giant axe handle. Though I do not know where Sharpton got the idea to claim, after Jesse Jackson endorsed Howard Dean, that Dean’s “opposition to affirmative action” proved an “anti-black agenda.” (Dean supported affirmative action.)
Sharpton also refused to attend a DNC event scheduled for after the primaries to pledge support to the eventual nominee, according to Barrett, while threatening protests, “whether that’s inside the hall or out in the parking lot,” unless he was granted a prime-time speaking spot at the convention, which he did get.
Did Sharpton have in mind more spoiling there? If so, he must have changed his mind. I was present at the Democratic convention in Boston. I felt like quite the oddball among journos for far preferring his speech to that of the breakout star, a Senate candidate from Illinois. “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America”: not my bag. If you ask me, Preacher Sharpton’s best line—“If George Bush had selected the court in 1954, Clarence Thomas would have never got to law school!”—got far more applause than any of Barack Obama’s.
Takes a hustler to handle a hustler, I guess. Maybe all Stone ended up getting out of the bargain was a double-cross.
Either way, however, you know what happened next. There’s no way of knowing whether Blacks were demobilized in sufficient numbers by Sharpton’s earlier antics to have any effect on the outcome. But those of a conspiratorial bent can certainly suspect the double-cross came from quite a bit higher in the political firmament. Seasoned consumers of Bush lore will recall that Stone’s first association with that clan goes way back, as senior consultant for George H.W. Bush’s successful presidential campaign in 1988. (He claims it was his partner Lee Atwater who was responsible for the Willie Horton ad, one of the rare dirty tricks he’s been accused of that he doesn’t take responsibility for.) Later, Stone drummed up the mob that helped shut down the recount in Miami-Dade County that sealed the deal for W. against Al Gore in 2000. Barrett points to an irony: “The Stone mob was chanting Sharpton’s slogan ‘No Justice, No Peace’ when the board stopped the count.”
Responsible journalist that I am, I posed some questions to Stone via Facebook, where I used to message cordially with the old horse thief before he was shipped off to prison. I asked who paid for all of this activity, whose idea it was, and whether anyone from the Bush campaign or Republican Party was involved. I’ll report back what he says.
I’ve also reached out to Sharpton, and promise the same dutiful reportage if he gets back to me. It’s shameful that he’s never had to answer for this, at least to my knowledge. He’s certainly been an eloquent and unstinting warrior against the depredations of the Republican Party ever since becoming a host on MSNBC’s PoliticsNation in 2011. Most recently, on his show that runs every weekend, he torched the Black Republican congressman and Trump surrogate Byron Donalds for appearing to suggest Black life was better under Jim Crow, when “more Black families voted conservatively. And then … Lyndon Johnson—you go down that road, and now we are where we are.”
Pressed Sharpton: “How can you even live with yourself?”
I posed questions to Sharpton via the National Action Network, and MSNBC’s communications department. If he cared to elaborate on this misadventure, Sharpton might have more insights to share about how these political thugs do business with Black America than just about anyone. Forthwith my questions: What did you hope to accomplish by working with a notorious right-wing dirty trickster to run for president in 2004? Do you have any specific knowledge of whether Roger Stone was involved with anyone else higher up in the Republican or Bush orbit with this project? Do you think John Kerry lost Black votes because of what you did? Do you ever wonder, say, if Kerry lost enough of them in Ohio, a state with a Black population of over a million, and where he came only 141,601 votes short of winning the state, and with it the presidential election?
If so: How can you even live with yourself?
Extra! Extra! Got Infernally Triangular questions you’d like to see answered in a future column? Send them to infernaltriangle@prospect.org.
