December 2, 2003
WHAT PROGRESSIVE COALITION?:
Sharpton in the Rainbow's Shadow: nd Al slips and slides as political landscape shifts (-Nehisi Coates, cember 3 - 9, 2003, Village Voice)
[Eric Easter, who worked on both of Jackson's campaigns and is now a senior adviser for Howard Dean] says a broad-spectrum appeal to progressives, from labor to environmentalists, is also harder than when Jackson ran. "Twenty years ago, people were returning checks from Arab Americans who donated to their campaign. Jackson set up an Arab American desk for his campaign," he says. "This time around you have the Green Party; they have a growing sophistication. You have Kucinich as a progressive candidate. Women have a candidate in Carol Moseley Braun. Even Dean is considered a sort of progressive candidate."Tugging at the Rainbow's mantle, Dean has gotten the support of labor leaders and drawn major black supporters like Elijah Cummings, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.
"Those coalitions who Sharpton thought he would tap into are those who are workers or who listen to the Grateful Dead, and they are interested in a Dean candidate," says Mike Paul, former PR man for Jesse Jackson. "Dean was very smart to use the Internet. Ironically, the person who needed the Internet the most was Sharpton. He has less money, less staff, and less sophistication among the people working for him."
And while Sharpton talked of using the hip-hop generation as a source of untapped votes, it's actually Dean who's gotten the mileage out of the Jay-Z set. That's because the majority of hip-hop's audience is not black. "Anybody that's truly in the business of hip-hop understands that there is a decent percentage of blacks and Latinos who are buying rap albums," says Paul. "But the majority of records are being bought by people who live in suburbs."
This was always the problem with the idea of the Emerging Democratic Majority--the interests of the various groups required to cobble together a majority coalition are too divergent. Each one ultimately wants their own agenda enacted and has little interest in that of the other member groups. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 2, 2003 8:38 PM
Any article that pretends to take Sharpton's campaign seriously is lying from the get-go.
Posted by: David Cohen at December 2, 2003 8:56 PM"Each one ultimately wants their own agenda enacted and has little interest in that of the other member groups."
Except in the face of the enemy,then there is a distressing habit of unifying till victory is won,then they fight over the spoils.
The real intent of this column is to show that Sharpton can be dismissed by the other 8 if they had the guts to do it. Jesse back in '84 and '88 was more of a force (or a broker) - Sharpton can be read out of the party, if necessary. Although, given his strength in NY, it won't happen (unless a certain Senator decides to do it).
Posted by: jim hamlen at December 2, 2003 10:35 PMThe other flaw in the Grand Unified Theory of the Emerging Democratic Majority is that it is fundamentally racist: it assumes people of a certain skin color or ethnicity will vote for liberal Democrats automatically because of their skin color or ethnicity.
Posted by: Mike Morley at December 3, 2003 6:34 AMIt is not racist. It's just that ethnic groups often have similar interests and can be treated as such, just like when people talk of "farmers" or "big business" as a voting bloc. This is especially true in urban areas. The same concept applied equally to Republican attempts at a "Christian Coalition."
All political parties are attempts at coalition building and bringing together disparate factions. It's not racist or cynical to do that. Both FDR and Reagan did that.
The problem with the Democrats is that there is no strong voting core anymore. The New Deal coalition had a core - working and middle class voters who were represented by the notorious "machines" who made sure crime was low, streets were clean, and the garbage picked up. The New Deal basically served them first.
The various interest groups were aligned to that core on specially crafted policies that advanced those little interests in ways that did not offend the party's base. Thus little by little civil rights were advanced to reward the northern liberals.
The problem was that after 1968 the party became hijacked by the activist groups who decided they could take the voting base (even if it was not the activist base) for granted, and that voting base slowly left until we see the wounded Democratic party we have today.
Posted by: at December 3, 2003 11:08 AMSo why are black people the "black" voting block, and people with Spanish surnames the "Hispanic" voting block? Aren't the black and Hispanic people who own farms part of the "farmers" voting block, while the ones who live in the suburbs and have minivans are part of the "soccer mom" block? (Bet those black soccer moms have more in common with my (Scotch-English ancestry) wife than they do with Louisiana sharecroppers of the same pigmentation.) Why do the Democrats disaggregate some flavors of people from other categories that they can legitimately be included in, but not others?
Posted by: Mike Morley at December 3, 2003 5:57 PM