Obama Not Divisive Enough Yet? Now Al Sharpton Is His 'New Partner'

Wonderful. Let's take perhaps the most racially divisive figure of the last 25 years and elevate him to a prominent level at the White House. That should go over well. Of course you're all raaaaacist if you dare criticize this.

That whole post-racial era is really working out, huh?

Mr. Sharpton has been to the White House five times since Mr. Obama took office, most recently this month as part of a small group meeting with economics advisor Lawrence Summers. Mr. Sharpton's radio program, which airs in 27 markets, has become a friendly platform for administration officials to address black listeners, allowing Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, for example, to take credit for a recent $1.25 billion settlement with black farmers who had sued the government for discrimination.

Now there are signs that Mr. Sharpton will play a role in this fall's midterm elections. Democratic National Committee Chairman Timothy Kaine conferred with Mr. Sharpton this month on sending him to black churches and neighborhoods in politically important states to register and mobilize black voters.

For the president, the alliance with Mr. Sharpton carries risk. Where Mr. Obama has worked hard to mute race as part of his persona, Mr. Sharpton is famous for inflaming racial sensitivities, as when he represented Tawana Brawley, the black teenager whose 1987 claims of rape by several white men were discredited.

Former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, America's first elected black governor, said that Mr. Obama "went to great lengths to show that he is the president for all people, not just some people." Outreach to Mr. Sharpton, while shoring up black support, could hurt that image, he said.

"Sharpton brings a profile, whatever you think of it," said Mr. Wilder. "When he first got known was with the Tawana Brawley incident. A lot of people still remember it, and many of those old enough to remember it still haven't gotten over it."

Especially the people he ruined with his hoax. To this day Sharpton has never apologized to Steven Pagones, the man he accused of raping Brawley.

And that barely scratches the surface.

Pagones won a court judgment against Sharpton for $345,000, which Sharpton never paid. Moreover, during the decade prior to Pagones' long-awaited vindication in court, the former prosecutor had suffered constant stress and anxiety (exacerbated by numerous death threats from Sharpton's credulous followers) that contributed heavily to the devastating dissolution of Pagones' marriage and the virtual ruin of his life. Sharpton has never acknowledged or apologized for what he did to Pagones.
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That same year, anti-Semitic riots in Brooklyn's Crown Heights section erupted after 7-year old Gavin Cato, a black child, was accidentally killed by an out-of-control car driven by a Hasidic Jew. Within three hours, a black mob had hunted down and killed an innocent rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum. Sharpton fanned the flames of racial hatred by publicly announcing that it was not merely a car accident that had killed Gavin Cato, but rather "the social accident of apartheid." He organized angry demonstrations and challenged local Jews -- who he derisively called "diamond merchants" -- to "pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house" to settle the score. Finally he claimed, without proof, that the Jewish driver had run over the Cato children while in a drunken stupor. Stirred in part by such rhetoric, hundreds of Crown Heights blacks took violently to the streets for three days and nights of rioting. Sharpton reacted to chaos by stating, "We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system."
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Also in 1995, Sharpton led his National Action Network in an ugly boycott against Freddy's Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem, New York. The boycott started when Freddy's owners announced that because they wanted to expand their own business, they would no longer sublet part of their store to a black-owned record shop. The street leader of the boycott, Morris Powell, was the head of Sharpton's "Buy Black" Committee. Repeatedly referring to the Jewish proprietors of Freddy's as "crackers," Powell and his fellow protesters menacingly told passersby, "Keep [going] right on past Freddy's, he's one of the greedy Jew bastards killing our [black] people. Don't give the Jew a dime." Some picketers openly threatened violence against whites and Jews -- all under the watchful, approving eye of Sharpton. The subsequent picketing became increasingly menacing in its tone until one of the protesters eventually shot four whites in the store and then set the building on fire -- killing seven employees, most of whom were Hispanics.

Now he's essentially a White House advisor. How special.