A new Al Sharpton takes the spotlight

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —  It was a rare sight, as anyone who has followed the Rev. Al Sharpton would understand: On Sunday, after preaching at St. Paul’s AME Church here, “the Rev” reached into his own pinstriped pocket, pulled out a wad of bills and dropped a hundred bucks into the offering basket.

“You know what that means, ‘cause I ain’t got no money,” said Sharpton, who is usually the one on the receiving end of the love offering. The church’s pastor, the Rev. LeRoy Attles, had supported him in the beginning of his presidential campaign, said Sharpton. Now he wanted to return the favor.

No question about it, say the people who see a leader where others have seen a reckless demagogue: Sharpton has changed, even over the short course of the presidential primary campaign.

Though he failed to win a single contest, Sharpton was always a crowd favorite on the campaign trail, bringing spontaneity and humor to often-stilted debates. In nearly every campaign speech, Sharpton vowed -- though it usually sounded like a threat -- that he would be on television in a prime-time slot during the convention, either “inside the hall or outside.”

He is scheduled to speak tonight, inside the FleetCenter.

“He wouldn’t be at the convention speaking to a national audience if people didn’t see a different Al Sharpton,” said Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, who introduced Sharpton at St. Paul’s and called him the “Fannie Lou Hamer of his generation.” (Forty years ago, Hamer, famous for being “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” demanded representation for blacks in the all-white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, N.J.)

Comparing Sharpton to Hamer may strike some as hyperbolic, considering that another African American woman, former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, also ran for the Democratic presidential nomination this year and was to have addressed the convention Tuesday. And the Rev. Jesse Jackson had considerably more electoral success than Sharpton when he ran for president in 1988, winning the Michigan primary and delivering an electrifying convention speech.

Jackson, normally voluble, was terse when asked for a comment Monday about Sharpton’s prime-time moment. Strolling around the media tent at the FleetCenter, Jackson, who has feuded with Sharpton in recent years, said Sharpton would do “a wonderful job.... My understanding is that all those who ran are speaking.... He has a constituency. Carol Moseley Braun has a constituency. Dennis Kucinich has a constituency. The sum of the parts equal the whole.”

But Sharpton, who seems characteristically unable to admit failure, talks of his presidential campaign in triumphant terms. “I’m speaking prime time. We’re on the platform committee. I have the ear of the candidate. I’m being used around the nation. If I’m eating, it doesn’t matter how I’m eating. I’m eating. We got what we wanted.”

Who, exactly, he means by “we” is not always clear. He did not win the black vote in the South Carolina primary, as he predicted he would, and earned fewer than 20 delegates (by comparison, Jackson earned 1,200 in 1988; Kerry will need 2,162 to put him over the top this week).

Sharpton never had much of a campaign staff. He travels with a videographer and one or two assistants, and the campaign is reportedly half a million dollars in debt. The Federal Elections Commission has ordered Sharpton to return $100,000 in matching funds. But what he lacks in voters and dollars, he makes up in irrepressible optimism (or perhaps denial) and a talent for reinvention.

A couple of months ago, he signed up with Spike TV to host a reality show called “I Hate My Job,” which will debut in the fall and feature Sharpton giving advice to contestants on a topic he knows something about: pursuing their dream careers. He also has a contract with MSNBC to provide political commentary on the conventions.

“And who,” Ogletree asked, “would have imagined a month ago, or four years ago, that it’s Rev. Al Sharpton who has the platform here in Boston in 2004?”

Despite his role during the primaries as thorn in the side of the Democratic Party, pointing out again and again (not always correctly) that he was the only candidate raising the issues of race, affirmative action, AIDS, the crisis in Haiti and the turmoil in Liberia, he is already campaigning for John F. Kerry, the party’s presumed presidential candidate. (Sharpton couldn’t claim to be the only one talking about poverty, given that “two Americas” was the theme of John Edwards’ stump speech. But he did usually one-up Edwards, saying that although Edwards’ father might have been a millworker, Sharpton’s own daddy wouldn’t even have been able to get a job in the mill.)

Sharpton was coy about his topic for tonight, although he did mention in one of his church appearances that he would talk about affirmative action. Ogletree, who is helping him with the speech, said he hopes to help Sharpton show a side that is less well known: “People don’t realize how much Rev. Sharpton is a family man and how important family values are to him.”

(Sharpton is married and has two daughters. The family did not campaign with him during the primaries; since he his stabbing and near death in 1991, he has worried about their safety.)

His visits to three churches Sunday were undisguised campaign stops for Kerry, filled with entertaining rebukes of the current administration. Last Friday, he told the congregation of Boston’s Morning Star Baptist Church, he visited Detroit to hear President Bush address the Urban League’s national meeting.

“He sat there, trying to be nice and joke with me and everybody,” said Sharpton. “I knew he was campaigning hard if he was nice to me. Then he had the gall to say blacks need not be taken for granted by the Democratic Party and that we need to look at both parties. He said the Republicans have been the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves.

“But after that, we didn’t get the 40 acres and a mule. So since you didn’t give us the mule,” said Sharpton, his voice booming as he went for the kill, “I’ll take the donkey and ride where I have to go.”