The Reverend Alfred “Al” Sharpton, former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, and former Attorney General William Barr have all been in the news lately for very different reasons.
Over the last two decades, Rev. Sharpton has emerged as the pre-eminent eulogists for Black victims of police violence. The fact that Rev. Al has emerged as the consistent choice for delivering eulogies for African Americans who have been the victims of police violence (George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Eric Garner, and Tyre Nichols etc.) is indicative of his emergence as one of the most influential civil rights leaders of our times. At the request of the family, Rev. Sharpton delivered the eulogy for Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver’s funeral this past Saturday.
Criminal justice reform has long been at the center of Sharpton’s activism, including protests in the wake of the brutal attack on Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who was tortured inside a Brooklyn precinct station in 1997. He has consistently pushed against racial profiling, stop-and-frisk policing and other law enforcement approaches that are often decried as racist. He has done this through the national organization he heads, the National Action Network, and the talk show he hosts on MSNBC since 2015.
Rev. Sharpton’s early career was replete with controversial and incendiary, homophobic and anti-Semitic remarks as well as inciting incidents of violence. In 1987 he was actively involved in publicizing the allegation that Tawana Brawley was assaulted and raped by six white men, some of them police officers in the town of Wappinger, New York. The accusation was later proved to be false. Reverend Al was found to have made several libelous statements in a court of law and refused to pay civil damages. For many years, he was dogged for his defense of the Tawana Brawley hoax.
Overtime, Sharpton has been able to rehabilitate his image to the point that he was praised by President Obama as the voice of the voiceless and a champion of the downtrodden” and was called by The New York Daily News “the most prominent civil rights activist in the nation.” Suffice it to say, Reverend Al has had a remarkable resurrection.
Former two-term New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman has not been content to sit back and twiddle her thumbs subsequent to her leaving government service after serving as George W. Bush’s Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Recently, Whitman announced she is co-chair of a new national political party, the Forward Party, sharing the leadership position with former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang of New York.
Unlike former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Whitman has been a consistent opponent of Donald Trump’s brand of Republicanism. From the get-go she labeled Trump’s early campaign tactics as “fascist” and after Chris Christie was defeated in the primary and pledged his support to Trump, she announced that she’d be voting for Hilary Clinton. In 2018, she penned an op-ed calling President Trump unfit for office and urging fellow Republicans to pressure him to step down and in 2020 she spoke at the Democratic National Convention in support of Joe Biden’s nomination.
In 2021, she submitted testimony to the House of Representatives Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. She indicated the attack was part of “a sustained and coordinated effort by the former president and his anti-democracy allies to suppress voting rights, de-legitimize free and fair elections, and subvert the will of the voters by overturning election results deemed undesirable to their movement.”
The likelihood of the Forward Party emerging as a major third force in American politics is incredibly slim, given the history of third parties in America. For this reason, some have criticized Whiteman for being too Pollyanna in terms of her efforts to change the system, but no one should question her deep-seated commitment to good government. No matter how often or how viciously she is attacked by MAGA Republicans, Christine Todd Whitman continues to show resiliency in her fight to preserve pro-democracy values.
William Barr, who previously served as Attorney General under President George H.W. Bush from 1991-93, was chosen by Trump to replace Jeff Session who angered Trump when he recused himself from supervising Robert Muller’s special investigation of Russian election interference. Before his appointment Barr expressed skepticism about the “bogus Russiangate scandal,” and once in office, actively undermined Muller.
Throughout his tenure, Barr was a complete lackey who politicized the Justice Department. David Firestone in a searing piece entitled “Bill Barr’s Image Rehab Is Kaput” wrote in The New York Times on January 30, 2023: “Attorneys general are not supposed to interfere in special counsel’s investigations. The whole point of the system is to isolate the prosecution of sensitive cases from the appearance of political meddling…. But weakening the country’s institutions and safeguards for political benefits is how Barr did business in the nearly two years he served as the nation’s top law enforcement official under Mr. Trump.”
Since resigning as Attorney General in December of 2020, Barr has been desperately attempting to salvage his reputation. In his memoir, Barr does a complete about-face and urges Republicans to not re-nominate Trump and accuses the former President of going “off the rails” with his stolen-election claims and describes him as “detached from reality,” “self-indulgent,” “manic” and “unreasonable.” His revisionist attempt to salvage his reputation is not going to be successful.
Irwin Stoolmacher is president of the Stoolmacher Consulting Group, a fundraising and strategic planning firm that works with nonprofit agencies that serve the truly needy among us.