E-Mail This Article to a Friend CAMPAIGN 2004 Al Sharpton brings his routine to Harvard BY ADAM REILLY

One of the high points in Al Sharpton’s October 27 appearance at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government — which doubled as an installment of MSNBC’s Hardball: Battle for the White House, in which host Chris Matthews interviews Democratic presidential candidates — came when the cameras weren’t rolling. Three-quarters of the way through the show — dazzled by Sharpton’s arsenal of perfectly crafted one-liners — Matthews mused out loud about a Freaky Friday–type scenario in which Sharpton’s mind would be transplanted, mid campaign, into another candidate’s body. "It would be interesting," Matthews said wistfully.

But while Sharpton was his dependably entertaining self for most of the one-hour session, he did hit some rough spots. One came when an audience member asked Sharpton about comments he made in 1994 at New Jersey’s Kean College:

Student: "In 1994, in a forum very similar to this one, you were quoted as saying, ‘White folks were in caves while we were building empires.... We taught philosophy, astrology, and mathematics before Socrates and those Greek homos.’ What should the American voter make of that comment?"

Sharpton: "First of all, what I said at a speech was, I talked about — you know, this was a forum. I’m glad you raised it because, give the whole context. This was a forum after we were dealing with this book that had come out saying we were innately inferior and that we could not compete, that there was something wrong with blacks. [Sharpton was apparently referring to 1994’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein.] And I said — first of all, I went through this whole thing about how we are not inferior and compared us to different stages in history. And many of the whites in the audience were standing up clapping because they were insulted that this guy — who was, by the way part of, at one point, the Reagan administration — came up with that theory that we were —"

Here, Matthews interrupted Sharpton for a commercial break. When the show resumed, Matthews moved immediately to another audience question: are US voters ready to elect an African-American president? By now, Sharpton’s trademark eloquence had returned. "Progress has never been made when America was ready," he said. "Progress was made when those that were ready to fight were ready.... Those of us that are ready not to be bound because of race or because of our sexual orientation or gender, and those of us that believe in progressive politics, we’re no longer going to be marginalized, we’re no longer going to have to take a sidestep in this party. We’re coming front and center, ’cause we’re ready to lead the party." The applause was thunderous.

It was quite a shift. In the span of five minutes, Sharpton went from haltingly defending some truly problematic comments to sounding an inclusive clarion call sure to appeal to disaffected lefties. It’s no surprise that the quick-witted Sharpton pulled it off, but it is disappointing that Matthews let him get away with it. Soon after, during another break in taping, Matthews gave Sharpton some unsolicited advice. "Say The Boys in the Band is your favorite movie," Matthews suggested, referring to the landmark 1970 film about a group of gay men attending a birthday party. "That’ll get you off the hook for the ‘Greek homos’ comment. Because I noticed you did a 180 on it three minutes later with the ‘sexual orientation’ remark."

The forgiving tone of Matthews’s comments, and his decision to make them off-camera, point to the fatal flaw of Monday’s event. While Matthews pressed Sharpton on some policy issues, he also gave the reverend’s biggest liabilities a wide berth. For example, there was no mention of Sharpton’s role in the 1987 Tawana Brawley case, in which Sharpton and others falsely accused New York’s Dutchess County assistant DA Steven Pagones of raping a 15-year-old African-American girl. And no one addressed the inflammatory and possibly anti-Semitic comments made by Sharpton after a car driven by a Hasidic Jew struck and killed Gavin Cato, a black child, in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1991. (At Cato’s funeral, Sharpton inveighed against "the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights"; after Cato’s death, a rabbinical student in the neighborhood was fatally stabbed by a group of black youths, and area stores were looted.)

There’s reason to take Sharpton seriously. While he won’t land the Democratic nomination, he’s intelligent, charismatic, and capable of genuine insight. But interviewers like Matthews need to tackle his past head-on. If Matthews had done this Monday instead of sitting back and smiling as Sharpton cracked up the crowd, some testy exchanges might have ensued. And the audience, instead of hooting and hollering, could have ended up squirming. But that’s Matthews’s job. As for Sharpton, his youthful indiscretions remain a serious liability in the minds of most mainstream voters. If he wants this to change, Sharpton should aggressively guide the conversation toward the past, speaking frankly about Tawana Brawley and Crown Heights and other examples cited by his critics, and then explain why, despite the conventional wisdom, he deserves to be considered a legitimate candidate. Until he does, Sharpton — no matter how gracefully he’s aged — will remain a marginal figure known mostly for generating laughs and making his opponents look tongue-tied and sluggish. That’s entertainment. But it only goes so far.