E-Mail This Article to a Friend Hitting with her best shot (continued)

ALL OF WHICH raises the question: since she won’t be president, why does Moseley Braun insist on pressing forward? Even Florida senator Bob Graham could read the tea leaves and dropped out of the race on October 6, bluntly stating, "I cannot be elected president of the United States." That Moseley Braun insists on keeping up the fight has led to much speculation about her motivation. One theory holds that she is running to undercut Sharpton, who, despite never having held elected office and with no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, still enjoys support among a certain segment of the black electorate. This theory, which has unnamed Democratic Party insiders exhorting Moseley Braun to enter the fray and thus dilute Sharpton’s influence as a power broker, has been voiced by a number of people, including Democratic congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois. But Bositis says the basic premise of this theory — that Moseley Braun could pull away some of Sharpton’s votes — is fundamentally flawed. "Al Sharpton is influential among a particular kind of black voter — the street people, the working class," he says. "[Moseley Braun’s candidacy] wouldn’t have had any effect on Al Sharpton, because they don’t appeal to the same people whatsoever. The idea that somehow, Carol Moseley Braun is going to take the street vote away from Al Sharpton? Dressed in her white-lace dresses and speaking about foreign policy? The idea was ludicrous."

A more plausible explanation sees Moseley Braun running for personal and political redemption. As anyone who’s followed her political career knows, two high-profile allegations of misconduct tarnished her term in the Senate. In the wake of charges that Moseley Braun and her former campaign manager and ex-fiancé, Kgosie Matthews, had misspent $249,000 in unaccounted-for donations, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) mounted an investigation; ultimately, the agency concluded that Moseley Braun had documented her finances poorly, but did not take legal action. (In addition, the Internal Revenue Service twice requested that the Justice Department investigate Moseley Braun for misuse of campaign funds; both requests were denied.) She also came under fire for a 1996 visit to Nigeria, where she met with Sani Abacha, a dictator with a record of human-rights abuses. (Nelson Mandela termed Abacha’s regime an "illegitimate, barbaric, ignorant dictatorship.") Moseley Braun and Matthews — who was a registered lobbyist for Abacha’s regime and worked to ease sanctions against the Nigerian government — made the trip without notifying the Clinton administration or the State Department. Afterward, the senator characterized the visit as an effort at "quiet diplomacy," but was criticized by human-rights activists, State Department officials, and Clinton for making a trip some believed lent legitimacy to Abacha’s government. Moseley Braun’s chief of staff, who also had not been notified, resigned in protest.

The former senator had a chance to defend her record in 1999, when Senator Jesse Helms attempted to block her ambassadorial appointment. (The Senate confirmed her by a 98-2 vote, and Washington insiders dismissed Helms’s opposition as the product of a longstanding grudge: in 1993, Moseley Braun had made headlines for opposing Helms’s attempt to renew a patent held by United Daughters of the Confederacy on a Confederate symbol, the Stars and Bars.) For most of the public, however, ambassadorial-confirmation hearings are fairly low-profile affairs. Moseley Braun’s presidential candidacy has given her a much better opportunity to dispel lingering notions that she engaged in financial misconduct or was chummy with a dictator. As she campaigns, she tells audiences she was grateful for Helms’s opposition, because it gave her a chance to document the outcome of investigations into her alleged financial misdeeds. She points out that she was never fined or sanctioned, and gives interviewers a dossier of paperwork assembled to prove her vindication of these charges and other accusations. At times, she jokes about the subject: during an interview with National Public Radio, Moseley Braun said that rather than seeking the standard $250 donations as she pursued federal matching funds, she was seeking gifts of $311.28 — the amount the FEC eventually found she had failed to account for. As for Nigeria, she tells reporters that she met Sani Abacha only twice: once when her friend Ibrahim Abacha, the dictator’s son, introduced them, and once when she attended Ibrahim Abacha’s funeral. And while Moseley Braun had, at one point, been willing to acknowledge that the Nigerian trip may not have been a good idea, she has hardened her stance. After the Washington Post ran an op-ed dismissing Moseley Braun and Sharpton’s candidacies and noting her connection to Abacha, Moseley Braun responded with a letter to the editor in which she argued that "[t]he Nigerian accusations were nothing more than racist shorthand."

The question of whether similar allegations would have dogged a politician who wasn’t an African-American the way they’ve dogged Moseley Braun is interesting to contemplate, but impossible to answer. So is the question of whether Moseley Braun’s defiant lack of introspection when discussing her past helps or hurts her. And whether her ongoing efforts to get her message out to the public will affect the vague but widespread sense that she behaved questionably while in office remains to be seen. There is, however, reason to think that her candidacy may have helped her standing in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. "She has been an uncommonly thoughtful, soft-spoken, rational, common-sense voice of reason in the debates we’ve had," says a senior strategist for a rival Democratic campaign. "I think she has brought enormous credit upon herself, even though she has been dismissed as simply a nonevent in the race. If you look at the other candidates who are considered to be in the bottom tier — Kucinich and Sharpton — she, I think, has made a lot of friends." After speculating that Moseley Braun might parlay her renewed position in the public eye into a plum private-sector or nonprofit position, he adds, "I can imagine a Democratic president asking Carol Moseley Braun to serve in a position of some leadership in an administration.... I can’t think of anything she’s said along the way in this race that would do anything but have enhanced her reputation. She’s got miles to go before she sleeps."

Others are more skeptical. Bositis says he can envision Moseley Braun being nominated to a post like ambassador to France if a Democrat retakes the White House, but adds that politically sensitive appointments would probably be reserved for long-time members of the president-to-be’s staff. And the University of Virginia’s Sabato says if Moseley Braun truly desired redemption, she should have sought to reclaim her Senate seat when Fitzgerald decided not to seek a second term. "She had a chance at doing that," Sabato notes. "She wasn’t the favorite — she would not have been the favorite even for the Democratic nomination — but potentially she could have done it." Sabato thinks Moseley Braun took the easier of two paths. "It was too hard, and the chances of failure were great," he says of the Senate option. "You run [for president], and you’re a winner."

Had she decided to run in Illinois, the high expectations attached to Moseley Braun’s 1992 election and the lingering disappointment over her Senate tenure might have made victory close to impossible. Joravsky, of the Chicago Reader, thinks that constituents held Moseley Braun to a higher standard as an African-American woman. But he also believes a relative lack of attentiveness to her constituents, as well as lingering allegations of misconduct, helped bring about Moseley Braun’s 1998 defeat. "I think what happened to Carol Moseley Braun is what happens to a lot of politicians when they win. Winning gets to their head, and they lose a sense of where they came from and what they have to do to keep those ties together," Joravsky says. "In her case, I think she got caught up in all the acclaim of being elected, and it’s like it just turned her head. Maybe she got intoxicated with all the success, and then thought, ‘Oh, the charm and the magnetism and the smile worked for me once. It can work again.’ When in reality it gets old fast."

"She didn’t spend nearly enough time in Illinois," adds CapitolFax.com’s Miller. "She got in trouble for doing some things that I think were overblown ... [but] she never really took a victory lap in Illinois. She had an enormous reservoir of goodwill in this state, and she squandered it right from the start, to the point where I knew women who took her bumper sticker off their cars. You gotta really be disappointed with somebody to take their bumper sticker off your car."

Finally, Moseley Braun may be running (by intent or in fact) as a kind of social trailblazer, one whose candidacy will help women — particularly black women — and African-Americans in general to be taken seriously when they seek the presidency in the years ahead. Such a function was alluded to when NOW offered its endorsement in November, with NOW/PAC chair Kim Gandy lauding Moseley Braun for "serving as an inspiration to women and girls of all ages who believe that a woman truly can become president of the United States." Gandy added, "Seeing an African-American feminist woman standing shoulder to shoulder with the other candidates, an equal partner in the race for president of the United States, I can’t help but be moved." But while Moseley Braun’s performance in the Democratic debates has convincingly demonstrated that a female African-American candidate can match or surpass several white male candidates in terms of eloquence and charisma, she has yet to prove that a significant number of voters will give their money — or their votes — to a black woman running for president. That, rather than a purely symbolic candidacy, would be a noteworthy accomplishment.

The chance to clear her name and pave the way for a possible appointment in a future Democratic administration may be enough to satisfy Moseley Braun. Just don’t expect her to admit it. But for those who have tracked Moseley Braun’s career — those who remember the lofty expectations that accompanied her election to the Senate, and believe she sacrificed a limitless political future by making some questionable decisions and alienating the voters who vaulted her to prominence in 1992 — the limited redemption she may achieve with her presidential campaign serves only as a depressing reminder of what might have been.

"You go back to ’92 when she was elected, before the first scandal hit, even before she’d taken office, and you saw people saying this woman could be the first woman and African-American vice-president or even president," Sabato says. "It’s a long way to fall, to end up being an asterisk in a Democratic nominating contest."

Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly[a]phx.com