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Hitting with her best shot
Carol Moseley Braun can’t possibly win the presidency. So why is she running?
BY ADAM REILLY


CAROL MOSELEY Braun won’t be the Democratic nominee for president. You know this. And Moseley Braun knows that you know this. But while she’s on the campaign trail, the former senator from Illinois would prefer that you bracket this knowledge and treat her like a viable candidate.

Don’t, and you may regret it. After a political breakfast last month at New Hampshire’s Bedford Village Inn, I asked Moseley Braun how long she’d be able to stay in the race. It wasn’t a direct challenge to her legitimacy — I hadn’t, after all, asked why she was taking time from the real candidates during the Democratic debates — but the underlying assumption was clear. Moseley Braun cocked her head slightly, raised an eyebrow, and paused for a fraction of a second. Suddenly, I felt embarrassed and apologetic, like I’d bad-mouthed her family. It was a relief when she finally replied. "Oh, we’re in it to win it," she said. "It makes sense to stay in and do the best I can all over the country, so we can go to the convention with delegates."

It’s no surprise Moseley Braun wants to be taken seriously. So do fellow back-of-the-pack candidates like Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich and the Reverend Al Sharpton. But there’s a difference. When Sharpton and Kucinich insist they can be president, it carries no emotional weight; it’s a fiction that can be embraced with detachment or mild annoyance. (Sharpton is a shameless self-promoter with a history of race-baiting, and Kucinich is a strident leftie who wants to create a cabinet-level department of peace to make nonviolence an organizing principle in society; it’s hard to imagine either one faring well in a general election.) But when Moseley Braun makes the same claim — after pitching you her can-do life story and dazzling you with her charm and wit — you regret that you doubted her. You still don’t think she can garner the Democratic nomination, or that she’d beat George W. Bush if she did. You do, however, think it’s a shame that a former United States senator graced with obvious intelligence and charisma has absolutely no chance.

LIKE EVERY presidential candidate, Carol Moseley Braun has a carefully scripted political autobiography she regularly shares with the public. In it, the protagonist — a young woman raised by a Chicago cop (her father) and a medical technician (her mother) — comes of age in the working-class South Side. She attends public elementary and high schools, then moves on to the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago’s high-powered law school. After getting her JD, she works for five years as an assistant US attorney, then leaves to start a family. She doesn’t want to be a politician. But when she joins an ultimately unsuccessful effort to save the local habitat of the bobolink, a nesting songbird, by preventing the construction of an area golf course, her fellow activists in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood notice her talents and urge her to run for the Illinois House of Representatives. The young activist demurs, protesting that she’s a new mother and knows nothing about politics. Then a naysayer publicly applauds her decision, prompting our hero to go for it.

Here’s how Moseley Braun describes the moment to her audience at the politics-and-eggs breakfast in Bedford: "[He] said, ‘Don’t run, you can’t possibly win. The blacks won’t vote for you because you’re not part of the Chicago machine. The whites won’t vote for you ’cause you’re black. And nobody’s gonna vote for you ’cause you’re a woman." The crowd laughs. Moseley Braun waits just long enough, then finishes: "My reaction: where do I sign up for this job?" Now she’s laughing, too. The applause is thunderous.

This anecdote, in addition to providing a killer line guaranteed to bring down the house, contains the interpretive framework the 56-year-old Moseley Braun uses to explain her entire political career. There is no ego involved, no personal ambition. Instead, Moseley Braun is repeatedly pressed into service by external factors, not against her will so much as against her natural inclination. Exhorted by friends and confronted with narrow notions of what a black woman can and can’t achieve, she quells her doubts and runs for a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives in 1978. She wins, and eventually rises to assistant majority leader; in Springfield, she champions education issues, proposes a moratorium on the state death penalty, and successfully sues the state Democratic Party over a redistricting plan she deems unfair to African-Americans and Latinos. After a decade, she’s planning to leave politics and work in private practice — but Chicago mayor Harold Washington complicates matters by asking her to run for Cook County recorder of deeds. She wins again, becoming both the first woman and the first African-American elected countywide in Cook County. After four years there, her preference — yet again — is to exit the political arena. But then Clarence Thomas is nominated to the US Supreme Court and narrowly confirmed after a bitter debate, with incumbent Illinois senator Alan Dixon, a Democrat, voting with the majority. At this point, as Moseley Braun tells it, "The people in Illinois said, ‘It’s time for us to shake up the Senate a little bit." Moseley Braun — who describes herself as a direct beneficiary of the Warren Court and Thurgood Marshall’s leadership — is pressed into service once more. She ousts Dixon in the Democratic primary, then tops Republican Richard Williamson in the final election. Moseley Braun’s victory is attributed in part to crossover votes from a large number of suburban Republican women. She is the first African-American woman and the first African-American Democrat ever elected to the US Senate. (In the "Year of the Woman," which also saw Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray win elections in California and Washington, respectively, Moseley Braun received star billing.)

In the Senate, Moseley Braun sponsors environmental clean-up legislation and the creation of the Sacagawea dollar coin, backs a balanced-budget amendment, and pushes for reconstruction of the nation’s schools. But in 1998, she narrowly loses her re-election bid to Peter Fitzgerald, a Republican whose campaign is aided by the efforts of a consultant named Karl Rove. (To friendly audiences, the implication is clear: defeats linked to the Republican Evil Genius should be taken with a grain of salt.) The sting of the loss abates when Bill Clinton taps her to serve as ambassador to New Zealand, Samoa, and the Cook Islands — a post that Moseley Braun calls "Ambassador to Paradise." After George W. Bush’s ascent to the presidency brings her stint in paradise to an end, Moseley Braun again gravitates toward private life; she teaches, works as a consultant, and plans a move to her family’s ancestral farm in Alabama. Then September 11 happens. The Patriot Act is passed. The US goes to war in Iraq. Troubled by the nation’s direction and urged on by friends, Moseley Braun decides she has an obligation to re-enter the political fray. This time, she’s a candidate for the highest office in the land.

Like any autobiography, this one has convincing and unconvincing elements. When she describes her gratitude to Thurgood Marshall and the Warren court, Moseley Braun’s genuine passion is impossible to miss. Conversely, she usually doesn’t note that her victory over Dixon came in a three-way Democratic primary in which she received a 38 percent plurality — or that the win was possible thanks largely to the efforts of the candidate who finished third, attorney Al Hofeld. "She had lots of help from a very rich trial lawyer," says Rich Miller, publisher of CapitolFax.com, a Web site dedicated to Illinois politics. "He spent a fortune beating up Dixon, but he didn’t think to do anything about Moseley Braun. And with the suburban women’s vote and the African-American vote, she won it." (During her Senate campaign, Moseley Braun also received assistance from supporters of Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who saw her as a potential threat and liked the idea of her moving on to Washington, DC; this, too, is omitted during stump speeches.) More broadly, the notion that Moseley Braun has been a perpetually reluctant politician strains credulity. Ben Joravsky, a Chicago Reader staff writer who covered Moseley Braun during her time in the Illinois House of Representatives, remembers her as a smart, purposeful figure focused on moving to the next level from the earliest years of her career. "She was clearly very ambitious," Joravsky recalls. "She just wasn’t going to be satisfied being a state rep from Hyde Park, articulating the need for good-government issues like a more progressive income tax or the end of patronage. She wanted to break out."

Whatever its weaknesses, though, it’s a powerful narrative — and it helps explain why people respond to Moseley Braun the way they do. The seminal moment in the politician’s story of herself, the event that makes everything else possible, comes when Moseley Braun is told she can’t accomplish something because she’s a black woman. After she tells her story, doubting her out loud — and to her face — feels tantamount to siding with that original naysayer, the one she’s proved wrong time and time again. Which is especially awkward for white liberals who regret that the general electorate probably wouldn’t elect an African-American woman president, whatever her strengths.

The other factor that makes you want to take Moseley Braun seriously is her considerable charm. She is thoughtful, articulate, funny, and down-to-earth, and fuses these qualities with a can-do maternalism that is deeply convincing. Whatever challenge she happens to be discussing, Braun manages to convey that everything will be okay if we just use a little common sense. Her well-known smile, which is broad and luminous, adds to her reassuring air; not surprisingly, it’s been a tremendous political asset. "When she first ran for Senate in 1992, her biggest selling point was her smile," Joravsky says. "She had this great smile, and this sort of winning way, and it enabled her to overcome all the obstacles a black woman would have running as a liberal Democrat statewide. A lot of women jumped aboard the bandwagon because she was very charismatic, very engaging, and she seemed so optimistic and hopeful." Focus on Moseley Braun’s long odds, and you probably won’t see the smile. Agree that she’s in it to win it, and you will.

BUT MOSELEY Braun is not going to win. This is not because she doesn’t have experience. She was, after all, elected to the US Senate and served on that body’s Finance Committee. She’s arguably more qualified to be our next president than North Carolina’s John Edwards, a first-term senator who’s never held elected office before but is taken much more seriously than she. Her experience in government also compares favorably to that of former Vermont governor Howard Dean, the consensus front-runner in the race. She is not going to lose because she lacks interesting ideas. Moseley Braun’s take on Iraq is cogent and distinctive: while she objects that "Operation Iraqi Freedom," like all wars since World War II, was unconstitutional because Congress never issued a formal declaration of war, she also insists that the United States must allocate the necessary resources for reconstruction. She also speaks compellingly about domestic policy, and articulates her left-of-center views in a decidedly centrist manner. For example, in advocating the implementation of a universal single-payer health-care system modeled on the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program, Moseley Braun argues that employment-based insurance damages American companies’ bottom lines and creates an unnecessary drag on trade. Nor is she going to lose because she fails to convey her ideas effectively. (At the November 24 debate in Des Moines, Moseley Braun offered the following gloss on the war in Iraq: "I’m reminded of the true story of my parents’ worst argument. The toilet broke and there was water going everywhere. My mother sent my father to the hardware store, he came back with a new lawnmower. [Laughter] That’s what really happened to us in this country. We were chasing bin Laden and they gave it up. They gave up a war on terrorism. They gave up a fight to protect the American people in behalf of a misadventure in Iraq.")

No, Moseley Braun will not win because she has no money; she has run a disorganized and ineffective campaign; and voters — who usually don’t meet candidates in person, and tend not to watch debates broadcast on cable news channels months before the first vote is cast — simply do not take her seriously. And neither, for that matter, do political insiders. For starters, there’s the nettlesome problem of seeking the Democratic nomination after losing her last election. "Carol Moseley Braun ran for the Senate for re-election and lost, and now she’s running for president," says David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a political think tank that focuses on African-Americans in politics. "The only person I can think of who lost a lower-level race and then won was Richard Nixon. Carol Moseley Braun is not Richard Nixon, and this is not 1968." Furthermore, since Moseley Braun began her campaign in February of this year, few things have gone well. In the first three quarters of 2003, she raised just under $342,000. (By comparison, Howard Dean raised over $25 million and John Kerry just under $17 million; even Dennis Kucinich raised over $3.4 million. Only Sharpton, with just $259,000 in donations, raised less than Moseley Braun.) She received endorsements from the National Organization for Women’s Political Action Committee and the National Women’s Political Caucus in August, but hasn’t parlayed that support into improved poll numbers or increased financial support. Four different individuals have served as her campaign manager; today, with the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries little more than a month away, she still has no paid staff in either state. When Patricia Ireland, the former head of NOW, signed on as Moseley Braun’s newest campaign manager in mid November, she identified obtaining federal matching funds as one of her top priorities. But when the December 1 filing deadline for the January disbursement rolled around, Moseley Braun’s operation failed to submit the necessary paperwork, meaning that the cash-strapped campaign will be deprived of approximately $300,000 at least until February 1, the next time funds are distributed. Meanwhile, recent polls have offered little reason for optimism. In last week’s Zogby poll of 503 Democrats and independents likely to cast ballots in New Hampshire’s January 27 Democratic primary, Moseley Braun did not receive a single vote. (Neither did Sharpton; Kucinich tallied two percent.) In South Carolina, which has a large African-American community and where Sharpton is running strong, only three percent of likely primary voters backed Moseley Braun in an American Research Group poll released November 28, tying her with Kerry and placing her ahead of only Kucinich. In terms of organization and effectiveness, University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato says, Moseley Braun’s is "absolutely at the bottom" of the Democratic field.

The candidate and her staff continue to look on the bright side, however. They identify and emphasize small nuggets of good news, like the Newsweek poll released November 8 that showed her garnering the support of seven percent of registered voters nationwide, tying her with John Kerry and putting her one point ahead of John Edwards. Last week, Ireland stressed that Moseley Braun had met the federal-matching-fund requirements (at least $5000 in small contributions from 20 different contributors in 20 states), and that documentation glitches from earlier this year were primarily to blame for the missed December 1 deadline. "I’m quite confident that we’re where we need to be," she said. Ireland also predicted that a delegate strategy identifying Moseley Braun’s target states — something that still hadn’t been created in November, two months after Moseley Braun officially announced her candidacy and nine months after she began her campaign — would be completed soon.

Ireland has to be positive. That’s her job. But to neutral observers, it’s inconceivable that Moseley Braun, despite her vow to "take the ‘men only’ sign off the White House door," could storm from the back of the Democratic pack to the front. It’s almost as unlikely that she can finish well enough in one or two significant primaries to make people take notice. If the situation on the Republican side were different — if a two-term Republican incumbent were exiting, say — Moseley Braun’s status as the second African-American woman to seek the presidency might help her garner support from voters looking to make a symbolic statement, at least in the primaries. (Shirley Chisholm was the first, in 1972.) Instead, George W. Bush is running for re-election. "Part of Carol Moseley Braun’s problem is that she’s a black woman," Bositis says. "There’s this question — is her appeal to black people, or is her appeal to women? I have less of a sense of [this] in terms of women, although I think it probably is similar to the black people. And all black people are looking for is a candidate who’s going to beat George Bush. They’re not looking for a candidate who’s going to make them feel good on this issue or that issue — they’re looking for a candidate who’s going to beat George Bush. And obviously, she’s not in that category."

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Issue Date: December 12 - 18, 2003
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