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What Donald Trump Shares with Al Sharpton

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

One of my favorite tunes in the super-hit musical "Hamilton" is a little ditty sung by King George III. He raises a very appropriate question for his former colonies today: What comes next?

What comes next?

You've been freed.

Do you know how hard it is to lead?

That question has come to many minds ever since King George's day, every time a new regime takes the reins of power and its lofty campaign promises run into the harsh realities of taxes, budgets and tough decisions. "We campaign in poetry," as the late New York Gov. Mario Cuomo famously proclaimed. "We govern in prose."

That question -- What comes next? -- also came to mind as I asked one of the most quotable black conservatives I know, Robert L. Woodson, founder and president of the Washington-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, what he thinks of Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign.

 

"I feel the same way about him that I felt about Ann Coulter," he said, citing an op-ed he wrote last year about the conservative author-columnist Coulter in the Wall Street Journal. "He's an Al Sharpton for white people."

I quickly grasped his point. Businessman Trump and the Rev. Al Sharpton have a lot in common. As Woodson wrote about Coulter, after she had criticized outreach efforts by Woodson and House Speaker Paul Ryan in low-income communities, Trump and Sharpton offer more "flamboyant attacks than fact-based analysis."

Although both make appeals across class and racial lines, their support falls mostly along racial and tribal lines. I've covered Sharpton off and on since the 1980s and appeared on his TV and radio programs. I have observed Trump, who never has been shy about the public eye, longer than that.

But as fun as they may be to cover, I am disappointed that they sometimes have done more to divide the races than bring us together. Like Woodson, Ryan and other pragmatic Republicans, I would like to see a vigorous competition between both parties for African-American votes, as we had before the mid-1960s.

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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