Rev. Al Tries to Bridge Obama's Passion Gap

It's not hard to figure out why the Rev. Al Sharpton, of all people, receives a strange new respect in President Obama's White House. Every president needs a good "anger translator."

Fans of Comedy Central's "Key and Peele" show know what I am talking about: the combative character that show hosts Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele call "Luther, the president's anger translator."

As Obama, played by Peele, addresses the nation with characteristic no-drama cool, Key's Luther interjects his unsweetened R-rated version of barber-shop-populist rage that the president is really thinking.

"On the domestic front," Peele's Obama calmly states, "I just want to say to my critics, I hear your voices and I share your concerns."

To which Key's Luther hops up and down and shouts into the camera. "So, maybe you just chill the hell out for just a second? Then maybe I could focus on some (stuff), y'know?"

If that sounds at least in tone, minus the expletives, like the fiery Sharpton of his bullhorn-wielding days in the 1980s, you know where I'm headed.

The old Sharpton rose to national notoriety as a portly, former protégé of music star James Brown -- complete with signature pompadour, track suit and gold chains. He ballyhooed such demagogic fiascos as the Tawana Brawley affair, in which he falsely accused a white New York prosecutor and others of gang-raping a black teenager.

Compared to those days, the new Sharpton -- an older, slimmed-down, suit-and-tie-wearing version of his former self -- still calls for justice but aims his rhetoric at putting out fires more than starting new ones. For this he has gained the ear of New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio, among other prominent Democrats. He also is described by The New York Times as "the White House's civil rights leader of choice" and by Politico's Glenn Thrush as "Obama's go-to man on race."

The new Rev. Al was on full display in Ferguson, Missouri, where the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teen by a white police officer touched off protests and riots.

Not surprisingly, his new prominence enrages conservatives, among others who agree with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly's assessment of Sharpton as a "charlatan" and "race hustler" who only cares "about his own self-aggrandizement."

But by his own description, a more humble Sharpton emerged after he barely survived a 1991 stabbing by a drunken white man during a march in the Bensonhurst section of New York City.

"Look back," Sharpton told me in a 2001 interview. "My image is no worse than Rev. (Jesse) Jackson's was in 1980," four years before the first of Jackson's two presidential runs.

Even then, he was talking openly about his aim to replace Jackson's prominence as a civil rights leader, although he denied trying to grease the slide.

That seems to describe his status these days as Democratic candidates seek his endorsements and he hosts his own nightly show on MSNBC -- on which, full disclosure, I sometimes have been an unpaid guest.

Also, according to Thrush, his phone calls to the White House are answered more quickly than Jackson's, who played more of a Luther-like insider role in President Bill Clinton's day.

I first saw Luther brought up by Slate's Jamelle Bouie in a clever May essay that applied the fictitious grouch as a good description of Attorney General Eric Holder, Obama's official representative in Ferguson. But even Bouie acknowledged that, as much as Holder's liberal views may enrage the right, he has too much lawyerly cool to show any more public rage than no-drama Obama does.

Sharpton fills that passion vacuum, as he showed at the Ferguson funeral for shooting victim Michael Brown, to which he was invited by Brown's family. His call for justice was laced noticeably with denunciations of "ghetto pity parties." Instead of feeling sorry for ourselves, he said, "We've got to clean up our community so we can clean up the United States of America!"

Those are the sort of self-help themes that his conservative critics claim that he and other liberal black leaders never talk about. I won't hold my breath waiting for them to give him much credit. Both sides have their Luthers.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.