Inside Politics

Embracing Sharpton

“Teresa Heinz Kerry’s weekend embrace of the Rev. Al Sharpton hints at a behind-the-scenes struggle between John Kerry and the Rev. Jesse Jackson,” Fredric U. Dicker reports, citing anonymous “Democratic insiders.”

“The insiders said Jackson has been aggressively pressuring Kerry’s campaign to hire several of his key political aides — as well as agreeing to give him a chance to address the Democratic National Convention in Boston this summer during a prime-time television broadcast,” Mr. Dicker writes.

“‘Jesse is up to his old tricks again, threatening to peddle stories that Kerry is hostile to blacks, if he doesn’t get what he wants,’ said a prominent New York Democrat familiar with the situation.

“‘Obviously, Teresa Kerry’s visit to the [Sharpton-run National Action] Network was a direct shot at Jesse, who has been noticeably absent from the Kerry presidential campaign,’ the Democrat continued.

“Mrs. Kerry heard Sharpton say her husband’s campaign was more racially inclusive ‘in this stage’ of the contest than was the Clinton campaign 12 years ago.”

Good into bad

“After Friday’s government announcement that 288,000 more jobs were created in April, reducing the unemployment rate by a point to 5.6 percent as job-creation numbers for February and March were revised upward, Richard J. DeKaser, chief economist at the National City Corporation in Cleveland, told the New York Times: ‘You’d be hard-pressed to find a dark lining in this cloud,’” the Media Research Center said in its daily CyberAlert.

“But ABC News managed to, as anchor Peter Jennings asserted: ‘When you look at the kind of work people are getting, however, the news is a little less encouraging.’ ABC’s downbeat story focused on service-sector jobs and those who are ‘underemployed,’ Brent Baker writes at www.mediaresearch.com.

“That was the second time in eight days that a network has turned good news into bad. The April 30 CyberAlert recounted: Good news, but. NBC’s Tom Brokaw on Thursday [April 29] night highlighted how ‘the government reported today that GDP grew at an annual rate of 4.2 percent in the first quarter of this year,’ but he then added an ominous ‘but’ as he warned, ‘but there are also growing fears tonight that the good news may have a dark side.’ That dark side, as outlined in a full story by Anne Thompson: potential interest-rate hikes and inflation — as illustrated by the price of nails.”

Defending Rumsfeld

“Donald Rumsfeld has been designated by Democratic politicians as the scapegoat for the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison. But any resignation would only whet their appetite to cut and run,” New York Times columnist William Safire writes.

“The highly effective defense secretary owes it to the nation’s war on terror to soldier on,” the columnist said.

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