Repeat After Me: "Roland Burris Is A Senator"

Maybe it's the advent of reality TV that has me a little hot under the collar about the charade that went on at the Capitol today in Washington when Roland Burris showed up. Maybe I'm like a lot of Americans who have come to recognize that our politicians have two faces – the one they display in front of the cameras and the one they show when the cameras aren't around.

Harry Reid spent the better part of his TV time glaring at the cameras like he was the tall, beak nosed Irish actor, James Cromwell, who plays the villainous dirty commander in all the police films, spouting righteous indignation like he'd gotten a fifty pound bag of it for Christmas. Does Reid feel that he stands for some mythical American consciousness that is supposed to ooze from the very center of the heartland?

I'd like to say – actually, I'm dying to say that Senator Reid succumbed to a latent racist desire to oppress any minorities in his path, but the reality is that Reid would have barred his own mother from taking her seat in the Senate if she had been appointed by Rod Blagojevich.

Now that the first act of this farce is over, what do we have?

A governor who is still governor of Illinois because the U.S. attorney who jumped the gun on his own investigation is burning the midnight oil while committing the number one prosecutorial sin - overzealousness. Fitzpatrick is wasting his time and our tax money trying to indict Blagojevich on a hundred and fifty counts of wrongdoing, the way they trained him to do it in prosecutor school, which means he's going have a thousand witnesses to interview, and ten thousand legal exhibits to organize. Pick five counts you've got Blagojevich on dead to rights and rock and roll – I’ve been on enough juries to tell Fitzpatrick that all that "preponderance" starts looking like "reasonable doubt" after a few weeks of mind numbing testimony.

A Senate majority leader who suffers from a lack of imagination. Harry Reid, you just watched the most improbable brown skinned presidential candidate in the history of the United States turn into the inevitable winner months before the election because of superior planning, superior execution, and a superior gameplan, and all you can do in the aftermath is ignore the changing trends in electoral districts across the country, including Illinois, to the point where you felt certain that ANY brown skinned Democratic candidate for Barack Obama's Senate seat had absolutely no chance of winning in a regular election. Jesse Jackson Jr. had at least as good a chance as your own favorite negro, Harold Ford, Jr., to win the seat in 2010. ALL of Jesse Jackson Jr.'s relatives are still eligible to vote, unlike Harold Ford Jr.'s motley crew of jailbirds/uncles.

A Senate appointee who has done nothing to cause himself to be barred from the Senate. Roland Burris looks a little mousy, but there's no crime in that. He very likely knows more about legal procedure than most of the parties involved in this charade as a former Illinois attorney general. He looks good in a suit. He is over 30 years of age. He has been a resident of his district for 9 years. And he is a citizen of the United States. It's harder to get a job at the Post Office than it is to qualify to be a member of the U.S. Senate.

The worst thing that happened to Harry Reid today was the rain. Any good reality show producer will tell you that rain heightens and intensifies drama. A character who is standing out in the rain, braving the elements, often garners more sympathy than they would in the same situation without a downpour.

The move by Blagojevich to appoint Burris is a public "f--k you" to everybody who tried to tell him what to do. It reminded me of Albert C. Barnes, the pharmaceutical magnate and art collector who surprised everyone when he left his massive collection of paintings in the care of historically black Lincoln University after being snubbed by the art world for years. It really doesn't matter, though, if the move was done for spite or not - at the time the decision was announced, it was still Blagojevich's to make.

Now that the cameras aren't rolling, I would suggest that Senator Reid wipe that nasty frown off of his face and ask Senator Burris to accept his apologies for having to showboat for his constituents back home. Then I suggest that the Senate's Democratic leader put the all call out to his key cronies that they had better be working on a way to backpedal their way out of this thing by next week, so they can enjoy some of the Obama love coming to DC the weekend after next.

Because if you’re not careful, Harry, you could end up being The Biggest Loser.

You can do it, Harry. Just repeat after me. "Ro-land Bu-rris. Ro-land Bu-rris. Ro-land Bu-rris is the junior senator from Illinois".

When You've Got The Name And The Looks

The children of Martin Luther King Jr. have always said “Marty got daddy’s name, Dexter got daddy’s looks.”

Jessie Jackson Jr. got both.

I myself got two colorful monikers, one Arabic, one Hindu, preceding my English surname, two names as far away from my father's utilitarian "Fred" as you could get. I quickly boiled them down to "Kris" the way "Barack" boiled his name down to "Barry" for the exact same reason he did - to avoid being different from everybody else.

When I was younger, I used to ask my father "why I wasn’t a 'Junior'?"

"Because I didn’t want you to be burdened with it if I didn’t keep my name clear."

The things that men like Jesse Jackson Sr. and my father and other highly motivated black men across the South went through to get to college, then to go out into an America that was in such racial turmoil in the sixties and be somebody was a part of a crossroads in time.

Jesse Jackson Sr. protested against the goverment.

My father went to work for the government.

So when your father runs for the presidency of the United States of America, even if it is a symbolic campaign, you don’t have a burden to be carried, you have a bar to be raised.

Since I didn’t know much about the younger Jackson, I decided to see for myself just who was the man behind those flashing eyes and that hungry smile. It quickly turned into a bona fide internet research junket when I clicked on a link to his wife, Sandi.

The most striking thing about Jesse Jackson Jr. that jumped out at me after reading through several biographical accounts of his life is the sense that this is a young man in a hurry. “Hyperactive” is what they called him at the military school he attended when he and his brother Jonathan proved too much for their mother and their Chicago school to handle.

In Jesse Jackson Jr.'s short career, he has chomped at the bit to run for mayor of Chicago as well as the U.S. Senate. He bypassed local politics altogether at the beginning of his career, against the advice of his father, jumping right into his first congressional race when Congressman Mel Reynolds was caught soliciting a minor.

He is still hyperactive.

He only misses TWO floor votes in thirteen years in Congress, a feat in and of itself.

He does his homework on the issues before he starts talking.

He sponsors constitutional amendments instead of special interest bills.

He knows the rules and the protocol of Congress inside and out.

He opposes President Bush ideologically but maintains a personal relationship with him.

He’s got three degrees – bachelor of science, master of divinity, law degree.

He has co-written several books, and authored one about why he is who he is.

But - he’s never had a job outside the family business, never been ordained, never taken the bar.

Jackson Jr. HAD to at least talk to Rudy Blagojevich. So did Obama's people. ANYONE who wanted a real shot at getting the Illinois Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama would have. Valerie Jarrett only escaped her own in person meeting or phone sessions because she probably wasn't a real candidate anyway.

But Jackson Jr.'s hyperactivity may have worked against him this time.

When he described Barack Obama at the Democratic Convention this summer, he said “he doesn't always tell people what they want to hear. He tells them what they need to hear."

So Jesse Jackson Jr., I'm not going to tell you what you want to hear, but what you need to hear.

Slow all this apologizing down for something you say you didn’t do. WAY down.

DO NOT concede your bid for the Senate right now – all the facts are not in yet.

Figure out how to tone down that prickly, thin-skinned edge you exude a couple of notches.

Estimate how much of the truth you think we can handle - and tell it before the other guy does.

You’ve got your father’s name. You’ve got more than a passing physical resemblance to him. Now, what we need to see is some of that famous Jesse Jackson Sr. charisma, some of that magnetic, plainspoken charm that used to allow us to see your father for more than he was.

Because in the end, that’s what a real leader is – someone who projects their greatness into our lives in a way that helps us believe a little more in ourselves, and trust a little more in you.