It's one thing for The Washington Post to remember the late Democratic Party chair and Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown as they named a street for him in D.C. last week. But sometimes, they allow too much exaggeration. In a story by Lonnae O'Neal Parker on Wednesday, Brown's son Michael, a D.C. councilman, was allowed to suggest he was a veritable Michael Jordan of politics:
Like a generation of Washington insiders and common folks alike, Brown embraces the larger-than-life legacy of his father. But he has also struggled with its burden. “It’s hard when folks say, ‘Who is the next Ron Brown?’ ” he said. “Just like it’s hard to say, ‘Who is the next [Michael] Jordan?’ ”
The Post left that whopper of an assertion right before the article jumped to an inside page, so if you flipped to another article, it's the last impression you were left. Parker didn't lay it on quite that thick, but the honorifics were still there:
Ron Brown was on a mission to help connect U.S. businessmen to trade opportunities in the war-ravaged former Yugoslavia when he died in 1996.
The trip was his 19th ambitious world-trade mission, including a historic one to South Africa, since Clinton appointed him commerce secretary in 1993. He brought vision and muscularity to a Cabinet position that often lacked vigor. It was the latest laurel in a career filled with dexterity and intention....
It is a still a source of speculation, what could he have been — secretary of state, vice president or, perhaps, the first black president — if he’d lived.
Then, in paragraph 33, after all the talk of how Brown led the Democrats to victory in 1992 and Clinton said he had "a fine mind and a big heart," there was a brief mention of Brown's controversies before the plane crash.
At the time the 23-year-old CT-43A aircraft carrying Brown and 34 others went down in heavy rain on the side of a mountain in Dubrovnik, Croatia, critics were charging that he had used Commerce Department trips to reward prominent Democratic businessmen; his personal finances, friendships and even dealings with his son were the subject of a federal independent counsel investigation; and some close to him had urged him to step down.
So instead of being the first black president, he could have been the first black Commerce Secretary to resign under a cloud of controversy. You can see why the "first draft of history" in this case is a bit less hyperbolic than the liberal second draft. A Brown confidant named Nolanda Hill made a number of assertions about shady dealings (including Brown's son getting hired) that few in the media wanted to report in the mid-1990s.
As for Parker, a few may remember she was the sneering Post reporter who rained fire on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and other black conservatives as she described watching Roots with a young cousin in 1999. They weren't Michael Jordans. They were sellout house negroes:
"There is a scene [in Roots] where kidnapped African Kunta Kinte won’t settle down in his chains. ‘Want me to give him a stripe or two, boss?’ the old slave, Fiddler, asks his Master Reynolds. ‘Do as I say, Fiddler,’ Reynolds answers. ‘That’s all I expect from any of my niggers.’ ‘Oh, I love you, Massa Reynolds,’ Fiddler tells him. And instantly, my mind draws political parallels. Ward Connerly, I think to myself. Armstrong Williams. Shelby Steele. Hyperbole, some might say. I say dead-on. ‘Clarence Thomas,’ I say to my Cousin Kim. And she just stares at me. She may be a little tender yet for racial metaphors. I see them everywhere."
That quote won her the "Damn Those Conservatives Award" that year.
