The Breakthrough by Gwen Ifill

Author:Gwen Ifill
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780385529204
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-22T21:00:00+00:00

IT IS NOT ENTIRELY shocking that sons and daughters follow their fathers and mothers into the family business. “Nobody questions the Ford children when they want to go into the car business,” said Essex County (New Jersey) freeholder Donald Payne Jr., whose father is a member of Congress. “The examples you have growing up are naturally going to cause you to lean that way, and when it comes to my father, why wouldn't I want to be like him?”29

In 2006, Payne was one of two sons of Newark's black political establishment elected to the city council. Ron Rice Jr., who followed in his father's footsteps onto the city council, split with his father politically when the son decided to align himself with another young leader, Newark mayor Cory Booker. This was particularly significant because the elder Rice was Booker's opponent.

“I ran for city council against my own father's judgment and without his support,” the younger Rice told me candidly. “I ran with Cory Booker against his support—against him, to be frank. But it wasn't because I loved Cory Booker more than my dad. It was because my dad's generation told him constantly to wait your turn, wait your turn.”

But legacy politics does not always take. John James, the son of former Newark mayor Sharpe James, ran for city council the same year and lost. And although Representative Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, a Michigan Democrat, was able to pass on her political genes to her son, Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, he became ensnared in troubling behavior that ultimately tarnished the family name.

At the height of the 2008 presidential campaign, the younger Kilpatrick was so enmeshed in a lurid sex scandal that even he admitted his endorsement would not help Obama. “He's running a very smart campaign,” Kilpatrick conceded. “And his campaign is not to be walking, holding hands, singing ‘Kumbaya with Kwame Kilpatrick.”30

True enough. When Kilpatrick was eventually forced to relinquish the mayor's job and sent to prison for obstruction of justice, Obama was far away. And Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick's political legacy was extinguished.

Sandpaper scratches. Almost all parents can enumerate ways their offspring can disappoint. But in politics, the family name is the coin of the realm. It opens doors like a charm, but it falls to the legatee not to abuse the advantage—or get sunk by the baggage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.