10-02-06, 11:00 am

Charles Barkley, Hall of Fame NBA player, television sports commentator, and author, recently declared his interest in running for the governorship of his home state of Alabama. Once the darling of conservatives champing on the bit for a high-profile Black sports celebrity to tokenize the GOP’s fatuous “big tent” claims, Barkley promptly disappointed his would-be backers by stating that “I was a Republican until they lost their minds,” or, alternately, that he had never been a Republican, only “rich like one.” Indeed, on his short-lived CNN show, Barkley also gave the “wrong” response to a fellow anchor’s question about how he felt about Bill Clinton’s 2002 induction into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame. Instead of providing the anticipated diatribe against white do-gooders pretending to be Black, Barkley replied that Clinton and Carter were the only two presidents of his lifetime who’d ever done anything for Black people. Perhaps not coincidentally, Barkley’s CNN show was cancelled not long after.

CNN may have backed away nervously from Barkley, but not its sister station TNT, which telecasts a number of NBA games along with what I and many others would argue is the best sports commentary show, period, on TV, Inside the NBA. Joined by co-hosts Ernie Johnson and Kenny Smith, Sir Charles is not only unafraid to chew out a player – think Kobe Bryant – for selfish or lackadaisical performance on the court, he is also apt to toss in extra-sports commentary, whether bashing my cherished X-Files or declaring his wish that Bush and Cheney would be “sent fishing,” the show’s favorite trope for a team eliminated from the playoffs. I couldn’t bear to watch broadcast television the night of November 4, 2004, not even my beloved NBA; I retired to bed early that night with wine and DVD’s of Sex and the City. But my brother told me that he and his girlfriend stuck with the Lakers’ game despite the horrible presidential returns, and that when a CNN anchor broke in to TNT’s halftime show with an election update, Barkley directly challenged her for failing to be pro-Kerry rather than pro-Bush, since we already had the Fox Network providing the latter perspective. Apparently the anchor was quite miffed, and for this reason alone I regret playing mass media ostrich that night.

I realize that all of this is fine and well; it’s nice that for every studiously apolitical or Bush-slobbering pro athlete, of which there seem too many to enumerate here, we have our Carlos Delgados, Steve Nashes, and Charles Barkleys. (Interestingly, only Barkley of the three is American-born.) But Barkley is more than just another entertainer with anti-Bush political views. Upon declaring his intent to seek Alabama’s governorship, he has put forth with characteristic – and sometimes controversial – candor his political agenda. “I really believe I was put on Earth to do more than play basketball and stockpile money,” Barkley is quoted in USA Today. “I really want to help people improve their lives, and what’s left is for me to decide how best to do that.” But he has done more than utter vague platitudes, publicly decrying the GOP for being “discriminatory,” objecting to the Iraq war and to the right’s obsession with gay marriage and immigration. Nor are Barkley’s forthright views informed by an opportunistic leftward shift in the wake of Bush and the GOP’s plummet in recent opinion polls; Dave Zirin catalogued a number of Barkley’s jabs against the right in the June 5/6, 2004 edition of Counterpunch. (In fact, Barkley supported Bush in 2000, and Kerry in 2004.) However, what sets Barkley most apart from our garden-variety timorous Democrats is his passionate emphasis on poverty and inequality as the chief ills of American society. “My number one priority is to help poor people,” Barkley has asserted. “In this country, 90 percent of the money is controlled by 10 percent of the people, and that’s not right.” Yes, Barkley is talking class inequality, and in a political environment in which even most liberals shy away from the dreaded “C-word” lest they be accused of waging “class warfare” by the conservatives. It is true that as a presidential candidate, John Edwards also decried the “two Americas,” one rich and one poor, but as soon as his political wagon was hitched to the Kerry team, Edwards fell flacidly silent on issues of social and economic inequality.

Charles Barkley has proven himself to be a public figure not easily silenced. “Who’s afraid of a large Black man?” he taunts in the title of his most recent book, a collection of interviews with prominent African Americans. He foregrounds race and class in a fashion that may disconcert both liberals and conservatives. The mainstream media, including major sports outlets such as ESPN, seem to regard Barkley’s political aspirations as a joke á la the candidacies, however successful, of such cartoonish figures as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura. “Who’d vote for someone who’s thrown a guy through a plate-glass window?” quipped one ESPN pundit, referring to Barkley’s notorious 1997 altercation with a drunken fan in Orlando. The sports swamis bandied about as well Barkley’s recent admission of having lost millions in gambling. To date, ESPN has failed to respond to my request for a written transcript of Barkley’s appearance on Pardon the Interruption the last week of July, in which Barkley verified the seriousness of his political intentions. However, Los Angeles Times sportswriter and frequent ESPN commentator J. A. Adande was kind enough to address my questions about the overall mockery of Barkley’s aspirations. “You can’t tell me he’d be any worse than Arnold or Jesse Ventura. And unlike them, he really does care about the gulf between rich and poor, Black and white,” Adande remarks. But Adande is perhaps correctly circumspect about Barkley’s actual chances to succeed in our present political system:

I think the thing I love best about him – his candor – would be a drawback in politics. Sure, it’s what the voters want to hear. But once in office you’re not dealing with voters, you’re dealing with politicians. They don’t want to hear the truth. They want to make deals, and that takes compromise. Compromise is not a word I would associate with Barkley. In short, I don’t think he’s flawed; I think the system is.

In my heart I know Adande is right; the problem is not the dancer but the dance, and until radical interventions in the structure of our politics take place and effect, corruption and complicity will quash authentic populism and its prospective candidates. And then there are those “I’m not a role model” Nike commercials that put Barkley on the pop culture map back in 1993. That slogan, however cleverly concocted by Nike and however genuinely exemplified by Barkley, is the antithesis of what US culture demands of its political candidates. These faux- role models, Democrat or Republican, must parrot devotion to American military hegemony, parade around more-or-less conventional spouses and children, and, of course, profess faith in God (preferably in an explicitly Protestant one). Charles Barkley expresses scorn for athletes who “thank God” for sports victories; moreover, he writes in his 2002 book (with Michael Wilbon) I May Be Wrong, But I Doubt It, “it’s just wrong, in my opinion, to act as if your religion is more important than somebody else’s” (210). God doesn’t have a favorite team, he insists, and it’s a small leap to conclude from there that God doesn’t exclusively bless America, either.

To echo Adande, then, the very qualities that make us value Charles Barkley as a fellow citizen probably make him unviable as a political candidate, whether governor of Alabama or president of the United States. I doubt that Schwarzenegger’s malapropisms count as candor, but Ventura, too, scoffed organized religion and engaged in his share of outrageous stunts. But these novelty politicians were elected as just that – novelties – and their policies are and were as unconcerned with the crisis of inequality as those of their conventional counterparts. The “C-word” remains Kryptonite to these would-be superheroes, but not to Sir Charles Barkley, still the anti-role-model, and still one of the very few popular culture icons unafraid to talk explicitly about class, race, and poverty. As a socialist, I am sadly accustomed to making futile gestures. Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly endorse Charles Barkley for President of the United States.

Special thanks to J.A. Adande for sharing his time and thoughts.

--Karin S. Coddon is a freelance writer from Southern California. Send your comments to