My Choice for Next California U.S. Senator Would Tower Over the Rest: I Support Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Kareem and Barack

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar poses with some relatively shorter guy.

So with Senator Barbara Boxer not raising money for a 2016 reelection contest, the pundits are a-howling about which Democrat (and it will very likely be one) is going to replace her.  Scott “Pride of Placentia” Lay quotes one pundit today — some guy named Willie Brown — as follows:

Things are really going to get complicated in 2015 for the super Democratic consulting firm headed by Ace Smith. The firm represents Gov. Jerry Brown, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris, as well as former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and a host of other people.

The issue will be which of their clients they persuade to run for the Senate seat held by Barbara Boxer if, as expected, she retires at the end of her current term.

And which of their clients they will start grooming to follow Brown when he winds up his fourth term.

Both races will require tens of millions of dollars, which means the work of getting that money together starts now.

My bet is that Smith and company will use the opening of the Boxer seat to clear the deck, with Harris running for the Senate and Newsom running for governor. The only complication would be if Jerry Brown decides he want to run for the Senate, because he would beat everyone.

Yeah, that’s about the way to handicap it, except that I don’t see any chance of Jerry Brown running.  (But I could see his wife, Ann Gest Brown, doing so — with Brown doing the necessary arm-twisting, with the threat of more than three years left in his second term, to get her through.)  There are plenty of people in state government whom I’d like to see advance — aside from Harris, that would include Betty Yee, John ChiangDave Jones — and, for the Governor’s role, I’d prefer our own Loretta Sanchez to any of the names Willie Brown mentions except Harris.  (I’d also take a depressed Debra Bowen over a non-depressed almost anyone else.)

But when I asked myself who I would really like to see represent our state in Washington DC, I came up with a different name, a man who I think is the person our state needs to send to national prominence at this time to address the major issues of our time.

As you may have gathered from the photo, that man is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — and I am not kidding even one tiny bit.  If you suspect otherwise, here’s a link to his time magazine piece on policing and violence that you have got to read.  One section of it is currently making the rounds of Facebook in the following form:

Kareem on Police Accountability

That’s simply the perspective that we need in government right now.  The election (and, even more, the reelection) of a Black man as President has ripped open sores in our body politic, leading police in New York to argue that it is their right, unbridled by and unaccountable to government officials and the public, to declare something that looks a hell of a lot like martial law against communities who look a hell of a lot like imperial subjects.  We need someone who is articulate, brave, charismatic, dogged, educated, fair, genteel, human, and intellectual — I could have kept going there — to represent a position that is considered peculiar — and almost foreign, despite it being the basis for our own Constitution — within our political discussions.  Kareem can do all that and get elected and reelected overwhelmingly.

Here are some more excerpts from his piece in Time:

The recent brutal murder of two Brooklyn police officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, is a national tragedy that should inspire nationwide mourning. Both my grandfather and father were police officers, so I appreciate what a difficult and dangerous profession law enforcement is. We need to value and celebrate the many officers dedicated to protecting the public and nourishing our justice system. It’s a job most of us don’t have the courage to do.

At the same time, however, we need to understand that their deaths are in no way related to the massive protests against systemic abuses of the justice system as symbolized by the recent deaths—also national tragedies—of Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, and Michael Brown. Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the suicidal killer, wasn’t an impassioned activist expressing political frustration, he was a troubled man who had shot his girlfriend earlier that same day. He even Instagrammed warnings of his violent intentions. None of this is the behavior of a sane man or rational activist. The protests are no more to blame for his actions than The Catcher in the Rye was for the murder of John Lennon or the movie Taxi Driver for the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. Crazy has its own twisted logic and it is in no way related to the rational cause-and-effect world the rest of us attempt to create.

Those who are trying to connect the murders of the officers with the thousands of articulate and peaceful protestors across America are being deliberately misleading in a cynical and selfish effort to turn public sentiment against the protestors. This is the same strategy used when trying to lump in the violence and looting with the legitimate protestors, who have disavowed that behavior. They hope to misdirect public attention and emotion in order to stop the protests and the progressive changes that have already resulted. Shaming and blaming is a lot easier than addressing legitimate claims.

It helps too that Kareem is a Muslim — a Muslim who is about as far away from malicious stereotypes of Muslims (and perhaps especially of Black American Muslim converts) as imaginable.  For those who don’t know, Kareem converted to Islam while still at UCLA, at age 21, although he didn’t reveal it until the day after the 1973-1974 Lakers (the actual best team in history, even though Michael Jordan’s Bulls eventually did a little better in a talent-diluted NBA) won their first championship in LA.  He did so, he said because he was [Wikipedia quote warning]:

latching on to something that was part of my heritage, because many of the slaves who were brought here were Muslims. My family was brought to America by a French planter named Alcindor, who came here from Trinidad in the 18th century. My people were Yoruba [90% of whom live in southwestern Nigeria], and their culture survived slavery…  My father found out about that when I was a kid, and it gave me all I needed to know that, hey, I was somebody, even if nobody else knew about it. When I was a kid, no one would believe anything positive that you could say about black people. And that’s a terrible burden on black people, because they don’t have an accurate idea of their history, which has been either suppressed or distorted.

That’s a bracing perspective that deserves to be able to speak its name on the floor of the U.S. Senate.  It’s also a bracing antidote to the hateful foreign policy still being goosed by for Vice-President Dick Cheney.  California would be giving the nation, and the world, a gift by lifting a man of such a background — someone who can understand the best of Islamic and African culture and translate it to the West — to prominence in our political system.  With due respect, the Senate already has a lot of people like Gavin Newsom.

Part of what I appreciate about Kareem is that he is a real scholar, with a deep understanding of urban American history.  Putting aside his first two books, which were about himself, here’s his bibliography:

Anyone who thinks that the presence of co-authors in that list means that he doesn’t know his stuff personally has never heard him interviewed.  And, of course, it’s about time that California was represented by an actor in the Senate rather than as Governor!  (Yes, yes, I know, “George Murphy”….)

The Senate is supposed to be the province of wise men and women with perspective.  Well, this year did not give us a bumper crop.  Kareem, if elected at age 69, would immediately become a star of the U.S. Senate in a way that no other person named as a possible candidate — not even Kamala Harris — would do.  And if he served only two terms, there would still be time for the politicians “standing in line behind him” to have their own chance, someday, to fill his literally and figuratively giant shoes.

What do you think, folks?  Kareem for U.S. Senate?  We not only could do worse, but we probably will.


About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)