Braun, Carol Moseley 1947–

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Carol Moseley Braun 1947–

Politician, lawyer

At a Glance…

Drafted for Senate Run

Candidacy Helped by Opponents’ Fighting

Primary Victory Seen as Powerful Symbol

Won Election Despite Controversy

Sources

Ever on the lookout for political trends and demographic patterns, critics have taken to calling 1992 the “Year of the Woman”—a tag line owed in significant part to Carol Moseley Braun’s rising star on the American civic scene. Relatively unknown beyond Illinois borders, Braun became the biggest surprise of the ’92 political season when she defeated two-term Senator Alan Dixon in the March Democratic primary. Vowing to pry open or, if necessary, bulldoze down the closed doors of the U.S. Senate, Braun successfully rode a wave of anti-incumbency and secured the votes of many who felt the old-boys network on Capitol Hill could stand a change. Generally ignored by her opponents and the press before the primary, the victorious Braun emerged as a symbol of the reinvigoration of the Democratic party and an embodiment of the potent force women candidates began to exert on American politics in the last decades of the twentieth century. Although several controversies taxed the momentum of her candidacy as she approached the November 3rd general election, Braun so successfully tapped voter discontent with the political status quo that she handily won election as the first black woman to the U.S. Senate.

Carol Elizabeth Moseley Braun was born August 16,1947, to a middle-class family in a segregated neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. Instilled with a strong sense of community interest and commitment to racial justice, a teenaged Braun staged a one-person sit-in at a restaurant that would not serve her, withstood the stone-throwing of whites when she refused to leave an all-white beach, and at 16, marched alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., in an open-housing demonstration in an all-white neighborhood.

Braun received her bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1972. She was an assistant U.S. attorney under future governor of Illinois Jim Thompson, and his deputy, Samuel Skinner. In 1978 the young mother—her son Matthew had been born a year earlier—sought and won election to the Illinois House of Representatives in Springfield. “It was immediately obvious that Carol was in her element,” Braun’s former legislative aide, Sue Purrington, was quoted as telling People.“She liked the power play and the control.”

Braun brought a glowing smile, infectious laugh, and disarming candor to her position, as well as an implacable commitment to the rights of the downtrodden and an

At a Glance…

Born Carol Elizabeth Moseley, August 16,1947, in Chicago, IL; daughter of Joseph (a police officer) and Edna (a medical technician) Moseley; married Michael Braun (divorced); children: Matthew, Education: University of Illinois, Chicago, B.A.; University of Chicago Law School, J.D., 1972.

U.S. Attorney’s Office, assistant attorney, c mid-1970s; Illinois House of Representatives, Springfield, state representative, 1978-88, became assistant majority leader; Cook County Recorder of Deeds, 1988-91; elected to U.S. Senate, 1992.

Selected awards: U.S. Department of Justice special achievement award; best legislator awards from the Independent Voters of Illinois, 1978-88.

Addresses; Office— 201 North Wells St., Suite 900, Chicago, IL 60606; or c/o U.S. Senate, Washington, DC20510.

ability to bring together rival political factions. She fought for reform in education, welfare, health care, and gun control, often taking on members of her own party when she felt blind party loyalty was interfering with progress. Even when going to the mat with ideological opponents, Braun never let the bitterness and venom of legislative wrangling supplant her personal warmth, arguably her most potent political weapon.

In 1983 Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, named Braun his floor leader in the legislature, even though she was not the senior legislator from the city. But her unflinching independence, evidenced in her reluctance to follow Washington unquestioningly, reportedly led to his blocking a 1986 recruitment of her to run as the state’s lieutenant governor. Other events that year—her marriage ended in divorce, her brother died from a drug and alcohol overdose, her mother suffered a debilitating stroke—brought her to the lowest emotional point she had ever seen, but she found a strength, particularly in her religious faith, that empowered her to persevere. In 1988 she was elected Cook County Recorder of Deeds, the first black elected to an executive position in the county. Running an office with 300 employees and an $8 million budget, Braun was credited with streamlining the agency through computerization and eliminating political patronage through the implementation of a code of ethics.

Drafted for Senate Run

Braun was intending to seek reelection as recorder when President George Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to serve on the Supreme Court, an action she publicly decried, arguing that Thomas did not have the judicial record to warrant his serving on the high bench. When the nomination process turned from questions about Thomas’s intellectual caliber and career to questions surrounding his alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill, a law professor and one-time Thomas colleague, the issue for Braun and for millions of Americans took on a broader meaning. “To be honest, I couldn’t bring myself to watch the hearings full time,” Braun was quoted as telling Ebony, regarding the often explicit televised interrogation of Hill, a black woman, by the white males serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The whole thing was an embarrassment. I mean, it was an embarrassment from the very beginning and by the time [it began focusing on] the sexual harassment issue, it was beyond embarrassing, it was mortifying.”

Illinois senator Dixon’s vote to confirm Thomas served as a vivid illustration of the insulated world of the U.S. Senate and prompted a call for some diversity among its members. (The body has historically been composed of white males.) Eyes quickly turned to Braun, who, as a black woman, cut the figure of prototypical outsider at a time when “insider” and “incumbent” were labels seen increasingly as political liabilities. Liberal activists particularly pinned hopes on Braun, whose advocacy of mainstream democratic causes contrasted sharply with the record of Dixon, who in 1991 sided with President Bush, a Republican, 58 percent of the time, more than any other northern Democrat. But Braun, weighing a Senate run against Dixon, needed more than the urging of her traditional liberal camp. And she got it. “By the time I got requests from white males in Republican counties in downstate Illinois, I knew something was up,” she told the New York Times.

Although anti-incumbency fever had gripped the country—a recession and a check-writing scandal in the U.S. House of Representatives had further fueled the “throw the bums out” cause—Braun, by no means a political innocent, knew that her role as giant-killer would not be easy. Illinois senator Al “The Pal” Dixon had never lost an election in his 43-year political career and was the champion vote-getter in state history. Political observers painted a bleak picture for Braun, whose outsider status would be pitted against Dixon’s name recognition, his sizable war chest, and his appeal to many conservatives.

Indeed the press paid scant attention to Braun, focusing instead on Dixon and a third primary candidate, Alfred Hofeld, a multimillionaire personal injury and products-liability lawyer and a political newcomer. The publicity she did get usually concerned her grass-roots campaign, which was beset by resignations, disorganization, and charges of mismanagement. She also got little help from her fellow politicians, garnering the support of only two members of the Illinois congressional delegation. Even Braun’s ideological ally, Senator Paul Simon—whose 1990 reelection campaign Braun had co-chaired—endorsed the more conservative Dixon. Despite fund-raising help from feminist Gloria Steinem, Braun’s candidacy appeared so unpromising that political organizations created to provide seed money to women’s campaigns across the country gave her nothing or just token contributions late in the race.

Candidacy Helped by Opponents’ Fighting

But it was this invisibility and low-key profile that political observers say were Braun’s most valuable assets. During the campaign, Hofeld spent roughly $5 million on advertisements that trashed Dixon as the archetypal incumbent, an entrenched senator out of touch with his constituency and in the pockets of special interest groups. Dixon retaliated by dishing out $2 million for ads defending himself and targeting Hofeld. Braun was untouched in the fray. And by not participating in the negative advertisements, the defining feature of many modern campaigns, Braun emerged looking the least political and—in this period of anti-politics—the most attractive of all the candidates. “We were hammering [Dixon] and he was hammering us and nobody was hammering her,” David Axelrod, a Democratic media consultant who worked for Hofeld, commented in Advertising Age.“She was the beneficiary of a set of circumstances that... uniquely formed to help her.”

Braun, who would later reject the argument that a third candidate rather than the appeal of her message was at the root of her primary victory, reached beyond her core constituency in the black and liberal communities. She traveled the state, delivering speeches that voiced the themes she felt an electorate in the midst of a recession and hungry for change wanted to hear. She made job creation, universal health care, and increased funding for education the cornerstones of her bid. In a testimony to her political savvy, Braun did not dwell on the Thomas-Hill affair, which had provided the spark for her candidacy, because she knew that a majority of citizens still supported Thomas’s confirmation. Instead, she artfully played to the issue that made the hearings so embarrassing and disconcerting to her and others, particularly to women: the Senate as a white male sanctum.

As a woman and as an African American, Braun’s call for change—and there were many such calls in the primary season—was the most credible. “I’m running to return a true Democrat to the Senate,” she was quoted as saying in the Nation.“But also to give that body a healthy dose of diversity.... There is still a lot of anger over Clarence Thomas. But what inspires me is that that anger is focused much more against a system of ideological patronage and a Billionaire Boys Club whose abandonment of domestic policy has brought us to a social and economic precipice.”

Primary Victory Seen as Powerful Symbol

Despite spending only $350,000 on the campaign—she could only afford two television advertisements, which ran one week before the election—Braun was the candidate who delivered the victory speech when the votes were counted. The final tally had Braun at 38 percent, Dixon at 35, and Hofeld at 27. Her victory, helped by votes she received from crossover white Republican women, was celebrated by those who would encourage more women to compete for the greatest political trophies in the land, including entry into the 98-percent-male Senate. The Democratic party in 1992 boasted 16 women running for the Senate, and at the national convention in July, six of the candidates, including Braun, were introduced to national audiences in the hope that the party would appear as the legitimate tool to upset Washington D.C.’s political state of affairs.

Determined to frustrate Braun’s wish to become the first black woman senator and the first black Democratic senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction was Richard Williamson, a one-time assistant secretary of state in the Ronald Reagan White House and a former aide to President Bush. Although the candidates were expected to have far more equal financial backing than was the case in the primary, some observers felt that Braun could not enjoy the luxury of keeping a low profile and slipping through the political cracks in the general election. Williamson, who initially had been recruited by the Republican party to run as a sacrificial lamb against the powerful Dixon, made it clear early on in his candidacy that he would use any means possible to cast Braun as a big-spending, big-taxing liberal.

Braun’s supporters hoped she would not shrink from the anticipated barrage of criticism and that she would be able to sustain a viable campaign. Braun voiced her support for a personal income tax increase on the top one percent of wage-earners, $100 billion worth of cuts in defense spending, a capital gains tax cut (which would decrease taxes on the increased value of investments), and a universal health care plan. “It’s a historic candidacy and we’re looking to make history,” she was quoted as telling the Boston Globe. “The state is ready and willing to strike a blow for revitalizing our democracy and opening the doors to the Senate.”

Won Election Despite Controversy

History was indeed made, but not before several scandals had eroded the huge lead Braun had carried over from her primary victory. The most taxing political crisis came when a local television station reported that Braun had mishandled a $28,750 royalty payment made to her mother on timber sales from family-owned land in Alabama. Williamson capitalized on the controversy, accusing Braun of lacking integrity because the money had not been turned over to the state, as required by law, to determine if it should be used to help pay Edna Moseley’s nursing home bills, which were being funded by Medicaid. Braun admitted mishandling the money, and her favorability ratings dropped precipitously. Also dogging her candidacy were concerns leftover from her primary fight—namely that she had not built a disciplined campaign and that she was running on a general anti-incumbency platform rather than on detailed, well-articulated positions.

But Williamson failed to present himself as a reasonable, strong alternative, and Braun managed to win a decisive ten-point victory, garnering support from a broad-based coalition that spanned racial, geographic, and gender lines. On November 3, 1992, Carol Moseley Braun joined other female candidates, including Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California, in winning entrance to the U.S. Senate and in shaking up the white male political hierarchy in Washington, D.C.