Barron's Magazine

Gatemouth analyzes more primary election results and notes that in the race to unseat Rep. Ed Towns, the former Black Panther, Charles Barron, did pretty well among whites in Brownstone Brooklyn.

One of the surprises of this race was Barron's strength among white voters in the Brownstone areas. In the 52nd, Barron held Towns to a near dead heat (Towns 583, Barron 516) among a nearly all white constituency. But, reports are that the closer one got to Atlantic Yards, the better Barron ran. By contrast, in the Concord Village development located far from the yards, and largely composed of retired Jewish school teachers and struggling young families pretending to be Yuppies, Barron was beaten soundly.

So how much of a fluke were Barron's results this year, and how seriously should we consider Barron's promise to run for the seat again in two years? I'll leave that up to you, but Gatemouth's work could be seen as a road map for how to tweak Barron's message for his next race. (Assuming, for the sake of this exercise, that Barron would ever stand for a tweaking in the first place.)

-- Azi Paybarah

Roger Green just called to say he's a) staying in the race for the Ed Towns Congressional seat in Brooklyn and b) shocked that Charles Barron accused him yesterday of reneging on a deal to drop out of the contest.

Green was particularly upset by Barron's suggestion that he was staying in the race to assure Towns' reelection, calling it "totally illogical and demagogic."

"I think it's a shocking example of tantrum politics," he said. "I was under the impression that Charles and I were having a private and civil discussion about the future of the Congressional district. I'm still committed to defeating Congressman Towns, but I believe temperament and humility are requisite for public office."

(Barron had said he was angry that he hadn't heard back from Green this week to discuss forming a united front against Towns. Green said that he was in Chicago over the weekend and in Washington yesterday.)

"I'm a deliberative person," Green added. "I try not to be impulsive in my decision making and my actions."

-- John Koblin

IAPE 1096, the union representing Wall Street Journal staff, responded to the Dow Jones memo outlining the company's new "strategy project" with a memo of its own. Full text after the jump.

Friends - on the heels of the outsourcing of 31 IAPE-represented employees today in South Brunswick comes the news that management will review the company's news operations, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron's and Dow Jones Newswires, with the intent of improving them.

However, management must take pains not to mistake attrition for efficiency, or sacrifice quality in the pursuit of cost savings.  read more »

Too often, efforts to improve the quality or scope of Dow Jones publications -- including the recent launch of the Journal's Weekend Edition and, before that, Personal Journal -- have instead left new ventures with fewer staff and resources than they need or were promised, and came with short-sighted cost cuts elsewhere in the enterprise....

The Politicker missed what I'm told was a heated, biting indictment of Al Sharpton by his ally Charles Barron, who was angered by the Rev. for endorsing against a black woman.

It was, one reader with long experience in black politics points out, a rarity: a public airing of a political grievance between two leaders, the sort of thing that -- whatever the hard feelings -- would never occur between, say, Sharpton and Charlie Rangel.  read more »

UPDATE: A reader sends on some notes from Barron's press conference: "You go ahead and support Freddy all you want but we will not accept the disrespect of a black woman who did nothing to you but respect our race and our movement. We will not tolerate that. How dare you get on your radio broadcast and lie? C. Virginia Fields did march across the Brooklyn Bridge. She was there. You need to check your records....Just because Freddie flip-flopped, don't get mad at Virginia. Virginia said it was a crime then."

Charles Barron, the black radical Councilman from East New York, has always wanted to take on the "white power structure."

And in today's Newsday, Barron's fantasy comes true. In the round-up of his re-election contest with a challenger named John Whitehead, the paper runs a photo of the other John Whitehead -- former Goldman Sachs chief, Reagan deputy secretary of state, Lower Manhattan Development Corporation Chairman, and a man Liz Smith (in Newsday!) once called "chairman of the establishment."  read more »

The Whitehead pictured in today's paper is a man Barron has, basically, been running against all his life.

The sun may have been ascendant in Scottsdale, Ariz., lastweek, but the mood was glum.  read more »