Indianapolis Star - "Carson vs. Elrod"

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Indianapolis Star - "Carson vs. Elrod"

Here are two stories looking at the leading candidates in the special election to fill the 7th District congressional seat. The story on Republican Jon Elrod is followed on this page by the profile of Democrat Andre Carson.
Republican Jon Elrod

Socially conservative Republicans look at Jon Elrod's position on gay marriage and question whether he is true to his party.
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Democrats look at Elrod's suburban, almost rural upbringing and question whether he is fit to represent an urban congressional district.

And others look at Elrod's life -- an amateur stage actor and former rugby player who studied abroad in London -- and note that he hardly seems a typical Indiana lawmaker, much less a Hoosier Republican.

Elrod, it seems, doesn't mind being seen as a guy willing to thwart convention. By trying to defeat Democrat Andre Carson in a special election March 11 for the 7th District congressional seat, he's clearly bucking conventional wisdom. Carson's grandmother, the iconic Julia Carson, held the seat for a decade until her death in December.

And Elrod was the lone Republican in the Indiana House -- out of 49 -- who refused to sign a petition demanding a floor vote on an amendment that would effectively make gay marriages, already illegal, also unconstitutional. Elrod hasn't had a chance to vote on the matter yet. But he says he is willing to become the first Republican in the General Assembly to vote against the amendment in the four years it has been an issue.

Stalwarts among Hoosier conservatives such as Eric Miller say his stance "puts him at odds" with the Republican Party. Some conservative bloggers have gone as far as to call Elrod a "fake Republican" or a RINO -- Republican in Name Only.

Elrod rejects such notions. He points out that he supports the elimination of property taxes on homesteads and opposes abortion, two of Miller's other passions. And he favors requiring local governments and school districts to win public approval on new building projects. But he also frequently says that people are entitled to their opinions of him.

"I don't want to say I don't care what other people think about me," he said, "but I am just going to do what I think is right. And everyone else can make their decision about that."

Yet even how Elrod goes about sizing up his place in the Republican universe leaves you wondering whether the guy just enjoys sticking a thumb in the eye of the party establishment. Republicans, he states plainly, have in recent years been too willing to let their leaders slide on traditional party dogma -- fiscal responsibility and smaller government -- so long as they made plenty of noise about hot-button social issues.

"As long as they got fired up about the definition of marriage amendment or the Terri Schiavo case, that was fine -- then you could spend whatever it is you want to spend. . . . And I'm not one of those. I really believe in narrowing the scope of government," he says.
Party mirror

In some ways, said Brian Vargus, a political scientist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Elrod seems to epitomize the struggle gripping the Republican Party, the same struggle evident in the Republican presidential nominating process. John McCain is capturing votes but has yet to be embraced by Christian conservatives.

"The Republican Party is undergoing significant tensions within itself," Vargus said. "It is kind of hard to characterize them one way or another."

The irony with Elrod's opposition to the marriage amendment is that Elrod said his position is rooted in a basic Christian principle.

"I think marriage is a sacrament. That means it is something ordained by God. To have government dictating what that is is generally a bad idea," he said. "Right now we define marriage pretty poorly by the government. You are married just as long as you want to be. . . .

"That is not at all what my church teaches."

Elrod, who is single and a lifelong United Methodist, has seen marriages dissolve in front of him regularly through his law practice, which includes divorce cases. But he said his position on marriage -- that it is a church matter, not a state matter -- is also grounded in the writings of C.S. Lewis, the Christian sage behind "The Chronicles of Narnia," and a host of Christian books.

Elrod grew up attending University Heights United Methodist on the Southside and has more than a casual fascination with church history. He spent three years studying theology at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, mostly out of desire to learn more on a subject he enjoys talking about. He remains a thesis shy of a master's degree.

In recent years, Elrod has been ensconced Downtown at Roberts Park United Methodist, a church with a thriving homeless outreach and more than its share of liberal Democrats, including blogger and Indiana Democratic Party communications director Jennifer Wagner.

Elrod, Wagner said, is a good guy. But don't look for her to provide him campaign ad material.

As she puts it, "I've never seen him kicking any puppies."
Lessons of Brixton

Elrod, 30, has charted his own course in other ways.

Through high school, college and his adult life, Elrod has played a number of roles on the stage. He was the male lead in "The Gift of the Magi." He was the sword-fighting Inigo Montoya in "The Princess Bride" and cast as the fastidious Felix in "The Odd Couple."

He played rugby while an undergraduate at Cincinnati's Xavier University, giving it up only after knocking his shoulder out of socket for a third time.

As a history major, he spent a semester studying abroad in northern England at Harlaxton College, where both dorms and living quarters are housed in a 19th century English manor house. He used the location to his advantage, traveling to Scotland, Ireland and Belgium.

As a law student at Indiana University, he spent a semester studying British law in London and serving an internship with a wig-wearing English barrister.

To get the most from the experience, he chose not to live with other Americans but instead stayed in a house with a cluster of students from around the world -- Aussies, New Zealanders and a German, among others. Together, they navigated the quirky London neighborhood of Brixton, known for its African, Caribbean and Middle Eastern immigrants and as home of the mosque where the shoe bomber drew his inspiration.

"It was a very dodgy part of town," Elrod recalled. "They had relaxed drug rules. You would walk off the subway and hear people shouting 'Skunk weed. Weed. Skunk,' " he said, referring to the marijuana vendors. Elrod says he never took them up on their offers and has never done drugs.

But he said his adventures in England had a different kind of lasting effect.

"I think it just opens your mind," he said. "You learn all kinds of things."
Community connections

How all of that serves Elrod in his current campaign to succeed the late Julia Carson is unclear.

One of the main knocks Democrats have against Elrod is that he doesn't know the district he wants to represent or the gritty issues it faces because they see him as something of a political carpetbagger.

The 7th District, looking something like a paint splotch dropped in the heart of Marion County, covers Indianapolis' urban core, but its roughly circular boundary stops short of the county's fringes. And that is exactly where Elrod grew up.

Elrod's opponent, Carson's grandson Andre, talks about growing up on the Near Northside in the "hood," surrounded by gang wars and drug dealers and at one point living in a homeless shelter -- all of which he says helps him relate to the people in the city.

Elrod, meanwhile, grew up on a 14-acre homestead east of Southport. His surroundings included a farm pond and enough trees to screen the family's home from nearby streets and houses.

He moved Downtown and into the district in 2003, about eight months after he graduated from Indiana University's law school.

Since then, he said, he has lived within roughly seven blocks of Fountain Square. Democrats say they find it strangely coincidental that he moved into his current Orange Street home -- and into his current Indiana House district -- right before the residency deadline for candidates in 2005.

Elrod acknowledges that political considerations were at least part of his choice in an address. But he points out that in his five years in the Fountain Square area, he has bought and renovated three houses. He has joined the neighborhood redevelopment organization. And he attends a Downtown church.

"I guess they can tell me how long I need to be there to be a resident of it," he said. "I have invested in there physically and metaphorically."

The other knock Democrats have against Elrod is what state Democratic Party Chairman Dan Parker sees as a thin record of achievement that boils down to little more than winning elections -- as a township adviser and state legislator -- in Democratic districts.

Elrod readily acknowledges he has been a "backbencher" in the House -- a Republican freshman in a body controlled by Democrats.

Aside from making suggestions on bills, he said his biggest achievement may be an amendment to an animal cruelty bill that made it a felony to attend animal fighting contests, a measure now law. But, he asked, how much can be expected when it is the nature of the parties in control to avoid giving freshmen from the other side any trophies to take back to the voters?

And he said his five-year career in the law -- handling issues such as wills, custody matters, business formations and personal injury cases -- have given him a fundamental knowledge of how laws affect people's lives.
Family ties

Elrod's family is Republican from way back.

His grandfather, French Elrod, was a Marion County commissioner from 1955 to 1965. His father, Bob, has been the attorney for Republican City-Council members since 1970. His mother, Bev, has worked for years with Bob on GOP precinct committees. They recall another young Indianapolis Republican who, like Jon, was criticized as being too inexperienced for office -- a mayoral candidate named Richard Lugar, who is the one politician the Elrod family most identifies with.

"He turned out to be a great mayor," Bob Elrod said. "Did he have much experience running the city? No. He had none. But he was a smart guy that had a basic instinct about what needed to be done."

In many ways the Elrods -- Bob, Bev and Jon -- see themselves as Lugar Republicans who see the GOP as being a party that cares mostly about fiscal responsibility and a strong defense, and less so with the social issues that get so much attention. They were thrilled that Indiana's senior senator recently endorsed Jon in his bid for Congress.

"He is the standard by which I compare everyone as a politician," Jon said.

And it is how Elrod hopes other Republicans can somehow see him.

********
Democrat Andre Carson

'I am multifaceted'

Carson's Muslim faith, Farrakhan's funeral speech raise questions for congressional candidate

Andre Carson's greatest political asset may be his grandmother's name, but one of his biggest liabilities is proving to be her funeral.

That's because his family gave a spot in the parade of dignitaries who eulogized Congresswoman Julia Carson to Louis Farrakhan, whom Jewish leaders consider one of America's leading anti-Semites, gay rights activists consider a homophobe and who famously referred to white people as "devils."

In recent weeks, Andre Carson has been reassuring Jewish leaders here and in Washington that Farrakhan's appearance wasn't his idea. He has spoken publicly about his distaste for discrimination, homophobia or racism of any kind. He has talked repeatedly of his desire for unity.

But the Farrakhan episode also called attention to something that went largely unrecognized before -- that Andre Carson is a Muslim and that, if elected March 11, he would be Indiana's first Muslim representative in Congress and only the second in U.S. history.

How his faith will factor with voters, if at all, is unknown. But in a post-September 11 world, it has led some of his own campaign advisers to interject, without being prompted, that Andre Carson is not an Osama bin Laden Muslim. And since the funeral -- which included Farrakhan's own plug for Carson's candidacy -- the young Carson has been trying to explain that he also is not a Louis Farrakhan Muslim.

Carson says his faith is just part of who he is. "It is not the totality. Like every other human being, I have various faces," he said. "I am multifaceted."

He does, indeed, have many faces: raised Baptist, taught in Catholic schools, introduced to New Age transcendentalism by his grandmother and hired to work in government counterterrorism operations.

Adult convert

Carson, 33, says he can't recall exactly when and where, but it was roughly 10 years ago that he first recited the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith. Like most observant Muslims, he says he doesn't drink alcohol.

He tries to faithfully pray the five daily required prayers of Islam at the appointed times but admits that his busy schedule, of late, makes it difficult. He makes up the missed prayers when he can. One staple, says his wife Mariama, a 32-year-old elementary school assistant principal, is that they try to pray together as a couple at least once a day.

Carson has yet to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, not unheard of for a man his age, but it is still something all able-bodied Muslims must do.

Since his conversion, Carson has been a regular at Friday afternoon prayers at the Nur-Allah Islamic Center, where the imam is Indianapolis firefighter Michael Saahir, who denounces terrorism as un-Islamic.

The Islamic Center has its roots in the Nation of Islam, but with the death of its founder in 1975, the denomination began to split. One branch, represented in Indianapolis at Nur-Allah, embraced a moderate, universal form of traditional Islam that abandoned the call for black separatism.

Farrakhan would, at around the same time, re-establish the Nation of Islam and much of its racially charged message. But he did it without people like Saahir, who felt black separatism ran counter to Islam's call for universal unity.

It was in this fractured setting of black Islam in America that a spiritually curious teenager named Andre Carson began trying to sort out his beliefs.

Dodge City

Andre Carson had been born into a solidly Baptist household. His mother, Tanya Carson, made him read Bible stories each night. Before he could go to bed, he had to present her with written summaries of what he'd read. He was baptized in his grandmother's church, Tabernacle Baptist, on the Eastside.

Yet through the seventh grade, he went to a Catholic school, St. Rita's, on the Near Northside, where he developed an interest in the priesthood. It ended when he hit puberty, he admits now, but not until after his priests encouraged him to begin studying the world's religions in preparation for such a calling.

So, in a neighborhood where gangs and drugs were rampant, an adolescent Andre Carson began studying the Talmud, a collection of ancient oral Jewish teachings, and the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred text of Hindus.

His grandmother encouraged such pursuits. Although a Baptist, she had dabbled in New Age transcendentalism herself. And she would offer to her grandson volumes of Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi poet of Persia, and point him to the writings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the 20th-century Jewish mystic who was a contemporary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

From Heschel, Carson says he was impressed by his notions against religious bigotry and "really living the golden rule."

A former rap artist, Carson considers himself a poet. And he says he was struck Rumi's ability to reach deeply into the soul. "It emanated with me in terms of my own writings of poetry," he said, "and speaking from his heart and not being restricted."

Perhaps most transformative, though, was the "Autobiography of Malcolm X," the story of a complex man who preached black separatism as a spokesman for the Nation of Islam only to moderate his views before his death.

That story -- and the young Nation of Islam men patrolling his neighborhoods -- made Andre curious, he said. But he couldn't get past the divisiveness embodied by Farrakhan.

"That did not match my experiences or personal beliefs," Carson said. "So, for me, it was like it was good to see the drug dealers being pushed out. But the philosophy and the ideology do not match who I am."

Even so, Carson attended Farrakhan's Million Man March in 1995 -- with a white friend, he says -- because of his interest in black men taking responsibility, rather than any aspect of Farrakhan's persona.

"I was one of the many people," Carson points out, "who didn't agree with everything he said. Still don't."

Muhammad Siddeeq, the father of a friend, helped Carson sort through things. He spent hours answering Carson's questions about Islam, the Nation and Farrakhan. "It was really touching for me," Siddeeq said, "because he was such a youngster and he was seeking clarification."

Andre confronted a choice many young black men considering Islam face, Siddeeq said: To follow Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, with its street credibility on social matters but record of divisiveness, or more universal Islamic teachings that promote tolerance. At crunch time, Siddeeq said, Carson chose tolerance.

"This man," Siddeeq said, "moved in the spirit of what was right and what was wrong and he made the right decision, at the right time."

New to politics

Until six months ago, Andre Carson was simply a guy with a career, a family and a grandmother in Congress. He had been extensively involved in managing Julia Carson's campaigns. But he never had been a candidate.

He has spent the bulk of his adult life -- nine years -- as an officer with the State Excise Police, a plainclothes job enforcing alcohol, tobacco and gambling laws. He also spent nearly a year dealing with counter-terrorism efforts at the state Department of Homeland Security, where Carson says he worked as a watch supervisor in a job that worked with the FBI, the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Administration on issues ranging from supremacist groups to threats of terrorism.

Many American Muslims and others have grown leery of the government's surveillance efforts, saying they have intruded into personal privacy. Carson said he is sensitive to that, and opposes racial and ethnic profiling. In the give and take between civil liberties and security, he says civil liberties must come first.

Carson said he was drawn to law enforcement as a kid, from reporting drug activity in his neighborhood through a crime-watch program and, more pointedly, after hearing a friend tell him about being molested by a man in the neighborhood. Carson says he saw fear in the boy's eyes. "I wanted to do something about it," he said. He eventually earned an undergraduate degree in criminal justice.

Carson says his first notions about running for political office came to him when he was 10, prompted by his 1984 trip with his grandmother to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. That was the year Jesse Jackson made his first run at the presidency. It opened his eyes to what could be.

When there was a Democratic vacancy on the City-County Council last summer, he jumped at the opening and won the seat through a party caucus. In November, he was unopposed for re-election. Then his grandmother announced her terminal cancer.

Others began mentioning his name as a replacement. And a day after being sworn in to his first full council term again in January, he became a candidate for Congress. He won the party's nod, again through the party caucus process.

The March 11 special election will mark the first time Carson has had to face voters in a competitive race.

His platform, so far, seems cut from Julia Carson's playbook. First and foremost, he opposes the war in Iraq and wants to bring the troops home quickly. He supports gay rights and abortion rights. He talks about being a "voice for the voiceless." He wants to preserve Social Security.

More than anything, though, he said Julia taught him to help people.

"She got a thrill out of it," he said, "and it rubbed off on me."

With the competitive race has come closer scrutiny. And while Carson said he understood that comes with the territory, he has bristled at times over questions about Farrakhan's appearance at the funeral.

Old ties

Julia Carson and Louis Farrakhan go way back.

They were together, says Andre's wife, on the night Andre Carson was born. They were acquainted from Farrakhan's visits to meetings of the Congressional Black Caucus. When Farrakhan came to Indianapolis in 1997, Julia showed up at Farrakhan's news conference and gave him a hug. And as she lay dying in her Near-Northside home, Farrakhan called to wish her well.

Andre Carson knew little of the personal history. He said he had never met Farrakhan. Word of Farrakhan's phone call came to him from his grandmother's professional caregivers, and from Julia herself. As a grandson, Carson insists he was far from the final voice on her arrangements.

But he still sought advice from Siddeeq, who said he must honor his grandmother's wishes.

Andre says he owed his grandmother more than most grandsons.

His father was mostly absent as Andre grew up. His mother was loving but had significant personal problems he doesn't discuss. At their low point, when Andre says he was a preschooler, he and his mother wound up living in a homeless shelter. That's when he said Julia, whom he called GiGi, took them in and gave him a home for good.

Andre says he watched her live out a life of service. He also says she tried to teach him responsibility by forcing him, at age 14, to start paying her $50 a month for rent. He got a part-time job washing cars and working as a mover. To this day, Andre says he obsesses about his mortgage payments because of that lesson on paying the bills.

"I can never forget where I come from," he says now. "I will always honor her as long as I live."

Surprising eulogy

So, in the end, he says he chose to honor his grandmother's wishes for her funeral. But matters grew more complicated for him when Farrakhan, while speaking over Julia's casket gave what essentially amounted to an endorsement of Andre as his grandmother's political successor. It was something he and his campaign staffers say he could easily lived without. It sparked letters to the editor referring to Andre as Farrakhan's emissary. Indianapolis political blogger Gary Welsh says Carson should repudiate Farrakhan's endorsement.

"If he disapproves of what he stands for then you wouldn't want his endorsement for the office you are seeking. And I've never heard that," Welsh wrote.

Jewish leaders initially were concerned as well. They asked for a meeting with Carson, heard his explanation of the invitation and accepted it, according to Marcia Goldstone, of the Jewish Community Relations Council. Carson met with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful Jewish lobby in Washington, which their spokesman, Josh Block, describes as "a good conversation."

Brian Vargus, a political scientist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, said the Farrakhan flap has been overblown because the minister is, in his view, largely irrelevant to most voters. He says the fact that the 7th Congressional District leans heavily Democratic should override other factors. But he said it will be interesting to sees if political opponents will try to make an issue of Carson's faith.

Marion County Republican Chairman Tom John and Carson's opponent, State Rep. Jon Elrod, say Carson's faith shouldn't be an issue.

But polling last year by The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life suggests that it already is. Pew's survey found that 45 percent of Americans say a candidate would be less likely to garner their support if he or she holds the Muslim faith.

Carson has tried to deflect this, saying his faith is merely a compartment in his life.

And indeed his support for abortion and gay rights would be at odds with many Muslims, whose views on social matters tend to be conservative. He has said little about Middle East peace other than he supports a secure Israel and a two-state solution to peace process for Israel and the Palestinians.

The bottom line, he says, is that his candidacy could be a good way to teach people about racial and religious unity. He is convinced his faith won't be an obstacle, saying, "I think the voters are bigger than that."

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