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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 6302
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, January 02, 2008 - 04:07 pm: | 
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Saying Race Is No Barrier, Obama Still Courts Blacks
By JEFF ZELENY
January 2, 2008
WATERLOO, Iowa — At a recent focus group of black voters in South Carolina, strategists for Senator Barack Obama presented a videotape of a speech he delivered at the Jefferson Jackson Dinner in Iowa, featuring images of an overwhelmingly white audience applauding earnestly.
It was designed to convey a particular message: that Mr. Obama was drawing enthusiastic support from white voters in Iowa and, more implicitly, that race was not a defining obstacle here in the first contest of the presidential nominating campaign.
Yet even as Mr. Obama maintains that his candidacy transcends racial divisions in American politics, his campaign has vigorously courted Iowa’s relatively small number of black voters. Outreach to pastors, civic leaders and student athletes are pieces of a rarely discussed element of the campaign here to seize upon excitement at the prospect of electing the first black president, which would resonate with black voters beyond Iowa.
The historic moment is not lost on Wyome Powell, 64, who moved here more than four decades ago from Mississippi in a civil-rights-era migration of blacks to Waterloo. Ms. Powell said that she had talked about the possibilities of Mr. Obama’s candidacy with her family back in Oxford, Miss., but that they remained skeptical of his viability.
“I do believe he can win in the state of Iowa because I see a lot of white people following his campaign, and it will carry him over to South Carolina and all Southern states,” Ms. Powell said in an interview before Sunday services at Union Missionary Baptist Church. “They need to know he can win at this day and time and age.”
Since arriving in Iowa nearly a year ago on his first campaign trip, Mr. Obama has carefully worked to navigate the politics of race. While he has made only a handful of appearances in black churches across the state, his campaign has mounted the most extensive effort in the history of presidential caucuses here to find supporters among Iowa’s 60,000 black residents.
The state is about 95 percent white, so the majority of his supporters are white as well. But in a tight contest among Mr. Obama, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and John Edwards of North Carolina, campaigns are working to bring new voters to the caucuses, and blacks are an important target of the Obama campaign.
While only 50 of 1,781 precincts in Iowa are predominantly black, strategists say, the population of African-Americans is diffuse enough to potentially add voters in precincts across the state. Voting registration records in Iowa do not track race, so the Obama campaign built its own database of black voters in the last 10 months.
In recent weeks, the Clinton campaign has strongly courted black ministers and civic leaders in Des Moines, Waterloo and other cities.
The Rev. Frantz Whitfield, interim pastor at Mount Carmel Baptist Church in Waterloo, signed on with the Obama campaign in May after meeting the senator. But in the week before Christmas, Mr. Whitfield suddenly received a visit from former President Bill Clinton and the former basketball star Magic Johnson when they were passing through Waterloo.
“In the past month or so, the Clinton campaign has really been pushing hard to key people in the community, trying to persuade us pastors,” Mr. Whitfield said in an interview before his sermon on Sunday. “They have a good approach and everything, but we know who we want to support. We’re committed to Senator Obama.”
Yet it was the Clintons who attended church services at Mount Carmel on the Sunday before Christmas, delivering separate remarks to the congregation. Mr. Clinton left his red necktie behind as a gift for Mr. Whitfield, who nevertheless said he remained an Obama supporter even though Mr. Obama has not accepted invitations to visit the church.
The pastor said the excitement and pride among elderly members of his congregation convinced him to support Mr. Obama.
“They’re never going to see an opportunity like this again,” he said. “They said it’s not very often that we see a black man that’s running for president. It will catapult him to where he needs to be after Iowa.”
While Mr. Obama campaigned before largely white audiences on the Sunday before the caucuses, the Obama campaign’s outreach efforts to black voters were under way in Davenport, Des Moines and here in Waterloo, where aides and surrogates traveled from church to church. (Waterloo, whose population is 12.4 percent black, has 32 churches that are predominantly African-American.)
Rick Wade, a senior adviser to the Obama campaign who oversees African-American outreach, delivered the Sunday sermon at Mount Carmel. It was the third church of the day where he answered questions about Mr. Obama’s candidacy and implored the faithful to attend the caucuses on Thursday.
“Show up and stand up,” Mr. Wade said, telling his audiences that the caucuses would take no more than an hour or two. “Let’s be real about this. There are a whole lot of folk who stood for more than an hour and marched for more than an hour, so the least that we can do is give one hour of our time on caucus day.”
Mr. Wade, a native of South Carolina, reminds his Iowa audiences of their outsized importance in the presidential nominating contest. After a faith breakfast at Union Missionary Baptist Church, he said voters in the South Carolina primary on Jan. 26 — perhaps 50 percent of which will be black — could be swayed by what happens in Iowa.
“My home is South Carolina, and some of my friends ask me a question: Are there any black folk in Iowa?” Mr. Wade said, speaking over the laughter in the room. “I’ve been making calls back to South Carolina and I tell them, yes, there’s plenty of black folk in Iowa. And if they show up on caucus day, Barack Obama will show out.”
Still, black voters are expected to make up just 2 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers, according to The Des Moines Register’s poll. So most of Mr. Obama’s 87 campaign days in Iowa have been spent courting whites, whose approval his strategists believe is far more crucial to proving his electability to blacks elsewhere. Beyond South Carolina, black voters could play a role in the outcome in a number of the states voting on Feb. 5, including New York, California and Illinois.
So even as the Obama campaign is most immediately focused on its effort in Iowa, recent focus group sessions with South Carolina voters were the first step of an extensive campaign to telegraph Mr. Obama’s appeal to whites. Even before the outcome of the Iowa caucuses is known, Mr. Obama’s strategists say they have made significant strides in persuading black voters elsewhere of the prospect of electing a black president.
“The greatest barrier to breaking through in a big way was the skepticism among African-American voters that white voters would embrace a black candidate,” David Axelrod, the campaign’s chief strategist, said in an interview. “It would send a resounding message.”
The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/us/politics/02race.html |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 11024
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, January 02, 2008 - 04:35 pm: |
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Our guy, Carey, is from Iowa. Wonder why he doesn't weigh in on this big upcoming event?? |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 6034
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 03, 2008 - 01:07 pm: |
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After all this, Tonya, you better not come back on here trying to talk Black. |
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