Saying Race Is No Barrier, Obama Still Courts Blacks
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.
nytimes.com
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.
---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.
---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.
---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.) |
