Saying Race Is No Barrier, Obama Still Courts Blacks: Message aimed at black voters in Iowa, beyond

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Saying Race Is No Barrier, Obama Still Courts Blacks
By JEFF ZELENY
Published: January 2, 2008


(Joshua Lott/NYT)
Jesse Jackson Jr., in suit, on Saturday in Des Moines tried to persuade black voters to caucus for Senator Barack Obama.

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....

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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.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/us/politics/02race.html?pagewanted=all