HYATTSVILLE — HYATTSVILLE -- When Tom Bacote and his five volunteers walked into Ebony Barbers to talk with the clientele yesterday, their message was simple: Be sure to vote on Tuesday.
That all the customers and 12 of the 13 barbers - all African-Americans - were supporters of Barack Obama was beside the point.
Bacote's get-out-the-vote effort in Prince George's County, underwritten by a San Francisco-based advocacy group called PowerPAC, is part of an eight-state campaign to increase voter turnout in African-American communities for the presidential primaries. Its cost could exceed $2 million, organizers say. If successful, it would likely benefit Obama more than any other candidate.
"It is sort of hard to untangle the two things," said Kirk Clay, the group's field director in Maryland, of his mission and support for Obama. "But we don't care who they vote for; we just want to increase the turnout in African-American communities."
Still, the prospect of large numbers of black men showing up at the polls is such a potential boon to the Illinois Democrat's presidential hopes that Obama has been forced to issue a clear and somewhat curious response to efforts like Bacote's. He wants them shut down.
Worrying that PowerPAC support runs afoul of his pledge not to accept money or support from political action committees, Obama and his campaign officials sent a letter to the group Dec. 28 asking it to stop the effort "without further delay."
The work of a political advocacy group, whose financing is not subject to the same contribution limits and reporting requirements as an individual candidate, the letter said, is "simply not consistent with the senator's clearly stated commitment to complete accountability and transparency in the financing of campaigns for public office."
Organizers in Maryland say they started building their operation a few days before the letter was sent and haven't backed off since. There's no denying that getting African-Americans to the polls benefits Obama, they say, but it benefits black communities even more.
"In the end," Clay said, "what we most believe in is democracy, that the more people get involved, the more they get inspired, the better of America is going to be."
Bacote and his crew were true to that promise yesterday as they walked the grounds of a Hyattsville shopping mall pressing literature into people's hands, urging them to vote - for anyone - and even promising a ride to the polls.
