Black Voters

Does Oprah Winfrey's endorsement help Sen. Barack Obama? She doesn't hurt. The question seems to be on everyone's lips. Mr. Obama's campaign announced Monday that Ms. Winfrey will join the presidential hopeful next month in the important lead-off states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. I doubt that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, was thrilled to hear that news. The conventional wisdom holds that celebrity endorsements don't mean much, if anything. But, hey, this is Oprah!

KURT Schmoke's tenure as mayor of Baltimore is now history. Assessments of Mr. Schmoke's performance vary, but it is surprising that after three terms the legacy of the city's first elected black mayor has less to do with his accomplishments than with the campaign colors he used in his last political race.He easily won that election but will forever be remembered as the man who couldn't resist making a racial appeal to black voters when his hold on power was threatened. Facing a sharp challenge from then-City Council President Mary Pat Clarke, Mr. Schmoke used red, black and green -- black liberation colors -- in his campaign to appeal to the racial sympathies of black voters.

A place of honor in mayoral voteIn 1997, then-speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich invited the Rev. Jesse Jackson to "sit in a place of honor" during the president's State of the Union address. Mr. Jackson accepted the invitation.The reaction from many Republicans and many blacks was akin to "how could they?"For me, the speaker's invitation was a small, yet important, step toward Republicans re-establishing a relationship with black communities and their leadership.And now, as Republican candidates seek common ground and opportunity to re-establish a relationship with black communities throughout the city as we face an election, many on both sides are asking "why should we?"

Gov. Parris N. Glendening trolled for votes in Baltimore and Prince George's County yesterday, campaigning with two key allies on a day devoted to generating enthusiasm among African-Americans.Glendening outlined a new minority loan program, won the endorsement of a minority contractors group and happily put in appearances with Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and Prince George's County Executive Wayne K. Curry, who had feuded with the governor before offering their endorsements two weeks ago.Along the way, Glendening and other Democrats stepped up their rhetorical attacks on Republican Ellen R. Sauerbrey, casting her as a bad choice for black voters in the Nov. 3 election, someone who would "turn back the clock on African-American progress."

Howard County's black leaders are hoping to make the minority vote more influential this year, and black Republicans are trying to help their party win a share of that vote in what's shaping up to be a crucial county election year.The African-American Republican Club of Howard County and the Howard County Young Republicans held a 90-minute introspective session last night called "Blacks and the Republican Party" in the hope of finding ways to attract more blacks to the GOP.In contrast to other, more solidly Democratic counties, where only about 10 percent of blacks vote Republican, such introspection isn't necessarily wasted in Howard.

W. Russell Johnson is a small-business man and a Republican. He hates taxes, thinks welfare is destroying America's cities and wants schools to go back to the basics.He also is African-American. And four years ago, like a huge majority of black voters, Johnson voted for Parris N. Glendening -- helping to elect yet another Democrat rather than taking a chance on a conservative Republican he knew little about.But with another election near, Johnson is taking a fresh look at Ellen R. Sauerbrey, the leading GOP candidate.

LIKE IT or not, African-Americans have inherited a historical exemption that allows them to employ racial pejoratives freely and even playfully. But the exemption has been strained to the breaking point in Monicagate, as black intellectuals struggle to explain why the African-American electorate supports President Clinton so much more vigorously than the white one does.The Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson conjectured reasonably enough on the New York Times op/ed page that black voters rushed to Mr. Clinton's aid because they feel historically vulnerable to invasions of privacy such as those committed during independent counsel Kenneth Starr investigation.

BEFORE CAMPAIGN '98 fades entirely, a recollection of images, voter wisdom, home truths and famous last words:Clinton's charisma is the real thingTo watch Bill Clinton at New Psalmist Baptist Church was to think of Frank Sinatra, The Beatles and other matinee idols whose presence brought audiences to peaks of excitement.After his talk the Sunday before the election, the president went to meet parishioners who had watched him from the basement on closed-circuit television. He paused for a moment in the doorway, taking in the electric enthusiasm of the crowd -- marveling at it himself, or so it seemed.

WASHINGTON -- This is the summer of Democratic discontent -- and I am not talking about Monica Lewinsky.I'm talking about leading Democrats in key states who suddenly find themselves struggling to hold on to black votes they no longer can take for granted.Although black voters often have turned out in unusually high numbers to support individual Republican candidates who have reached out to them, something new appears to be happening.Democratic defector"When was the last time you saw a black Democratic mayor defecting from a Democratic incumbent governor?"

Traveling along the back roads of the Deep South, a landscape rich in legend and history, one can still hear stories of black men meeting horrible deaths at the hands of white mobs, of men tossed from bridges, beaten with beanpoles or shattered by car bombs.In scattered tiny towns, aging white men are living out their days shielded, even embraced, by their communities, despite suspicion and sometimes evidence that they committed these killings against blacks during the civil rights era.Their presence, living freely and unpunished all these years, has magnified the grief of friends and relatives who mourn the black victims.

This time last year, virtually no one could have predicted that today both of the nation's two major political parties would be headed by African-Americans. Democrat Barack Obama's historic election as the first black president and Michael S. Steele's elevation to chairman of the Republican National Committee mark a watershed in race relations in this country that is literally unprecedented. Yet neither man could have hoped to achieve his present position without the political empowerment of African-Americans made possible by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed blacks across the South access to the ballot.

The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama By Gwen Ifill Doubleday / 288 pages / $25.95 It's too bad Republicans backing their candidate in the recent presidential election chose to demean Gwen Ifill's The Breakthrough in hopes of disqualifying the venerable black journalist as the moderator of the vice presidential debate. Now that it's published, they should read the book. Ifill, a former reporter for Baltimore's Evening Sun and now the moderator and managing editor of PBS' Washington Week and a senior correspondent of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, explores the landscape of black politics.

They voted when they had to pay a poll tax for the privilege, sat in the back of buses, chopped wood to heat segregated schools and stayed indoors at night when the Ku Klux Klan was in town. America's older black voters - who grew up under the doctrine of "separate but equal," came of age during the civil rights movement and this week saw an African-American elected president of the country that once deemed them less than full citizens - said yesterday that they could not believe what they had witnessed.

Gambling opponents are hoping that an alliance with black churches produces an upset defeat of the slots referendum when an expected record number of African-Americans turn up at Maryland polling booths next month. Slots foes hope that black voters energized by Barack Obama's presidential bid will heed their ministers' objections to gambling - as sermonized from pulpits across the state in recent weeks - and cast a ballot against Question 2, which would change the state's constitution to allow slot machine gambling.

CINCINNATI - Appearing before some of his presidential rival's most ardent supporters, Sen. John McCain urged delegates to the NAACP convention yesterday to support school vouchers as a way to improve education in largely black, underperforming school systems. McCain acknowledged that he will have difficulty making inroads among black voters. But he used his speech to the Baltimore-based civil rights organization to criticize the education views of his Democratic opponent, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, and to argue that the country needs to move away from "conventional thinking" with regard to public schools.

They gave us the bullet to save themselves; they will give us the ballot to save themselves. - Frederick Douglass Unfortunately, the nation did not feel as indebted to black Americans as Douglass suggested it would. Perhaps the great ex-slave orator, abolitionist and native Marylander was not as confident as he sounded. He may have found it more politic to suggest that white America would do the right thing if only to repay black soldiers who fought on the Union side. But there was no immediate indication Americans believed their system was endangered by withholding the franchise.

A day after her hoped-for monster triumph in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries fizzled, Sen. Hillary Clinton no longer seemed to care whom she offended. She dared to speak about race and gender in public with the candid language that even political consultants usually keep private. Despite losing big to Sen. Barack Obama in North Carolina's Democratic primary and barely squeaking out a victory in Indiana, she said in an interview with USA Today that "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on."

Race, says Michael Fauntroy, a black political scientist at George Mason University, is the "undertow" of American politics. And yet, suddenly, its presence has been muted by a figure of confident, youthful charisma. For the first time in our history, an African-American - Sen. Barack Obama - is one of the leading contenders for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. For black voters, in particular, that fact is both thrilling and frightening. It raises a number of profound and sometimes troubling questions: He has an awesome r?

WEST COLUMBIA, S.C. -- When Hillary Rodham Clinton started running for president, Wanjulia Ezekiel was thrilled. "I was looking forward to the advancement of a female," she said. But Sen. Barack Obama is getting her vote in this week's Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina. "He speaks to the possibility that I dreamed about as a child," explained the 40-year- old civil engineer from Columbia, the state capital. With Democrats on track to select either the party's first female or black presidential nominee, polls have suggested that black women such as Ezekiel are torn by conflicting loyalties to race and gender.

In primary election campaigns, the fighting is often vicious because the differences are so small. That helps to explain why, despite so many more urgent foreign and domestic issues on the table in the Democratic presidential campaign, so much attention has been riveted lately on distractions. Did Sen. Barack Obama oppose the war in Iraq from the very beginning? He proudly did. Did Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton insult the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.? She proudly didn't. Yet former President Bill Clinton suddenly found his honorary "first black president" status in jeopardy after he ridiculed Mr. Obama's version of his Iraq war opposition as a "fairy tale."