Gore and Kerry Unite in Search for Black Votes
By JIM DWYER and JODI WILGOREN
JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Oct. 24 - Al Gore, the former vice president, sprinted across six pulpits Sunday morning to exhort African-Americans to avenge his disputed 2000 defeat in this deadlocked state, while Senator John Kerry hit South Florida, clapping along with the choir at another black church in Fort Lauderdale.
The men - the vanquished Democratic nominee of four years ago and the candidate he was campaigning for - had the same purpose: to drive up turnout among a critical party constituency in the face of recent polls suggesting some slippage.
"If any of you ever think to yourself that your vote doesn't count, or that one vote doesn't count, you go and tell them to talk to me," Mr. Gore said in his first presidential campaign swing to Florida since the 36-day recount fight here four years ago. "If any of you felt frustrated or angry about what was done four years ago, I want to encourage you not to ignore those feelings. Don't turn it into angry actions. Love thy neighbor. But vote for your future."
And on Monday, another Democratic powerhouse is set to take up the cause. Mr. Kerry plans to be joined in Philadelphia - and in a conference call to 1,000 African-American ministers - by perhaps the most popular politician in black America, former President Bill Clinton, who will then head to Florida.
Black voters are crucial for Democrats, and the party has been seeking to galvanize them in record numbers this year. But the urgency, with just over a week left in a breathtakingly close race, is also driven by recent polls showing President Bush's support among African-Americans may be double the 8 percent he won in 2000.
The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington group that focuses on blacks, attributed the uptick largely to an unusual Republican push in black churches and the party's backing of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages.
Mr. Kerry's campaign said its own polling did not show such erosion and insisted their candidate would make up for any ground gained by the president with new registrations and a sharp increase in black turnout.
But aides acknowledged that Mr. Kerry, whose home state of Massachusetts is 5 percent black, has struggled to connect with minority audiences in a campaign whose national-security emphasis has often overshadowed domestic issues. "There was a little bit of reluctance because it's not been a campaign that has focused specifically on the needs of urban America," said Mike McCurry, Mr. Kerry's chief spokesman. "They were waiting to see would he talk about their issues, would he go to their places, would he speak with a little bit of soul. I think we're obviously doing that."
But Republicans said they had made inroads by spending more money than ever before on black media and outreach. "They've given us an opening and we've taken it," said the party chairman, Ed Gillespie.
Mr. Gillespie and Ken Mehlman, Mr. Bush's campaign manager, credited their improved position among blacks in part to the president's "faith-based initiative'' to give religious institutions more of a role in delivering social services. David Bositis of the Joint Center noted that his poll also showed stronger opposition to same-sex marriage and civil unions among blacks than in the population over all.
"I think Bush's faith-based initiative, combined with the gay marriage issue and also Bush's sort of overtly Southern religious personality has made him more popular among black conservative Christians," Mr. Bositis explained.
Mr. Gore presented himself on Sunday as an example of the importance of voting. It was a pilgrimage that took him to six Baptist churches on the north side of Jacksonville, where nearly every person in every pew was African-American.
While he was lacerating in his criticism of President Bush, he scarcely mentioned Senator Kerry, and neither did the pastors who were his hosts. Instead parishioners were urged to prevent a repeat of what Mr. Gore described as the injustice that had been done in 2000.
Speaking as an unchallenged authority on how fouled up an election can get, Mr. Gore urged his audiences to take advantage of new rules that established statewide early voting, one of the remedies adopted after tens of thousands of ballots in Florida were uncounted or disqualified in 2000.
"I can see there are quite a few ladies here who didn't get up and just throw something on," Mr. Gore said. "You didn't press the snooze button on your alarm. There's an alarm sounding on this election. You don't have to wait until Nov. 2.
"If you vote early, you will give them plenty of time to count your vote - to make sure that there is not any kind of" - Mr. Gore paused for a long moment, as parishioners called out "cheating," "stealing," "thievery" - to finish his sentence.
"You fill in the blank," Mr. Gore said. "More important, you fill in the ballot."
Mr. Gore, who received an extraordinary 90 percent of the black vote nationally in 2000, led a cadre of high-profile campaigners for Mr. Kerry on a pulpit parade Sunday morning. Senator Edward M. Kennedy was at a church in Philadelphia. And Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards, was likened to a Southern preacher by the pastor of the Allen Temple A.M.E. Church in Cincinnati before headlining a rally in Dayton, Ohio.
"We have to get our souls to the polls," Representative Danny K. Davis of Illinois told the predominantly black crowd in Dayton, where Mr. Edwards was joined by the actor LeVar Burton, the television judge Joe Brown and the singer BeBe Wyans.
The Democrats' effort came days after the Joint Center released its poll, which found 18 percent of black voters backing Mr. Bush, compared with 69 percent for Mr. Kerry. In the parallel survey before the 2000 election, Mr. Bush had 9 percent, just above what he earned on Election Day, and Mr. Gore 74 percent.
Other studies have shown similar movement for Mr. Bush; the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll gave him 17 percent among blacks nationally, and one poll published Sunday in the St. Petersburg Times showed 19 percent of African-Americans here in Florida supporting the president. Both newspaper polls had large margins of sampling error because of the small samples of black voters.
Mr. Kerry's campaign aides and other Democrats questioned these results.
Cornell Belcher, a pollster who focuses on African-Americans, said his surveys in battleground states showed Mr. Bush in single digits. Nationally, Mr. Belcher said, he has found only 10 percent of blacks approve even "somewhat" of Mr. Bush's job performance, while 89 percent say the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Mr. Bositis of the Joint Center said 2000 "was the ultimate perfect time for a Democrat to run among black voters," because the second Clinton term brought marked improvement in African-American unemployment, wages and home ownership, and said Mr. Bush would definitely "get more than he got last time."
Concern about the Republicans' appeal to black Christians over cultural issues like gay marriage was clear when the Rev. Jesse Jackson campaigned with Mr. Kerry at a black church in Miami two weeks ago. Scores of hands went up when Mr. Jackson asked whether parishioners had relatives dying of cancer or in jail, whether they faced job discrimination or studied in second-class schools. But the pews fell silent when he wondered who had a family member wanting to marry another person of the same sex.
"Well, then how did that get in the middle of the agenda?" Mr. Jackson demanded. "If your interests are cancer, and Medicare, and education, and jobs, and Social Security, and decent housing, then how did someone else put their agenda in the front of the line?"
Some black Democrats said they expected a surge in turnout that the polls were not taking into account.
"What that poll doesn't measure is the enthusiasm and the passion that African-Americans feel about this election, and that bodes well for John Kerry and the Democrats," said Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, who has been asked to campaign by Mr. Kerry's side this week.
"I think that Kerry's biggest problem is that he is not Clinton," Mr. Cummings said. "A lot of people are expecting a Bill Clinton, and that's not who Kerry is, but on the other hand his heart is right."
Mr. Kerry in recent days has been playing up his support of an increase in the minimum wage and other domestic priorities his aides believe appeal to African-Americans. This was the fourth Sunday in a row he had spent in a black church. He earns amens as he recites "Amazing Grace'' and describes his campaign as a continuation of the civil rights movement.
"Vote your climbing of a mountain," he said at Mount Hermon A.M.E. Church in Fort Lauderdale. "Vote the unfinished journey."
Mount Hermon's pastor, the Rev. John F. White, promised to lead a pilgrimage to the polls next Sunday after services, and compared Mr. Kerry to Moses leading the children of Israel to the promised land.
"For the last four years we've been living in the wilderness," he shouted from the pulpit, Mr. Kerry seated by his side. "There is one who can divide the Red Sea for us and we can cross over on dry ground. You've got a vote in your hand - use it on Election Day, use it and be liberated and be set free."
Jim Dwyer reported from Jacksonville for this article, and Jodi Wilgoren from Fort Lauderdale.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/politics/campaign/25blacks.html
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