Traveling off the beaten trail

It was an unlikely setting for Republican presidential hopeful John McCain to campaign in Monday: the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where black protesters were beaten in a 1965 march for voting rights.

McCain joined hands later with black women who sang gospel spirituals to him as they rode a ferry across the muddy Alabama River near Gee’s Bend, a community famous for its quilts and for its role in the civil rights struggle.

“Ninety years old and I never thought I’d see this,” quilt maker Nettie Young said. “Republicans don’t come to this bend.”

That was exactly the point.

McCain was not hunting for votes in the overwhelmingly Democratic black communities of central Alabama. Nor will he be looking for support from residents of the hurricane-ravaged 9th Ward of New Orleans on a visit later this week.

But at a time when President Bush and his party are highly unpopular, McCain’s weeklong tour of places that he describes as forgotten by other presidential candidates is part of his drive to brand himself as a different kind of Republican -- one with wider appeal.

“That’s the biggest obstacle he faces as a presidential candidate: how to distance himself from a very unpopular president,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University.

McCain’s visits to impoverished black and Democratic areas of the country, Abramowitz added, are mainly symbolic, projecting an image that can attract moderate white voters. The itinerary for McCain’s “Time for Action” tour includes Inez, Ky., where President Lyndon B. Johnson launched his campaign against poverty; and economically hard-pressed Youngstown, Ohio.

“The time for pandering and false promises is over,” McCain said in Selma. “It is time for action. It is time for change.”

In 2000, Bush adopted a similar approach, campaigning as a “compassionate conservative” who cared about education and economic opportunity for the poor.

But McCain faces a daily barrage from Democrats who say the Arizona senator offers no meaningful change from Bush.

In a biting response last week to McCain’s economic agenda, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York said he “looks at the hole that President Bush has dug us into and says, ‘Why not more? Let’s go deeper.’ ”

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, told a Philadelphia crowd that “the change this country needs will not come from a third term of George W. Bush, and that’s exactly what John McCain is offering in this campaign.”

“McCain has to distance himself from Bush anyway, but this line of criticism increases the pressure on him to highlight those differences,” said Dan Schnur, who was communications director of McCain’s 2000 campaign.

McCain has tried to do that without alienating conservatives who support the president. He says that Bush has failed to respond adequately to the threat of global warming. He also has opposed the administration’s detention and interrogation policies for suspected terrorists, although he voted against a Democratic bill that would have banned waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning.

“I promise you, my friends, I’ll close Guantanamo Bay, and we will never torture another person in our custody again,” McCain told MSNBC last week.

McCain also has a history of friction with his party. He has tangled with leaders of the religious right. His push for campaign finance reform rankled party leaders.

But on the economy and the Iraq war, McCain’s agenda barely differs from Bush’s.

Senior McCain advisor Charles Black acknowledged that Bush and the party’s tainted image posed challenges for McCain, especially amid an unpopular war and an economic slowdown. But he played down the significance.

“The guy we nominated is independent, and is not perceived by the voters to be the same as the president, nor as a typical Republican,” Black said. “So we’re sailing into the wind a little bit, but not with all the baggage that some other Republicans might have.”

In Selma, where most residents are black, McCain used the word “change” seven times as he spoke to a nearly all-white crowd of more than 100 on a riverbank by the bridge where the Bloody Sunday beatings occurred 43 years ago.

“It’s time for change,” McCain told the crowd. “The right kind of change; change that trusts in the strength of free people and free markets; change that doesn’t return to policies that empower government to make our choices for us, but that works to ensure we have choices to make for ourselves.”

McCain hailed the courage of civil rights leader John Lewis, now a Democratic congressman, and others who marched in Selma. He said he would spend the week gathering ideas about how government can help Americans.

Asked about the lack of African Americans in the crowd, McCain said he knew many voters would not support him.

“But I’m going to be the president of all the people, and I will work for all the people and I will listen to all people -- whether they decide to vote for me or not,” he said. “I’m going to places, frankly, in this country where there is the greatest need, and whether, at the end of the day, they choose to vote for me or not is not my major purpose.”

--

michael.finnegan@ latimes.com

maeve.reston@latimes.com

Finnegan reported from Los Angeles and Reston from Alabama.