Clinton’s Push for Black Support Signals Shift in Democratic Contest : Politics: Campaign is moving to states where racial issues have greater weight. Analysts give Arkansas governor an edge, but challenges loom.

When Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton came to one of the nation’s leading black colleges here Friday, he was barraged with questions that had popped up in the snows of New Hampshire about as often as tulips.

Why did he support the death penalty when it is disproportionately applied to black men, one student at Morehouse College asked Clinton.

Did his repeated references to the “forgotten middle class” mean that he was forgetting about the poor, another asked.

The searching questions from the students at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater marked the opening of a new stage in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. So far, the contest has been fought in states almost devoid of racial diversity: Iowa and New Hampshire, the two states that have already voted, and Maine and South Dakota, the two states that vote next, are all over 90% white.

But over the next two weeks, the campaign moves on to states where blacks constitute at least a quarter of the electorate in the primaries--from Georgia and Maryland on March 3, to South Carolina on March 7 and then Mississippi and Louisiana on Super Tuesday, March 10.

That demography presents a new test for the Democratic candidates: finding a way to build a biracial coalition in an era of racial polarization.

In the past two races for the nomination, the Democratic candidates virtually ceded the black vote to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. But with Jackson on the sidelines--and Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder withdrawing from the race after a slow start--polls now show that as many as three out of five black voters across the South are undecided.

Most analysts give Clinton, as a regional favorite son, the edge in eventually capturing those voters. He has amassed more support from black elected officials than any of his competitors; on Friday, U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia endorsed Clinton, joining a list of backers that includes Reps. Mike Espy of Mississippi and William J. Jefferson of Louisiana.

“On all of those issues that are dear to many of us,” Lewis said in a ringing endorsement speech, “this man can not only talk the talk, but he can walk the walk.”

But, as Clinton’s appearance at Morehouse illustrated, he still faces a challenge in reaching out to blacks while attempting to reclaim middle-class whites who have abandoned the party in recent presidential elections.

“On pocketbook issues, the gap (between Southern whites and blacks) may not be that great,” said J. Bradford Coker, president of Mason-Dixon Opinion Research, a private survey firm that conducts polls across the South. “When you get to the social issues, that’s where it gets tricky.”

For Clinton, the balancing act is complicated by a second strategic consideration. Since the race moved South, his campaign has moved to paint his chief rival, former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, as a cultural liberal who is out of touch with the region’s values.

Georgia Gov. Zell Miller, one of Clinton’s staunchest backers, signaled that strategy last Wednesday when he denounced Tsongas for opposing the death penalty in most instances.

Clinton aides say Tsongas can expect more of the same in the next few weeks. One possibility under discussion within the campaign is stressing Clinton’s support for increasing work requirements on welfare recipients, an initiative Tsongas has not embraced.

But the same issues that Clinton could use to isolate Tsongas from moderate whites may alienate some of his own black support. Already, some associates of Jackson, such as Howard University political scientist Ronald Walters, have charged that Clinton is attempting to subtly stoke racial resentment through his calls for increased “personal responsibility” from the recipients of government aid.

Those concerns were evident in the questions that followed Clinton’s speech to the college students on Friday. Clinton held his ground against the charge that he was abandoning the less fortunate, saying that his program offered new opportunities for the poor as well as the middle class.

Nor did he back off his support for capital punishment--though he gently corrected his questioner by pointing out that studies have shown that the bias in the application of the death penalty does not involve the race of the murderer, but rather the tendency of juries to impose the death sentence more frequently when the victims are white.

(Clinton was correct in that analysis, Leigh Dingerson, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said Friday.)

Still, Clinton tried to soften some edges.

When one questioner asked if Clinton’s previous work with the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of centrist Democrats, meant that he wanted to steer the party to the right, he said that “a lot of the things that are on Rev. Jackson’s agenda I also support.”

Clinton added that the DLC had supported the Civil Rights Act recently signed by President Bush “long before it passed Congress.”

But Clinton did not mention that last May, while he was chairman of the DLC, the organization angered Jackson and other black leaders by passing a resolution denouncing racial hiring quotas--at a time when the White House was insisting the civil rights measure would require employers to hire in just that fashion.

Despite these potential frictions on social issues, Clinton retains significant advantages over his rivals in attracting votes from the black community. As a Southerner, Clinton can talk about healing racial divisions with the authority of someone who was swept along with the civil rights movement that remade the region.

“I grew up in the segregated South,” he told the crowd of several hundred students that gathered in a half-full auditorium to hear him Friday. “I’m telling you, you look at our experience, every time we have permitted ourselves to be divided by race in this region, we have been kept dumb and poor.”