For Many Blacks, Election Isn’t on Radar

Thelma French has a nightmare, which goes like this: All across Louisiana, indeed all across America, millions of black voters stay home on election day, lulled by good times and convinced they have little stake in the presidential election.

It is French’s nightmare--but it should make Al Gore toss and turn. If the race stays close, black turnout could be crucial in deciding whether Gore or George W. Bush is elected on Nov. 7.

There is no doubt that Vice President Gore will win the majority of black voters. African Americans are the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituents, routinely delivering 80% or more of their votes to the party’s presidential candidates.

But with just three weeks to go in a seesaw contest, Gore is still trying to summon the enthusiastic backing that President Clinton has long enjoyed among African Americans.

Here in New Orleans, few seem interested when French tries to talk politics with other black women at Trendsetters, her favorite beauty shop in the middle-class Gentilly neighborhood. Crime is down and black unemployment stands at a record low, robbing the election of much of its urgency.

“The whole presidential thing just has not been on the radar,” said French, a deputy to Democratic Mayor Marc Morial. “It just shows how hard we have to work.”

Nationally, African Americans make up about 12% of the voting age population. But the distribution is hardly uniform. There are substantial African American populations in several of the states that will likely decide this election--among them Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri and Louisiana--and that could give black voters an outsize influence come November. As a result, the African American community is being courted like never before.

Just last week, the Republican Party launched its biggest minority ad campaign ever, budgeting more than $1 million for commercials on black radio stations across the country. “The more we get the message out, the more likely we think people will become excited,” said Jim Dyke, a spokesman for the Republican outreach effort.

Democrats ‘Getting Our Troops Out There’

Democrats, meanwhile, have placed specially designated field workers in more than a dozen states, part of an unprecedented effort targeting black voters with phone calls, mailings, door-to-door visits and advertisements taped by a range of celebrities, including actor Will Smith, singer Stevie Wonder and author Maya Angelou.

“We believe this will be won on the ground,” said Fred Humphries, political director of the Democratic Party. “So we’re getting our troops out there.”

Some, however, fret the party has taken too long to muster its forces, concentrating instead on a relatively narrow slice of undecided voters, mostly white suburbanites.

“People want to see more,” said one Democrat who is prominent in the African American community and who wished to stay unnamed to avoid antagonizing the vice president. “They want to see more on the ground, they want to see more candidate time, they want to see more message focus . . . like on health care: If you don’t have health care, you’re not worried about a patients’ bill of rights.”

But Donna Brazile, Gore’s campaign manager and a veteran organizer in the African American community, said the vice president “enters the final weeks of the campaign in good shape” among black voters. “We’ll have as much ammunition and as much information as we need out there,” she vowed.

Gore’s hopes may be riding on it. The Bush campaign is counting on just 10% to 15% of the black vote, about what Bob Dole managed in 1996 and what Bush’s father polled in 1988, the recent high-water marks for Republican presidential nominees.

Gore, on the other hand, will almost surely need a big black turnout to help offset Bush’s expected edge among white voters; the last Democrat to carry the white vote was Lyndon B. Johnson, back in 1964.

It was that election that solidified the black exodus from the GOP, long the party of abolition and Abraham Lincoln. Although the shift toward Democrats began in the 1930s, during the New Deal, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower still managed to win nearly 40% of the black vote as late as 1956. Four years later, Republican Richard Nixon was supported by nearly one in three black voters against Democrat John F. Kennedy.

But four years after that, Johnson won a stunning 94% of the African American vote after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The GOP and its candidates have struggled for black support ever since--few working harder than Texas Gov. Bush, who has put forth more effort than any Republican nominee in well over a generation.

His convention in Philadelphia, with its gospel music and parade of black loyalists--including prime-time speeches by former Army Gen. Colin L. Powell and foreign policy advisor Condoleezza Rice--may have struck some as cynically scripted. But Bush has campaigned numerous times in black neighborhoods across the country and has addressed major black organizations that other Republicans shunned.

More substantively, Bush has made the nation’s troubled inner-city schools the centerpiece of his education reform agenda. In Wednesday night’s debate, he decried “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” a line he uses often, and he asserted “there’s nothing more prejudiced than not educating a child.”

At the same time, however, Bush acknowledges the remedial nature of his efforts. “We need to do a better job of explaining why our message pertains to people of all walks of life,” Bush said at a recent Kentucky town hall meeting. “I recognize that.”

In contrast, Gore has a virtual down-the-line record of support on issues of concern to many black voters, from raising the minimum wage to outlawing so-called racial profiling to backing affirmative action. He even has a family history in support of civil rights; in 1970, his father, Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Sr., lost his seat in part because of his tolerant stand on racial matters.

The vice president, however, is no Bill Clinton. The president’s humble roots, his outreach to Africa, racially diverse appointments and, above all, policies spreading the prosperity have made Clinton a figure revered within the black community like few other white politicians, past or present.

Gore inevitably suffers in contrast. “He’s been under Clinton’s shadow,” said Jacques Morial, an investment banker and advisor to his brother the mayor. “And that’s a long, long shadow.”

By several statistical measures, life is better than ever for many African Americans. Few, however, seem to give much credit to the man at Clinton’s side these past 7 1/2 years. (The president himself has kept to the background, though he may increase his profile in the black community by election day.)

Support for Gore May Be Reflexive

“Clinton will go down in history as one of our better presidents,” said Jessie L. Conerly, whose New Orleans contracting business thrived under the booming economy. “People forget fast, but I can remember the days of high unemployment and high interest rates.”

And Gore? “I don’t know a whole lot, beyond that he’s vice president,” Conerly said. He pauses. “I think he’s genuine. Cares about people.”

The 56-year-old Conerly is supporting the Democratic nominee. But more out of reflex, it appears, than any great passion. And that lack of conviction is a problem for Gore.

“He’s carrying the black vote,” said Silas Lee, a pollster and political scientist at New Orleans’ Xavier University. “But you have to look at intensity. That’s where you have to really mount an aggressive voter outreach.”

To that end, Gore can count on help from several allies, including the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, which will spend $9 million on targeted turnout in a dozen states, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose operation PUSH is mounting its own get-out-the-vote drive.

Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts Are Planned

Many of the nation’s big-city mayors are also lending a hand, such as New Orleans’ Morial, who plans to field a fleet of yellow school buses to ferry black voters to the polls on election day.

Thanks to huge black support, Clinton twice carried Louisiana. But Morial concedes the climate is different this election. Indeed, Louisiana now tilts toward Bush.

In 1992, after 12 years of Republicans in the White House, “there was a great sense that we had an opportunity to make a change, and that had a propelling effect,” Morial said.

This time, Morial and other African American leaders are talking up efforts to win Democratic control of the House--which would produce black chairmen of the Judiciary and Ways and Means committees--and raising the specter of a Bush-packed Supreme Court retreating on issues such as affirmative action and political empowerment.

“Turning back the clock is a powerful message,” Morial said as he surveyed troops during a recent City Council race, which offered a test-run of November field operations. “These folks don’t have to be convinced who to vote for.”

But for the vice president, it’s not a question of persuasion but motivation.

“Will Al Gore get the black vote? Yeah,” said David Bositis, a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank on black issues. “Will Gore have to worry and make sure those voters turn out? Yeah, he has to worry a lot.”

*

MUCH AT STAKE

Questions of accuracy, exaggeration are raised as Bush and Gore ready for last debate. A16