Jackson and Sharpton Join Kerry on Trail

Sen. John F. Kerry urged African Americans on Sunday to beware of Republicans using “hot button” issues to divert attention from jobs, civil rights, schools and other matters central to their day-to-day lives.

Speaking to the congregation at a black church, Kerry made clear he was referring to same-sex marriage, which is unpopular with many African Americans. He did not broach the topic directly, but spoke after the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a senior advisor to Kerry’s campaign, accused President Bush of using gay marriage to divert attention from a record he portrayed as harmful to blacks.

“Jesse Jackson was right a moment ago,” Kerry told several hundred congregants at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Miami. “Don’t let them fool you with these diversionary tactics.”

Given Bush’s shortcomings on jobs, education and healthcare, Kerry said, “all they’re going to do is attack and attack and try to divert and push some hot button that has nothing to do with the quality of your life on a daily basis in this country.”

Kerry opposes same-sex marriage but has criticized Bush for proposing a constitutional amendment to ban the practice.

Kerry’s church appearance with Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton was part of a broader push by the Democratic presidential nominee to spur a strong turnout of black voters in the Nov. 2 election. The effort is targeted mainly at swing-state cities, including Miami, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee.

“With a huge African American turnout, we will win Ohio, the same with Florida,” said Bill Lynch, deputy manager of Kerry’s campaign. “That’s the difference between winning and losing -- the turnout of those votes.”

In 2000, blacks favored Al Gore over Bush by roughly 9 to 1, a ratio that polls suggest Kerry could replicate.

At the Miami church, the congregants leapt to their feet and burst into applause Sunday when Kerry, Jackson and Sharpton entered from behind the pulpit as a swaying and clapping gospel choir sang, “I will praise him.”

By turns, Sharpton, Jackson and Kerry recalled the obstacles that prevented many blacks in Florida from voting when they went to the polls in 2000.

“Get ready, Mr. Bush,” Sharpton shouted. “Those that you felt you disenfranchised and marginalized and ignored, early this Nov. 2, we’re going to get up, and we’re going to the polls for the big payback.”

Jackson said blacks were “targeted” for disenfranchisement in 2000, with 1 million of them deprived of their right to vote.

“Today it’s getting worse,” he said. “It’s not just Florida. It’s Minnesota. It’s Colorado. It’s Illinois. It’s an ideology. It’s a plan.”

As Jackson posed a series of questions, congregants raised their hands. Did anyone have a family member with cancer? A relative in jail or on probation? Troubles with racial discrimination? But when he asked who had a family member “marry somebody of the same sex,” no one raised a hand.

“Well then how did that get into the middle of the agenda?” he asked amid ripples of laughter. “If your issues 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?”

Jackson also questioned Bush’s pursuit of the Iraq war and lamented the deaths of U.S. troops.

“They’re dying,” Jackson whispered. “It hurts. A thousand lives lost? Seven thousand injured? Paralyzed? Loss of eye, loss of leg? This is serious business. On a lie? No Al Qaeda connection, no weapon of mass destruction? No imminent threat?”

For his part, Kerry said Florida next month would “make up for what happened last time” in the presidential vote recount of 2000. He said his legal team would ensure that “never again will 1 million African Americans be denied their right to exercise the right to vote in the United States of America.”

“That’s not going to happen,” he said.

A Roman Catholic, Kerry invoked multiple passages from the Bible as he accused Bush -- although not by name -- of neglecting urban America’s problems. “I say to myself, maybe these are the folks from Jeremiah who were reminded they have eyes, but they don’t see, and they have ears, but they don’t hear.”

Drawing on the civil rights movement, Kerry recalled the bloody 1965 protest led by John Lewis, now a Georgia congressman, in Selma, Ala.

On the ballot in 2004, Kerry said, “is what Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and others have marched for and fought for, what John Lewis put his life on the line for at that bridge down in Selma.”

Kerry also laid out an array of administration policies he promises to reverse.

“These folks want to take America backward and cut overtime pay,” he said. “Not in my America. We’re not going to cut overtime pay.”

In response to Kerry’s remarks, Bush spokesman Steve Schmidt said the president cared “greatly about civil rights issues.” He said Kerry’s agenda would reverse economic growth and lead to higher taxes and a bloated healthcare bureaucracy.

“This is more divisive rhetoric from John Kerry, who uses that type of rhetoric because he doesn’t have any kind of forward-looking agenda or plan he can sell to the American people,” Schmidt said.

Neither Bush nor his running mate, Dick Cheney, campaigned Sunday. Sen. John Edwards, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, appeared on five Sunday talk shows. On “Fox News Sunday,” Edwards criticized the Bush administration for taking on Iraq when other countries were developing nuclear weapons.

“Iran’s moved forward with their nuclear weapons program on this president’s watch,” he said. “The same thing’s happened with the North Koreans. They’ve gone from one to two nuclear weapons to as many as six or seven nuclear weapons.”