Barber’s poll has Obama by a hair

Yes, Lawrence Tolliver says, there’s been some colorful chatter about Phil Spector’s murder trial. And Kobe Bryant’s public tantrum is getting some airtime at the barbershop too.

But politics still gets top play at his tonsorial parlor on Florence near Western. At the shop on Thursday, Mr. Tolliver proves his point by trying without much luck to get something going on Spector.

“Question of the day,” he says to the gang of regulars. “Who’s guiltier, O.J. or Phil Spector?”

He then adds, provocatively:

“There are still people who think O.J. didn’t do it.”

To which customer and former state Assemblyman Rod Wright says:

“There are still people who think Elvis is alive.”

A few customers bite on the Spector question, but there’s not much to talk about. They all agree it’s not much of a whodunit when the defendant is at the murder scene with a gun and says, “I think I killed somebody.”

But when Tolliver steers the discussion to the early stages of the presidential campaign, you’d think we were two weeks away from election day.

It’s a wide open race, Tolliver says, with a chance for historic change.

The leading candidates include a black man, a woman and a Mormon. And before much longer, an actor is likely to join the party.

But at this shop, much of the buzz is focused on New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, wife of a man respected by many African Americans, and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, an African American.

“Obama,” Wright says when asked who he likes.

“Hillary,” says Bill James, arguing that she’s stronger on specifics and would benefit from ex-President Clinton’s standing among world leaders.

And James thinks Obama could get tripped up on character issues.

Mr. Tolliver tells me there isn’t likely to be a single John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson vote in the entire shop now that the eloquent Rev. Roger Smith, the shop’s lone conservative, has passed on.

When Tony Wafford challenges the blackness of Obama, whose mother is white, Tolliver steps out from behind his barber chair to hold forth.

“For Obama to be black enough for you,” Tolliver bellows with sharp scissors in hand, “he’ll never be a viable candidate ... I don’t care how black he is.”

Wafford bolts from his chair to respond.

“Why would you vote for him?” he shouts, and then answers his own question. “Because he’s black!”

“If I had a choice between Hillary and Obama, I’d pick him,” Tolliver says. “Yes, I would like to see a black man become president. He’s the only man I can see who can bring this country together. I wouldn’t vote for Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. But Obama can talk to people,” he adds, noting that as a mixed-race man in an immigrant nation, he can relate to lots of people.

This sends Wafford into orbit.

“He didn’t even know his little old black grandmother!” he shouts, arguing that Obama hadn’t seen her in 14 years when he visited her in Kenya last year while weighing a run for president.

I tell the regulars I care less about Obama’s grandmother and more about what he has to say, and he’s coming up light so far.

“He has a populist perspective,” Wright says, and sure, he’s playing it safe this early in the game. His healthcare proposal “has a little hair on it,” but the more detailed plan by John Edwards “would require huge tax increases, and it’s going nowhere.”

“If you give more information now,” Tolliver says, “you’re open to more attacks.”

Wafford, whose vote is undecided, plays the skeptic.

“He’s got a 32-inch waist and he looks good. So he gets a pass?”

“You know, Bill was the first black president,” Wright says, gently mocking those who would back Hillary just because her husband was “down with the brothers,” as another barbershop patron puts it.

Don’t forget, says Wright, that Bill Clinton threw people off welfare when there weren’t enough jobs to go around and got tough on petty crack dealers to win law-and-order votes.

Don’t go soft on knuckleheaded drug dealers, Tolliver says, and Bill James backs him up.

“Black people do not hold black people accountable for anything,” James fumes.

“Listen to you,” Wafford snaps. “You must hate yourself.”

Before it gets out of control, Tolliver conducts the first official vote of the presidential campaign season, asking for a show of hands.

Barack Obama is elected the next president of the United States with eight votes to Hillary Clinton’s five. Bill Richardson and John Edwards each get a single vote.

“With Obama, there’s a Kumbaya feeling that’s similar to what there was with Bobby Kennedy. It transcends issues,” says James, a Clinton supporter.

Maybe so, but at some point he’ll need to say something worth hearing about the war, healthcare, education and the economy. Tolliver’s barbershop is in a neighborhood that’s been waiting on better days for decades.

In 1965, says Wright, a guy working at the Goodyear tire plant at Florence and Central had it made.

“He could buy a house right here on 74th Street, he could buy a Chevy Malibu and send his kids to college. Today, at a comparable job, he can’t even come up with the down payment on the house, he can’t buy the Malibu and his kids aren’t going to college.”

Can Obama do something about that? Can Clinton, Giuliani or Thompson?

I vote that the next presidential debate be held at Tolliver’s, where the shears are sharp, the shaves are close, and no one gets a free pass.

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steve.lopez@latimes.com