Breaking Down the Black Vote

By John Cloud / South Carolina

The Democrats had seemed rather pleased with themselves so far this campaign season for having managed to avoid one of their typical self-immolating fights. Instead, once Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had each taken an early contest, we heard a lot of self-satisfied gloss about how the party would make history with the first female presidential nominee or the first minority one.

Then the race moved from the monochrome fields of Iowa and the overwhelmingly white exurb known as New Hampshire into Nevada and South Carolina. The Nevada population is one-quarter Hispanic, and typically about half of South Carolina Democratic-primary voters are African American. Within hours of reaching those states, the contest between Clinton and Obama acquired a racial text and subtext that posed dangers for both candidates. The spat subsided only after the candidates stepped in to defuse the tension and return to the sort of post-identity campaigns that both will need to run in the general election.

South Carolina, where a Confederate battle flag still flies on the capitol grounds off Gervais Street and where dying but persistent de facto segregation still divides church life and civic organizations, will be a test of just how deeply the skirmish has resonated with voters. Sixty years after South Carolina governor (later Senator) Strom Thurmond created the Dixiecrats, rupturing a Democratic Party he found insufficiently racist, the state is poised to remind Americans how far they have come--or how much further they still have to go.

In a contest pitting the son of a Kenyan against the wife of the man Toni Morrison suggested was "the first black President," it was perhaps inevitable that a battle over race would be joined at some point. It took the form of an arch and insidery back-and-forth between the candidates over the role that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement.

On Jan. 7, Hillary Clinton said--in a comment highly uncontroversial from a historical perspective but highly inadvisable from a political one--that King's dreams couldn't have become law without the executive and legislative leadership of Lyndon Johnson. She was trying to make a point that forms the central claim of her candidacy: that Obama lacks the experience to effect change in Washington. Stung, Obama surrogates seized the irresistible opportunity to say Clinton was belittling King. Then the Clinton camp, not atypically, overreacted. The New York Senator complained that when Obama defended the value of hopeful rhetoric by referencing King, he was inappropriately comparing himself with the civil rights leader, and it was he, therefore, who didn't adequately appreciate King's unique historical role.

The fuss descended to a tawdry nadir on Jan. 13, when black entertainment baron and Clinton supporter Robert Johnson obliquely reminded a South Carolina audience that Obama has admitted using drugs. "Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won't say what he was doing--but he said it in his book," Johnson said with a smirk. (He later claimed, unconvincingly, that he was referring to Obama's "time spent as a community organizer.")

Sensing that the media conflagration served little purpose for either candidate, Clinton and Obama called a truce in time for a televised debate on Jan. 15 with the third major Democratic candidate, John Edwards. Polls suggest Clinton will lose the Democratic primary in South Carolina to Obama, but she would prefer to come in a respectable second, particularly among African Americans, who will be important for any Democratic nominee in November.

While South Carolina Democrats of all races have doubtless thought about the racial implications of this election, on the ground--in the churches and salons and restaurants the candidates visit--very few voters will actually base their decision on race. Indeed, what all candidates are learning--or will soon learn--is that African-American voters can't be neatly classified or treated as a homogeneous voting bloc. Nearly 80% of blacks vote Democratic, but Republican candidates have managed to make intermittent gains over the past decade. Many African-American voters--including Democrats--line up with conservatives on social and cultural issues. And in poll after poll, black voters say they would not cast their vote for a black presidential candidate solely because of the color of his skin. That's in part because the very definition of race has become more complex: according to a Pew Research Center poll of African Americans taken in November, nearly 40% said they don't believe blacks should be thought of as a single race.

Many of those currents are evident in South Carolina. Over the course of several days in the midst of the Clinton-Obama fracas, I met a number of well-connected black Democrats in the state who were unfamiliar with the details of the controversy. Xavier Starkes, 45, a trial attorney, and Kia Anderson, 35, a state employee whose mother is a Clinton activist, were in fact slightly miffed at the (very white) notion that as African Americans they would cast their votes entirely on the basis of skin color or a media squabble.

Starkes leans toward fellow trial lawyer Edwards, with Obama a close second, and Anderson remains undecided between Clinton and Obama. (The Real Clear Politics average of polls taken between Jan. 1 and Jan. 13 has Obama at 42%, Clinton at 32% and Edwards at 16%.)

And yet Obama's race tugs at them, in the gut. For African-American women, however, Clinton also holds appeal--both as the first potential female President and a longtime activist for equal rights. African-American women will probably make up the largest single voting group in the primary, if you extrapolate from the 2004 primary returns. "This particular election is kind of hardest, if I can put it that way, for the African-American female," says Jennette Williams, 55, a black Georgia public-schools employee who took her grandson Dimitiras, 5, to hear Clinton speak in Columbia. Williams plans to vote in the Feb. 5 Georgia primary, but she is undecided between Clinton and Obama. "You have this opportunity to see either the first woman or the first African American."

For many African Americans, however, the issue of Obama's race is not tidily packaged. One delicate issue, rarely broached by white commentators but avidly discussed among blacks, is Obama's biracial identity. "For some reason, if you're biracial and part African American, you're African American where the masses are concerned," says Williams, who has a biracial niece. "My thought is, he is really as much white as he is black." For her part, Marjorie Hammock, 72, a professor of social work at Benedict College who is also undecided, fears that a Clinton presidency would be "K Street all over again." But she's not sure about Obama. "Where are his points of reference, his experiences?" she asks. "It comes out of both of those worlds, I gather. I don't expect him to have a perspective on the world, say, as a Jesse Jackson might. I can want all I want to for him to be a candidate who would be steeped in the black tradition and understands totally the issues in the black community. But he probably represents what this world is going to look like, and I don't fault him for who he is."

The nation's increasingly polychromatic mix could be an advantage for Obama. As with many social changes, though, the multiracial reality precedes the vocabulary we usually deploy in talking about race. All his life, Obama has faced both the challenges and the advantages of being biracial--the subtle hints in the African-American community that he isn't black enough, the racism in the white community that, thank goodness, he isn't too black. In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote that "when people who don't know me well, black or white, discover my background ... I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am."

The challenge for Obama and candidates like him is to establish a connection with traditional black constituencies while still maintaining a postracial profile. It's fitting that Obama often closes his stump speeches with an anecdote drawn from a campaign stop in South Carolina that reveals something about how he sees his identity.

As Obama tells it, he was at an event in tiny Greenwood County, S.C., last year, having driven hours out of his way through the rain in pursuit of an endorsement from a state representative, when someone started leading the group in a cheer. "I turn back. There's this little lady standing there," he recalled in Aiken, S.C., not long ago. "She got a big hat. And she's smiling at me. She says, 'Fired up! Ready to go!' And it turns out that this young lady's name is Edith Childs, and she's a councilwoman from Greenwood. And she is famous for her chant. They call her the chant lady. And for the next, it seemed like, five minutes, she just kept chanting. I don't really know what to do. But here's the thing, Aiken: after about a minute or two, I'm feeling kind of fired up." He goes on to say that the point of the story is that "one voice can change a room."

Possibly, but for Obama, the point of the story is also to signal to black South Carolinians that he has learned to be one of them, not only a black man in appearance but also one comfortable with the call-and-response folkways of African-American Southern life.

"I think it's a sort of defining moment in his campaign, and not just because he got a slogan out of it," says Robert Tinsley, 54, a white attorney who was at the meeting where Childs, 59, started the chant. "He was mesmerized by the enthusiasm he received, and I think it helped him connect better with the Southern black voter." Tinsley is leaning toward Obama but is still considering Clinton and Edwards because Obama can be "a little vague."

That could become a bigger liability for Obama as the race tightens in South Carolina and beyond. Clinton's victory in New Hampshire showed that Obama's effort to cast his campaign as a broad, generational crusade may not be enough to win the nomination. Still, Childs says she supports Obama because "the sincerity this man shows is what I don't see in Hillary." She adds that Obama has inspired her to work harder to bring people together in a county that still has two American Legion posts--one favored by whites and one by blacks. On Jan. 21, for the local observance of King's birthday, she has made sure that the integrated choir from nearby Emerald High School will be a featured attraction so that both white and black families attend. "If nothing else," says Childs, "Obama has reminded us that we've got a lot to do in Greenwood in that area still."

Although pundits and campaign staffers alike will spend the days leading up to the South Carolina primary attempting to predict the outcome of the "black vote," the voters themselves prove the folly of such an exercise. Hammock says she will end up making what she calls a highly "political" choice: she wants to give "this one little ole vote" to whichever Democrat she believes is going to win the nomination so that he or she has the most resounding mandate possible going into the general election. Meanwhile, Anderson told me in Columbia that she didn't yet have enough information to make up her mind. "I still need to hear about the issues in depth from Senator Obama as well as from Senator Clinton." She will decide her vote, possibly in the booth, on the basis of the candidates' positions on health care and jobs.

The Rev. Fred Armfield, pastor of the Little Zion AME Church in Greenwood, says the black church has all but lost its electoral influence over African-American voters, and he's glad. "This generation has grown and is intelligent enough that it doesn't need a driver at the polls," says Armfield. "I don't take a position from the pulpit. I know the people in my congregation are independent thinkers." That said, however, he's backing Clinton. "The Clintons have always been good to the African-American community, and I'm staying with them," he says. He knows many black voters in Greenwood are torn between Clinton and Obama but says that's a good thing if it raises black turnout.

Twenty-two states will hold Democratic primaries or caucuses on Feb. 5. The racial politics of New York, California and many of the other states voting that day are so riverine that they make South Carolina's racial divide look simple. But if Obama can persuade enough black and white South Carolinians to give him a resounding victory, he may be able to claim that he knows not only how to fire up an American crowd but also how to dampen its lingering prejudices.

with reporting by Tim Padget / Greenwood