Sen. Barack Obama brought his messsage of “change” to Brooklyn last Wednesday.
Blacks represent more than 38 percent of the borough’s 2.5 million residents so it’ll be interesting to see how many black voters show up to meet the man of hope.
The number will be telling since Obama says, “I guarantee you African-American turnout, if I’m the nominee, goes up 30 percent around the country, minimum.”
During the political roundtable at the 1st annual New York State Convention of the National Action Network, Dr. Ron Daniels, deputy campaign manager of the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.’s 1988 presidential campaign, observed, “He’s [Obama] not as deeply pigmented as I would like on some issues but on balance, he would be a positive as president of the United States.”
Ron warned that black support for Obama is no sure thing:
Obama and Clinton are splitting the black vote. Obama has not found a way to signal to black voters that he’s one of us and for us.
Democrats have a funny way of signaling their love for black voters. Black voter education and mobilization groups that have ongoing relationships with black voters are starved for resources while fly-by-night groups are paid millions to woo black voters.
But as Don Hazen points out in his piece, “Bloggers and Billionaires, MoveOn and Howard Dean: The Battle for the Soul of the Democratic Party,” this is a losing strategy:
In these 527 operations, funded to the tune of $200 million in 2004, the power control model exercised by the big three failed to motivate voters as was necessary to overcome the superior organizing effort by the Republicans. The Media Fund efforts contributed tens of millions to the big media corporations by taking out a vast number of ads, and other efforts transferred millions of dollars to the Sulzbergers via endless New York Times ad buys. In the case of ACT, thousands of outsiders — often college kids parachuted into unfamiliar neighborhoods with their handheld PDAs — failed to connect with ordinary Americans.
The end result was that after spending that $200 million, they had virtually nothing left in place to show for it. Little infrastructure was built, and there was no real public accounting of what that money was spent on (emphasis added). And many expect that if Hillary Clinton gets the nomination, she will implement the same type of command-and-control operation with insiders like Ickes and others — the same people who have been busy trying to build the same voter database that failed the Dems in 2004.
Question: How many black voter empowerment groups are included in the Democracy Alliance’s portfolio?
If Obama or any Democrat wants to win, they need to build the capacity of the organizations that closed the racial gap in voter registration and turnout. To do so, they must embrace the message of Bobby “Blue” Bland and spend their money where they spend their time.