THE WRITTEN OFF:

Black and Bruised (JOANN WYPIJEWSKI, February 1, 2004, NY Times Magazine)

Baraka Cheeseboro noticed something going on behind the poinsettias. While prayers were raised and the choir sang on a recent morning at the Community C.M.E. Church in Columbia, S.C., Howard Dean was chattering away on the altar with Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. Labrena Aiken noticed it, too. ''Baraka,'' she leaned in to whisper, ''those flowers need to be moved. We want to see his face.'' The service was well under way, but a sign from Cheeseboro to an usher, a quick word with the pastor, and the flowers came down. Dean, now in plain sight, assumed a respectful mien. A bit later the two women were joined in the pew by a third, and the young pastor, the Rev. Joiquim Barnes, acknowledged for his audience the arrival of Gilda Cobb-Hunter.

"You do know what they call those three -- Gilda, Labrena, Baraka," a friend long involved in South Carolina politics said afterward. "They call them the Marvelettes.'' If you want something to happen politically, especially in their home base of Orangeburg County in the heart of the state's Black Belt, you need to know them. [...]

If the Marvelettes are an indication, there's trouble for the Democratic Party in black America. Most people don't have a passion for politics to offset the skepticism born of being dragooned into service every election cycle to cover the spot on the political gaming table labeled ''the black vote.'' And skepticism reigns among the Democrats' most loyal constituents on the eve of what is being called the ''black primary.'' African-Americans could account for up to half the vote in South Carolina on Tuesday, so for months candidates have been visiting black churches, dropping in at football games and fish fries, collecting black endorsements and welding themselves to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. or Bill Clinton, sometimes both. [...]

"The Democratic Party is the party that talks about the black vote and attaining it by any means necessary,'' Aiken said. ''Now, that does not equate with 'We value the black vote' as much as 'We have to attain it in order to get what we want.''' The routine currency in this exchange is emotion -- for white candidates a little soul power soaked up from a gospel choir and shed just as easily. Candidates parade through church, Aiken noted, but, she said: ''Has anyone done a follow-up visit after a campaign? You know, 'I came to your church, asked for your vote, the preacher gave me the pat and we prayed. Now I'm in; I'm going to make one more trip back, at least to thank you.'''

It is commonly recognized that whichever passing churchgoer ultimately becomes the party's nominee, he will not be seen here again. In the Democratic National Committee's markup of battleground and nonbattleground states for November, South Carolina falls definitively into the latter category. (Bush easily won the state in the 2000 election with nearly 60 percent of the vote.) Some Democratic strategists say that the party might be smart to write off not just South Carolina but the whole South (except Florida) and concentrate on states more demonstrably in play. It is less commonly noted that writing off the South, home to 55 percent of the country's black population, symbolically means writing off African-Americans as well.

At a Democratic National Committee meeting last October, members of the D.N.C.'s Southern Caucus confronted the committee chairman, Terry McAuliffe, about the national party's failure to sponsor a single debate in the South and about fears that the region will be starved of resources for November. The D.N.C. insists that this is not the case and that some Southern states are on its target list. But Cobb-Hunter, like every African-American I spoke with, has not forgotten that in 2000 the party pulled virtually everything out of the South to concentrate on Florida, then refused to see beyond hanging chads and go to the mat over the tens of thousands of voters, the majority black and Hispanic, said to have been improperly labeled felons and stripped from the rolls. ''Any message that the Democratic Party wanted to send, they sent in 2000, and '04 is just a continuation of that message,'' she said. ''It's up to the Democratic Party whether they want to change the story. Because if they don't, we will not carry one Southern state. Let me just add that if the Democratic Party is not serious about dealing with the issues of race and class that are so prevalent in this country but particularly in the South, then they may as well write it off, because there's no point in coming in here with cosmetics.''

Disintegrating unions, disaffected blacks, and Hispanics don't hate the President--how are the Democrats looking?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 1, 2004 5:01 PM