McCain taking different approach than Bush to pursue black voters

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is making an appeal to black voters this week, but he has taken a different approach than President Bush did during his 2004 reelection campaign.

While Bush highlighted an amendment seeking to ban gay marriage and other social issues to court black voters, McCain is championing education and other populist ideas. Part of McCain’s strategy is to make the case that the Democrats’ tax plan will negatively affect citizens across the economic spectrum.

{mosads}“There’s a misconception that the Republican Party is the party of the rich,” said a McCain aide working on outreach to African-Americans. “The senator is going to blast through that and serve Americans of all tax brackets.”

McCain officials contend that increasing the tax rate on capital gains, which Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) support, would affect many low- and middle-income workers, including many African-Americans.

On Tuesday, McCain held a campaign event in Youngstown, Ohio, a Democratic stronghold with a 44 percent African-American population. On Thursday, he will tour New Orleans’s 9th Ward, a mostly black community that was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and visit Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically black Roman Catholic University.

In Alabama, McCain spoke of the importance of attracting better teachers to public schools.

He said the next president should support initiatives to attract promising teachers to rural schools. In urban and suburban communities, he said parents should be given more choices about where to educate their children, a concept that some African-American parents favor as a way to escape underperforming public schools.

Teachers’ unions, however, adamantly oppose giving students funding vouchers and the freedom to leave public schools, fearing this would drain public schools of resources. Democrats have by and large sided with the unions.

Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele (R), an African-American who has been mentioned as a possible McCain running mate, said that many black voters consider the public school system “a joke” and that policies promoting charter schools and education vouchers could draw their support.

McCain has some work to do, however. He was booed when he appeared at a recent ceremony in Memphis commemorating the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Steele, however, said the media failed to report that while McCain heard jeers, many in the largely African-American crowd said they appreciated that he made the effort to participate.

Republican strategists say that McCain could take advantage of what they say will be a fractured and frustrated African-American community if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) persuades party leaders to give her the nomination over Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

GOP officials are hoping to repeat gains they made among black voters in 2004 in two pivotal swing states: Ohio and Florida.

Bush increased his support among African-American voters in Florida from 7 percent in 2000 to 13 percent in 2004. In Ohio, Bush increased his level of support from 9 percent to 16 percent. Much of that hike was attributed to the marriage amendment, which McCain opposes.

Bush won Ohio by a mere 119,000 votes. Had Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) won the state, he would have become president.

Steele said this week’s tour is the first of many on which McCain will court voters who have not traditionally supported Republicans.

“This is the first stage of many over the course of the spring and summer where you’re going to see McCain in places where you scratch your head and say, ‘Wow, how did he get there?’ ” said Steele, who describes himself as McCain’s friend.

By touring such areas, McCain appears to be casting himself as a politician who can unite the country after eight years of an administration critics have repeatedly characterized as divisive and partisan.

Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist who worked for former Rep. J.C. Watts (Okla.), the last black Republican to serve in Congress, said McCain could pick up African-American voters who will likely become angered if Democratic Party leaders gave the nomination to Clinton.

“If Hillary wins the nomination, at least a quarter of the Democratic constituency would vote for McCain, according to polls,” he said. “Why not increase [that] percentage as much as possible by going to voters that may feel disaffected because she won the nomination?”

Bonjean said that even if Obama won the nomination, his message could resonate with black voters who favor lower taxes and less government regulation, policies Republicans describe as “pro-growth.”

A GOP official said that if Clinton wins the nomination, “there are elements within the Barack Obama coalition that will be fairly unhappy and displeased, and significant segments of his voter base that will consider not participating [in November].”

To attract black voters, however, McCain will have to overcome some obstacles, such as the Democratic Party’s traditionally strong hold on the demographic and the senator’s past opposition to establishing a federal holiday to commemorate King. He eventually supported the holiday, despite the opposition from conservatives in his home state.

By the end of this week, McCain will have toured several communities with large numbers of black voters. In Selma, Ala., on Monday, McCain discussed civil rights and quoted Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who played a prominent role in the civil rights movement. He also traveled to Thomasville, Ala., where he spoke about education before largely African-American audiences at Thomasville High School and Alabama Southern Community College.

After first supporting the practice, he spoke out against displaying the confederate flag on South Carolina’s state capitol.
McCain supports aspects of affirmative action but does not back the use of quotas.