Wherever black votes are, campaigns will follow

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Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2008 | midnight

Even on Christmas Day, the work of the caucus goes on.

So there was Pat Brown, a precinct captain for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign, again trying to persuade her next-door neighbor, who'd come over for holiday cheer, to caucus for Obama. Obama is the candidate for badly needed change, she told him.

And, finally, he relented.

He'll caucus for Obama on Jan. 19. This week Brown will hit the neighbor with a pledge card to lock down his commitment.

Brown, like hundreds of Obama volunteers turned on to politics by the first-term senator, has never volunteered for a campaign before, but now works up to 20 hours a week recruiting converts by canvassing, making phone calls and hosting parties.

This nonstop work of paid organizers and volunteers like Brown -- and her counterparts in the campaigns of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards -- is especially apparent in the black community, an all-important constituency of reliable Democratic voters who could form 20 percent of the caucus turnout.

And they are up for grabs.

The caucus takes more rigorous organization than a typical election because it requires the voters to show up at their appointed caucus site at 11:30 a.m. Jan. 19. The campaigns are schooling voters all over Nevada in this unfamiliar process, which allows no absentee or early voting. The key to winning will be committed voters, who can be brought into the fold and kept there only with a powerful and dedicated organization of paid politicos and -- more important -- volunteers.

A Democratic operative who's neutral and didn't want to be named but is watching the campaign closely said Obama and Clinton are battling for the black vote in Nevada.

The Edwards campaign says it's also competitive, citing Edwards' populist message of fighting for working people as an effective appeal to the black community. Actor Danny Glover campaigned for Edwards in North Las Vegas last week.

Clinton is running strong, however, tapping into a deep reservoir of trust and admiration of her and former President Clinton, who was beloved in the black community for his commitment to the legacy of civil rights and his presidency's rising wages, urban renewal and falling crime rates.

Indeed, Hillary Clinton racked up a number of early endorsements from key figures in the black community, including Assemblyman William Horne, Las Vegas, and the Rev. Robert Fowler, senior pastor at Victory Missionary Baptist Church.

As in current Republican politics, the black community's Democratic activism has long flowed out of churches. Clinton attended a Fowler service in the fall.

In a recent interview, Fowler cited Clinton's experience as the chief reason for his endorsement: “She has the contact set and skill set to restore our reputation across the world, and domestically to push policies that will help communities across the country and especially the community I'm part of: fatherlessness in our homes, the achievement gap in education, unemployment, health care and revitalization of our neighborhoods.”

The Obama campaign is also hitting the churches hard. Jason Green, the son of a minister and a fluent public speaker who is an Obama regional field director, is making his way across the valley every Sunday, one church at a time. He uses the language of the church and its themes of liberation from hopelessness and tyranny to sell Obama.

The Obama campaign's ace, though, is Sen. Steven Horsford, North Las Vegas, who represents many of the active black precincts up for grabs. Horsford is a Democratic national committeeman. And, though he doesn't mention it, Horsford, who's head of the Culinary Union Training Academy, has important ties to the 60,000-member union.

The Culinary is expected to endorse a candidate after Thursday's Iowa caucus. The union says once it endorses, it expects members to stick together behind the union choice.

Aside from a focus on black churches, Horsford said, the campaign's method with black voters has been consistent throughout the community -- black, white and Hispanic: precinct-by-precinct organization, door-to-door, voter-to-voter contact. “We were doing door to door in the summer when it was 115, and that foundation is catapulting us now that the race is closing,” he said.

“I've learned more about organizing from the Barack Obama campaign than I ever knew, and I take pride in having walked my Senate district to win it. There's field and there's field field,” Horsford said, referring to the campaign's intense focus on building a field program during the past nine months.

Horsford echoed statements made all year by the campaign's leadership: The more voters get to know Obama, the more they like him. It's a message that will be tested by the Iowa caucus; Obama led in many polls there about two weeks ago, but the latest round of polls was more mixed.

The Clinton campaign also is focused on building a field program. At a recent precinct captain meeting in a well-appointed North Las Vegas home, about a dozen attendees learned caucus basics -- show up on time Jan. 19 at your caucus site and stand with the Clinton people -- before feasting on some New Orleans cooking.

Joyce and Lonie Chaney, a former legislator, have been volunteering with the campaign since March. They expressed concern to Clinton staff that the Obama campaign has a bigger presence and more knowledge about turning out black precincts.

But Ruben Warren, a Strip resort accountant and high school baseball coach who's a Clinton precinct captain, showed the campaign's sense of urgency at a meeting at the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy: “We have to make this happen, and we cannot take for granted these people will come out -- if we take it for granted, we will lose.”

Brown echoed Warren's words, the sense that there's no do-over, and the moment has arrived: “I'm still in a cloud, because there's so much work to do, and I question whether I'm doing everything I need to do, and am I doing it right?”

J. Patrick Coolican can be reached at 259-8814 or at patrick.coolican@lasvegassun.com.