Hillary And Barack Fight For Black Vote, Who Wins?

From nydailynews.com:

Black vote key & Hillary may let it slip away

 By Errol Louis

Behind the brawl between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is a fight over the black vote, a valuable piece of political turf both are counting on to carry them to the White House. The competition has been brewing for months. You could hear it in the coded observation from black pols around the country that Obama might not be “black enough.”In translation, that means the young Harvard-trained lawyer has failed to conduct a cross-country humility tour to kiss the rings of a patchwork of black ministers, lawmakers, college presidents, business titans, county commissioners and mayors that most of us have never heard of.Obama did secure the endorsement of fellow Chicagoan Jesse Jackson, but he has ignored many of the lesser-known local headmen around the country who register, rile up and turn out black voters every election season.Obama stopped in Hollywood, not Harlem, this week.

Hillary, meanwhile, made a splash in South Carolina, an early-primary state where blacks could comprise up to half the vote, deploying the Clinton knack for wooing black leaders that’s been honed to perfection by hubby Bill.

She’s landed the support of black billionaire Bob Johnson, a former Obama supporter who founded Black Entertainment Television – and, more importantly, nailed the lower-profile endorsement of a state senator named Darrell Jackson, who doubles as pastor of a 7,000-member megachurch in Columbia, S.C.

And to seal the deal, the Clinton camp began negotiating a campaign contract with a publicity firm called Sunrise Enterprises whose principal owner is – you guessed it – that same Rev. Sen. Darrell Jackson, the same headman in charge.

Earlier this week, Bill Clinton was dispatched to Albany, where he gave the keynote address at the annual conference of the Black and Puerto Rican Legislative Caucus. The ex-President walked out with the star-struck lawmakers and party bosses – basically, New York’s black vote – snugly in his pocket, safely out of Obama’s reach.

Obama has nowhere near the depth, reach and ruthlessness of Clinton’s team, which was aptly described by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd as “a do-whatever-it-takes family firm with contract killers and debt collectors.”

But the kid from Illinois has a secret weapon of his own: a rising public disgust with roughhouse politics. David Geffen, an ex-Clinton backer who helped raise more than $1 million for Obama in a single night, put his finger on it when he predicted the Clinton crew “is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective.”

Coming from Geffen, a Hollywood mogul who grew rich from an exquisite talent for sensing the public mood, that prediction should give pause to Clinton’s political leg-breakers. Obama may be stumbling in his efforts to build a bridge to black voters, but nothing will win sympathy for him faster than a mugging by Team Clinton.

And so, with nearly a year to go before the first primaries, the two leading Democrats are at each other’s throats, in a fratricidal battle sure to bring a smile to the lips of Republican strategists everywhere.