It is still a week until the New York primary, Hillary Clinton’s path to the White House is clear — as long as black voters pave her way.
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Hillary Clinton has campaigned heavily in black communities ahead of the New York primary.
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It’s a familiar position for the former senator, who was hailed as the “inevitable” Democratic candidate early in the 2008 race.
Competing against a charismatic but fairly unknown young senator from Illinois, Clinton and her supporters turned increasingly bitter as her voting base among blacks gradually drifted away.
It was Barack Obama who got to make history as the Democratic nominee and later the nation’s first African-American President.
But it appears to have been a lesson well learned for the 68-year-old Clinton — who yearns to be the first woman President.
Faced again with a progressive Democratic rival — Bernie Sanders, whose stirring calls for social change contain echoes of Obama — Clinton is taking nothing for granted, especially the black vote.
Sanders, a Vermont senator who identifies as a democratic socialist, needs to take the same “big tent” approach Obama did for his first landmark win: energizing blacks and Latinos, plus young voters. But according to the latest Quinnipiac University Poll, released Tuesday, Sanders is scoring with only one of the big three — young voters.
Clinton has a stranglehold on the rest — and in the case of the state’s black vote, she’s trouncing Sanders, 65% to his 28%.
Yet even with that commanding lead, Clinton is devoting a huge chunk of her schedule to stumping in black communities — including visits to three black churches last Sunday.
At each one, Clinton wooed audiences with glowing mentions of Obama — perhaps to ease the sting of her brutal assessment of him eight years earlier.
“I don’t think President Obama gets the credit he deserves,” she said, praising the Affordable Care Act and the rebooting of the economy.
“I want to build on that progress . . . taking lessons from President Obama, I want to serve you again if you would be so gracious as to give me your support,” Clinton told the packed pews.
The popularity of her husband, Bill Clinton, with black voters in the 1990s has only helped in 2016.
But Hillary Clinton’s approach doesn’t sell as well among the younger generation.
Her 1996 comment that gang criminals were “superpredators” morphed into a Black Lives Matter talking point in favor of Sanders.
And she may have hurt herself by taking part in a skit riffing on “colored people time,” meaning always late, at a gala last week with Mayor de Blasio.
“I haven’t made up my mind between her and Sanders,” Tyrus Townsend, 38, of Harlem, said. “That superpredator stuff is bad, but so was that ‘C.P.’ time joke.”
As much as Clinton rubs some younger voters the wrong way, she enjoys a special level of support among older women — and black women in particular, many of whom were torn between voting for Obama or Clinton in 2008.
“It was so hard . . . to pick between the first black President and the first woman,” said Paula Whitney Best, an African-American lawyer from Brooklyn.
Clinton’s trying to make it easier this time around, lest any voters opt for the first Jewish President.
She’s hammering at what she sees as a wedge issue between Sanders and the black community: his vote for a 2005 law that granted almost total immunity to the gun industry from lawsuits.
At the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference Wednesday, Clinton heaped praise on six women in the audience who lost sons or husbands to gun violence.
Some have appeared in a Clinton campaign video, “Mothers of the Movement,” to tout her commitment to social change.
“She been working on these issues for a long time. I voted for her in 2008 and will do it again, She is good for women — all women,” said Gwen Carr, whose son Eric Garner died after an NYPD cop put him in a chokehold.
Lesley McSpadden, mother of Michael Brown, the teen who was slain by a cop in Ferguson, Mo., said Clinton contacted the family after the tragedy. “We have spoken one-on-one and we believe she is genuine about what she says,” said McSpadden.
Source : New York Daily News
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