. . .[T]here'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.
Some say the outcome here will forecast how the candidates will sell to African-Americans nationwide. As of early January, the most compelling message appeared to be ''sellers beware.'' A schoolteacher and choirmaster in the county seat, the city of Orangeburg, told me, ''I'm disgusted with the whole process.'' A store owner said he'd vote for Al Sharpton because ''what choice do we have?'' One 21-year-old hip-hopper wasn't even having that; he said of Sharpton, ''All he's trying to do is manipulate the black people against the white people to vote for him to be leader of black America.'' At a meeting early last month of Concerned Citizens of House District 66, a civic group in the area Cobb-Hunter represents, there was no debate about ''the presidentials,'' as she calls them, but heated words about a sheriff's race in June.
. . . Some election officials said a 20 percent turnout among all Democratic voters for the primary would be an achievement.
Blacks who vote in South Carolina overwhelmingly want George Bush out. But as one black South Carolinian told me, a party can't just depend on ''a bogeyman'' or identify with a community when it's convenient and expect consistent identification in return.
''The Democratic Party is the party that talks about the black vote and attaining it by any means necessary,'' [Labrena] 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.'''. . . 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. . . . [Gilda] 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.'' . . .
Unlike Aiken, whose people are from Orangeburg but whose childhood was spent on military bases, and Cobb-Hunter, who is from Gifford, Fla.,[Baraka] Cheeseboro has spent all her 46 years here. She holds ''office'' under a venerable pecan tree in Martha (Bay-Bay) Hooks's front yard in the hard-time neighborhood of Sprinkle Avenue, where locals plan for political campaigns, organize events and gossip. They say Cheeseboro knows everyone and his cousin-once-removed in Orangeburg, and she holds its history close. Back in 1968, when she was 10, her 17-year-old cousin Delano Middleton was among three people shot dead by white Highway Patrolmen at South Carolina State University in one of the civil rights era's bloodiest events; known as the Orangeburg Massacre, it was the first such use of force on an American campus. That attack ripped her world of cowboy shows and country and western on the radio; she never would be so carefree or so unconscious of what people call the state's ''race culture'' again.
Cheeseboro can chart the class matrix and power gaps within white society as well as black, but Orangeburg isn't a place presidentials come to woo the white vote. They come here when they want to be sure of a black audience and sure that their words aren't wasted. The center of a county that is 61 percent black and nearly 100 percent Democratic in elected offices, it is more or less midway between Columbia and Charleston, midway between rural and urban, midway between abject poverty and the high life, meaning that while some African-Americans reside in the suburbia of cathedral ceilings and others live out of rusty vans off a main road, most people occupy the space where dirt alleys of trailers and shotgun shacks seem to melt into potholed lanes of bungalows, which in turn melt into smooth streets of ranch houses and pretty lawns. Just outside the city limits, there are vast medical complexes and factories making ibuprofen, sterile tubing and more lawnmowers and garden tractors than anywhere in the world. Countywide, unemployment is 14.5 percent and the average wage is $8.72 an hour, but a more palpable measure of the area's financial state is the generous presence downtown of pawnshops and all manner of loan-fixer and car-title repurchaser. Candidates rarely, if ever, do walk-arounds through this slice of Americana, preferring readymade audiences across the tracks at the historically black colleges, State and Claflin University. . . .
. . . More than 27 percent of the county's households survive on $15,000 a year or less, a condition of persistent poverty that ensnares so much of the South, especially the rural Black Belt. For some, the drug business is a way out, and Cheeseboro can spot the ''movin' on up'' homes that drugs bought. But more are caught than lucky, particularly if they're black. African-Americans make up 30 percent of South Carolina's population but 70 percent of its prisoners. Officially, one out of 13 black men in South Carolina is barred from voting because he is in prison, on probation or on parole; nationwide the rate is one in 8. And everyone says it: the poor have been written off. The poor, the state, the South. Who's next? . . .
Separately, each woman noted that the former state party chairman, Dick Harpootlian, who is white, had once quipped, ''I don't want to buy the black vote; I just want to rent it for a day.'' That was in 1986, he told me, an offhand joke that no one takes seriously, adding that as a state and a country, ''we've got to get beyond racial division, and we can't seem to do that.'' Memories are long; the three women were not the first to mention his quotation to me. Nor were they the first to assert that white Democrats would jump party (and have) before accepting black leadership. Or to say they'd felt used by the former Democratic governor, Jim Hodges, who was elected in 1998 with the help of black party activists and who then, some say, ignored black, poor and working-class voters.
Many fault Hodges for skimping on grass-roots campaigning in his 2002 re-election bid. He went down on Nov. 5, Cobb-Hunter's birthday. It was, her friends joked, the best present she got. '''Y'all ain't got nowhere to go,' Dick Harpootlian would tell me in meetings for the 2002 cycle,'' she said. '''Are they gonna vote Republican?''' One of her best friends, a born Democrat, did. More than 10,000 South Carolinians left the top of the ballot blank or, like at least one of Cobb-Hunter's fellow legislators, voted for Kevin Gray, a black write-in candidate. Gray, who later served as an adviser to Carol Moseley Braun's campaign, studied state Election Commission statistics and found that almost 289,000 blacks stayed home in the 2002 election, more than went to the polls.
The state Democratic Party executive director, Nu Wexler, maintains that as a percentage of overall turnout, that was among the better recent performances, which can't be reassuring. In any event, it's hard to overstate the residual bitterness. Just last November the Rev. Hayes Gainey of Edisto Fork United Methodist Church, in Cobb-Hunter's district, got ''amens'' when in a Sunday sermon he mentioned black voters' feeling of being used and abused by the Democrats, specifically noting 2002. It's a sensitivity that carries over in assessing national candidates now. ''John Kerry had his people in Orangeburg one night,'' Gainey told me. ''They were trying to push his platform to a group of us, and one of them says, 'If we decide to use you -.' Well, 'Hold on,' I said. 'You're not going to use anyone in this room. If we decide to support John Kerry's campaign, we'll let you know.' Thought to myself, Man, you talking to us as if you're the pimp and we're the workers.''
. . . Some 260,000 eligible black voters in South Carolina aren't registered. Added to registered no-shows, that means half a million or so African-Americans are ''missing voters,'' a group sizable enough to turn any statewide election for the Democrats -- if they saw a reason to. But everyone I met who's doing voter registration in town, on campus or in the countryside said they're up against it. Cheeseboro recalled that two years ago, ''folks actually ran me out their yard. They'd say: 'Get out! I'm not voting. I don't want anything to do with it. Ain't nothin' gonna change.' I have heard that over and over again.'' . . .
No one I met in the 18-to-35-year-old cohort said, as did James Sulton, at 80 the lion of one of Orangeburg's grand families, ''I'd vote for the Devil if he was a Democrat.'' Often, younger blacks called themselves independent or libertarian or said they thought the two parties didn't differ fundamentally, supporting national data showing that about a third of African-Americans of this age (and almost 40 percent of the men) identify with neither party. Lately, the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons announced plans to register millions of young voters nationwide, but as in South Carolina, that still leaves unaddressed the turnout question (in 2000, almost two-thirds of registered blacks between 18 and 24 didn't vote) and the matter of whether people believe voting can change anything. In the hamlet of Elloree, in Cobb-Hunter's district, half a dozen hip-hoppers spent four hours telling me about the jobs that were not there, the cops that always were, the runarounds and racial disequilibrium in the smallest things. They said they'd vote (except for one, who had a drug rap), but as I heard repeatedly, you might perform the act without having confidence in it. As for Elloree, ''It ain't ever gonna change.'' . . .
The last time the question of energizing, even expanding the base came under serious debate in the Democratic Party was in the 80's. Labrena Aiken remembers 1984, when at 18 she cast her first ballot, for Jesse Jackson, as something ''electric.'' She and her friends knew, she said, that he would not win the nomination, but ''even when you know, you still want to believe.'' Cobb-Hunter was a Jackson delegate that year, her first national convention. It's often forgotten that Jackson's campaign registered more than a million voters in 1984 and that two years later the Democrats regained the Senate, picking up four seats in the South. In 1988, his Rainbow Coalition came in first or second in 46 of 54 primary contests, registering another two million along the way. But as Ronald Reagan had in 1980, Michael Dukakis took his general-election campaign to Neshoba County, Miss., to court white votes, never mentioning the murder of three civil rights workers there in 1964. The white Democratic leadership's interest in rainbow populism, never enthusiastic, was officially terminated. . . .
On our last day together, Aiken observed: ''The Republicans have a strong white base, a very strong white base, an unwavering white base. And the Democratic Party is being threatened because we're wavering.'' In 2000 some of her professional friends were impressed by the Republican convention's ''black night.'' She and Cheeseboro watched it on TV from their own homes while talking together over the phone. Cheeseboro wasn't impressed; she was more interested, she said, that apart from ''liveliness'' (where Democrats had the edge), she couldn't detect much difference in what the two major parties presented on so-called black issues. That year Cheeseboro, a county party officer ''raised to vote Democrat or you'd die,'' voted against Al Gore and for Ralph Nader.
I remembered the look on Cobb-Hunter's face when I, surprised, mentioned this -- one of those looks that says, ''Girl, where have you been?'' What she actually said was, ''It's the Democratic Party; it's not a blood oath.''
JoAnn Wypijewski writes about political and social issues for Harper's and The Nation.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/magazine/01VOTERS.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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