The Trail

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

NEW FORCES

Obama Says His Nominat ion Would Swell Black Turnout

If he wins the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) can "redraw the political map," he told an audience in Concord, N.H., on Monday. "I guarantee you African American turnout, if I'm the nominee, goes up 30 percent around the country, minimum," he said. Obama made the comments in response to a question from a voter who said she wanted to support the Democrat most likely to win, the Associated Press reported. "Young people's percentage of the vote goes up 25 to 30 percent. So we're in a position to put states in play that haven't been in play since LBJ."

Offering one example, he said, "If we just got African Americans in Mississippi to vote their percentage of the population, Mississippi is suddenly a Democratic state."

The candidate has suggested in the past that African Americans will strongly back one of their own, much the same argument that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has made about women and former senator John Edwards about Southerners.

But data from the 2004 National Election Pool exit polls suggest Obama's assumptions might be off base. In Mississippi, black turnout was about 57 percent; overall turnout in the state was about 54 percent.

For Obama, increasing the black vote by at least 30 percent in some states would be very difficult, if not impossible. For example, a 30 percent increase in the number of black voters in Mississippi would require 74 percent of blacks to vote, virtually unprecedented in recent U.S. elections.

And even with such an increase, white voters' support for Republicans in the state is so broad -- 85 percent of white voters backed Bush in 2004 -- that if every other voting bloc remained the same and black voting jumped -- an unlikely scenario -- Obama would collect only about 45 percent of the vote in Mississippi, based on John Kerry's performance that year.

-- Perry Bacon Jr. and Jennifer Agiesta

A SHOT AT GIULIANI

I {heart} New York, But Hands Off My Gun

Fred Thompson says he enjoyed his time in New York, where he lived and worked while filming the hit television show "Law & Order."

But he just felt a little naked walking around town without all his rights.

"Anybody who knows me knows I've always cared deeply about the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms," Thompson wrote Tuesday in an e-mail to supporters. "So I've always felt sort of relieved when I flew back home to where that particular civil liberty gets as much respect as the rest of the Bill of Rights."

It doesn't take special insight to see the reference to former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose views on gun control have the potential to turn off a big chunk of Republican primary voters. Giuliani has tried to soften his opposition to gun use, forged during his service as a federal prosecutor and carried on in his years as a tough-on-crime mayor. "I used gun control as mayor," he said at a news conference in February. But "I understand the Second Amendment. I understand the right to bear arms."

Thompson's e-mail makes a special effort to mention that "the same activist federal judge from Brooklyn who provided Mayor Giuliani's administration with the legal ruling it sought to sue gun makers has done it again. Last week, he created a bizarre justification to allow New York City to sue out-of-state gun stores that sold guns that somehow ended up in criminal hands in the Big Apple."

Thompson said New York's lawsuit reinforced for him the "need to protect states from other states that interfered in free commerce beyond their borders -- as New York is doing today. In this case, we need Federalism to protect states from a big bully in New York City."

But some New Yorkers liked the mayor's version of law and order more than Thompson did, at least according to Giuliani's communications director, Katie Levinson.

"Those who live in New York in the real world -- not on TV -- know that Rudy Giuliani's record of making the city safe for families speaks for itself," she wrote. "No amount of political theater will change that."

-- Matthew Mosk

ONCE AGAIN

Me, President? Get Real, Says Citizen Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg is trying to say it as clearly as possible. Despite leaving the Republican Party to become an independent and having a Web site, MikeBloomberg.com, that promotes his achievements and includes links to articles speculating about a White House run, he is not running for president.

In an interview with former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who now hosts a show on the cable channel HDNet, Bloomberg offered a more believable denial.

"Nobody's going to elect me president of the United States," he told Rather. "What I'd like to do is to be able to influence the dialogue. I'm a citizen."

What would-be candidate would say this?

But with his billions of dollars, Bloomberg could bombard the airwaves with enough ads next summer to make Americans forget he ever said he wasn't running or couldn't win.

-- Perry Bacon Jr.