Black-issues symposium attracts only 1 candidate

Obama, the black candidate, won’t attend the symposium on black issues.

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON — Presidential politics will take center stage in New Orleans on Saturday at the annual “State of the Black Union” symposium, where the hottest topic is likely to be which candidate is there and which one isn’t.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will address a largely black crowd of thousands in New Orleans’ Ernest M. Morial Convention Center — where thousands of the city’s poorest residents sought shelter in squalid conditions after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., Clinton’s Democratic rival, is skipping the event. He’ll focus instead on campaigning in Texas and Ohio in hopes of delivering a knockout blow to Clinton in those states’ presidential primaries on March 4.

The Republican presidential candidates, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, also declined to attend the symposium, which television and radio talk show host Tavis Smiley organized and will host.

Obama’s refusal to attend and Smiley’s criticism of him for doing so have stirred debate within the black community and the blogosphere, taking both men to task.

“On one side, there are people who feel he [Obama] is about to make history and you [Smiley] are trying to mess it up,” said Ronald Walters, a black political science professor at the University of Maryland. “Then there are others who feel that Obama needs to address issues important to African-Americans more than he has.”

Clinton, meanwhile, is attending because she has to try to woo back black voters who’ve deserted her in droves, political analysts say. Within a year, black support has flipped from favoring her to backing Obama by as much as 80 percent to 90 percent in recent primaries.

Clinton could receive a cool reception from blacks, who think that her campaign — especially her husband, former President Clinton — injected race into South Carolina’s Democratic primary last month to try to marginalize Obama as “the black candidate.”

“Her coming to the event, it’s a bit of a risk. She could get a chilly reception,” Walters said. “If it hadn’t been for South Carolina, she could go into the forum expecting a good reception.”