Washington Post: ATLANTA, Jan. 20 -- Sen. Barack Obama took the pulpit of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s church here Sunday and drew a clear link between King's vision of an America free of segregation and racism and the central tenet of his own presidential campaign, a call for unity after years of partisan rancor and division.
"If Dr. King could love his jailer, if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time, and bind up our wounds and erase the empathy deficit that exist in our hearts," Obama said.
Speaking to more than 2,000 people in the large modern sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church, across the street from the original structure where King and his father preached, the Illinois Democrat invoked the slain civil rights leader in defending himself against the argument, put forward repeatedly in recent weeks by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and her supporters, that by itself the inspirational rhetoric of the sort that he offers, and that King provided years ago, is not enough to achieve change.
King's rhetoric was twinned with the recognition of the need for hard struggle, and so, Obama said, would be his own. "Dr. King understood that unity cannot be won on the cheap," he said.
Obama's appearance carried the symbolism of the first African American candidate with a serious shot at the presidency addressing the church of the civil rights giant whom he often echoes. The huge crowd, which included King's sister, embraced Obama with warm applause and shouted "amens," and swayed in unison with him to the chords of "We Shall Overcome" sung by the church's 90-member choir.
The occasion took on added significance, however, because of the turn the contest between Obama and Clinton has taken in recent weeks, and the emergence of race as a more pronounced factor in it. Obama arrived here after losing to Clinton Saturday in the Nevada caucuses and 12 days after losing to her in the New Hampshire primary.
For much of last year, Obama offered himself as someone who, with his biracial background and conciliatory rhetoric, could transcend the nation's racial fissures. Only rarely did he speak in explicit terms about the historic nature of his candidacy. One of his primary challenges, in fact, has been winning over African American voters, including civil rights leaders from King's generation, who have remained loyal to former president Bill Clinton and, by association, his wife.
Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses seemed to convince some skeptics in the African American community that he could win over voters in Middle America, and his standing with black voters surged in opinion polls. A dispute that unfolded after the New Hampshire primary over remarks by the Clintons and several top campaign supporters that some in the Obama camp interpreted as racially tinged also generated support for Obama among African Americans. They saw the remarks as seemingly downplaying the importance of King's role in passing the civil rights reforms of the 1960s.
The candidates settled that dispute in an informal detente at a debate last week, but Saturday's results in Nevada confirmed the emerging racial dimension in the race: Obama won about 80 percent of the black vote, according to opinion polls, while Clinton won Hispanics by a 2 to 1 margin and white voters by 18 percentage points.
Obama's support from black voters bodes well for him in Saturday's primary in South Carolina, where African Americans make up at least half of the Democratic electorate. But if his campaign becomes overly reliant on black support, and continues to face deficits in other demographic groups, it would be facing a threat to the whole motivating theme of his campaign, as well as its path to victory.
That was a concern on the minds of some of Obama's supporters in the mostly black audience here Sunday, even as they loudly applauded his address.
"His purpose is not just for African Americans, but for all people looking for a change," said Cleveland Ewing, 50, an Atlanta entrepreneur. "It's different than being just from an ethnic standpoint." He hoped, he said, that message would continue to get across to voters.
For her part, Clinton on Sunday was also moving to address the race's new demographic dynamic, in which African American voters will also play a pivotal role in many of the Feb. 5 "Super Tuesday" primaries that follow South Carolina's, including those in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, New York and New Jersey.
Clinton appeared Sunday at the landmark Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem -- where the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a pioneer black congressman, once preached to accept the endorsement of the Rev. Calvin Butts, one of New York's most prominent black pastors. At the church, Clinton described traveling with a youth group to hear King speak, and the "transforming experience" it was for her.
In a sign of just how fractious the Democratic race has become, the Obama campaign said it would ask the Nevada Democratic Party to review reports that Clinton caucus organizers had sought to block entry to certain caucus sites a half-hour before they closed. But the campaign said it was not contesting Clinton's victory and only wanted to prevent such confusion in future caucuses.
Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said the Obama campaign was peddling "false claims" and "grasping at straws" to explain its loss.
And Obama, in an interview taped for broadcast today on ABC's "Good Morning America," took issue with Bill Clinton's criticism of his record. "The former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling," Obama said. "This has become a habit, and one of the things that we're going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he's making statements that are not factually accurate."
In the spacious, light-filled sanctuary Sunday, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the young pastor of Ebenezer Baptist who invited Obama to address the church, asked parishioners not to wave Obama signs, for fear of giving the occasion an undue (and possibly illegal) political bent.
But Warnock's own position was hard to miss, as his sermon implicitly held up Obama -- "a brother [who] is committed and brilliant and has a spiritual foundation" -- as an answer to the "unfinished business" left 40 years after King's assassination, which Warnock said included millions without health insurance, a growing divide between rich and poor, and a disproportionate share of young blacks behind bars.
Obama took care to avoid appearing presumptuous in offering himself explicitly as King's heir in the civil rights struggle. But he portrayed his campaign's message as descended straight from King and his declaration that "unity is the great need of the hour," adding, "unity is how we shall overcome."
Obama drew applause by evoking grievances distant and recent for African Americans, including the controversial charges brought against black teenagers in Jena, La. But he added that "we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean," citing homophobia, anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant bias in the black community.
He grew most impassioned as he veered from his text to rebut Clinton's notion that he is offering "false hopes." Without hope, he said, he would not be running for president, considering that he grew up with a single mother and "got in some trouble when I was a teenager."
If King had listened to such skeptics, he told the crowd, he might have "stood on the Lincoln Memorial and said 'You all go home, we can't overcome' " instead of giving his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.
"That's what hope is. Imagining and fighting and struggling for it and sometimes dying for it," Obama said. "There's no false hope in that."
Barack Obama
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