As time for the 2008 US presidential elections is approaching closer, the pursuit for the Democratic presidential nomination is getting intense as well as interesting, for it is for the first time in the history of Democrats that race and gender are going to play such a vital role in the nomination.
All the prospect presidential candidates looks determined and do not want to leave a single pebble unturned and miss an opportunity to woo the voters. In a similar quest for support in the black community, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton will attend events on Sunday in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the significant 1965 anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday’. The march was a major turning point for the Civil Rights movement, leading to the introduction of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Barack Obama, the U.S. senator from Illinois, will deliver the keynote address to commemorates the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march at the annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee. He will also speak at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, the site in Selma where marchers assembled in the historic protest that gave blacks access to the election.
Bill Clinton, bringing his star power and popularity among African Americans, will join Sen. Hillary Clinton to the weekend that possibly will be the former president’s first major public appearance with his wife since she launched her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist, said,
There is no white politician in America who is more popular in the African-American community than Bill Clinton. So she has a very strong card to play.
Black voters may have a great deal of loyalty for Bill Clinton, ‘the question is whether that loyalty transfers to Hillary Clinton, and that’s really the test she’ll have to meet’, owing to the fact that Obama is also a black Democrat senator.
According to a recent survey Obama is the first preference of 44 percent of black Democrats leaving Hillary Clinton behind with 33 percent, which is a dramatic reversal of the analysis when Clinton whitewashed Obama 60 percent to 20 percent early this year.
Artur Davis, a Representative from Alabama who has endorsed Obama and whose district includes Selma, asserts,
I think the Clinton camp is sending a signal that they will aggressively contest Barack Obama for the African American vote. It’s a good thing the black vote will not be taken for granted and will be actively contested.
The Selma march has as much political significance as historical that bring politicians and nominees from different political parties together on a single platform, but bi-partisan participation at the popular event appears to be lost and remain all Democratic affair this year.
