8-06-08, 9:51 am

Critics of US politics often cite low voter participation as a sign of political backwardness, massive alienation from the process, and the lack of an appeal by the major party platforms to ordinary working Americans. Barack Obama wants to change all that.

After securing the nomination, the Obama campaign launched a national voter registration drive to bring millions of new people from all states, regions, communities, and racial and ethnic backgrounds into the political process. It was a strategic decision to boost the pool of voters likely to vote for change as well as a philosophical point of view that values the widest civic participation.

By contrast the McCain campaign has made no special effort to bring new voters into the process.

One feature of this voter registration drive has been to increase the number of registered African American voters. To achieve this, the Obama campaign announced this week in a teleconference with reporters a special campaign to bring African American barbershop and beauty parlor owners into the registration drive. Senior campaign adviser Rick Wade described the new campaign as focusing on these small businesses where many tens of thousands of African Americans weekly gather as 'part of a tradition of empowerment and community.'

Actress Kerry Washington, a national co-chair of the voter registration initiative, told reporters that her experience is that the barbershops and beauty parlors are the places where differences in the community can disappear and 'we can have an open and honest conversation about the things that are important to us.'

Actor Blair Underwood, who also volunteers for the Obama campaign, added that the barbershops and the beauty parlors are the places to meet African American people at the grassroots. 'It has always been our pulpit, when we can't get to church, where we talk about religion, family, and life.'

Wade also cited the Obama campaign's success in reaching African American voters during the primaries by systematically visiting Black-owned barbershops and beauty parlors. Not only are barbershops and beauty parlors a site of cultural interaction, Wade added, they 'are a traditional site of serious discussion about politics and issues of civic responsibility.'

Business owners will be asked to host voter registration materials, receive training on proper voter registration, and they will be given a video to share with their customers talking about Barack Obama, his life and record, Wade announced. Business owners will also be regularly contacted by the campaign through text messages about upcoming events, get out the vote drives, and other relevant news.

Wade pointed out that right now 32 percent of eligible African American voters (8 million)are unregistered. This fact had a huge impact on the 2004 election, Wade said. John Kerry lost Ohio by two percent or 110,000 votes. Currently, there are 270,000 unregistered African Americans in Ohio who are eligible to vote, Wade emphasized. Similarly, Kerry lost Florida by less than 400,000 votes with more than one-half million unregistered African Americans. And there are more than twice the number of unregistered African American voters Virginia than the total number of votes Kerry lost the state by in 2004.

Southern Focus

Southern journalist Bob Moser, author of Blue Dixie and a contributing writer for The Nation, in a recent interview with RadioNation, pointed out that demographics throughout the South have changed over the last generation.

The generation of white Southerners that clung to the Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell's conservative view of being Southern is dying out, he said. A new generation of whites is no longer intransigently racist. They share many of the difficult economic realities that their African American and Latino neighbors are burdened with and can be appealed to with positive, economic populist messages. Moser opined that the Obama campaign has been far more successful on this latter score than its Democratic predecessors.

Key demographic shifts caused by a massive re-migration of African American families and the fastest growing population of Latinos mean that the South will have a huge impact on whether or not political realignment in November is possible, Moser suggested. For example, he added, there are 500,000 unregistered but eligible to vote Latinos in the state of Georgia alone.

These demographic shifts make registration of Southern Black and Latino voters especially crucial to the Obama campaign. To appeal to Latino voters, the Obama campaign, according to one source, has purchased about $5 million in TV and radio ads.

The Obama campaign's barbershop and beauty parlor campaign will open in Jacksonville, Atlanta, and Detroit. Additional cities will be targeted for this unique campaign soon, Wade predicted.

Washington added, 'In this election cycle, the Black community truly can close the gap like never before. Unregistered voters can play a critical role.' She pointed to North Carolina and Florida as well as Ohio and Nevada as states where vote registration drives in the African American community can turn the tide and bring Obama to victory.

--Reach Joel Wendland at