Seeking unity, Obama feels pull of racial divide  

“He’s got large numbers of white brothers and sisters who have fears and anxieties,” Dr. West said at the time. “He’s got to speak them in such a way that he holds us at arm’s length; enough to say he loves us, but not too close to scare them away.”

Working from inside
Mr. Obama was so annoyed by the complaints, one aide recalled, that he asked staff members to invite more than 50 influential African-Americans, including some of his critics, to meet with him, hoping to win them over with the gale force of his charisma.

But his aides cautioned that such a large event would be sure to draw press attention. Instead, they suggested that Mr. Obama establish a smaller advisory council of prominent black figures. In a two-hour telephone call, he not only persuaded Dr. West to serve on the panel, but also convinced him that his rhetorical tightrope — reassuring whites without seeming to abandon blacks — was necessary.

Dr. West recalled the conversation, saying that if Mr. Obama focused on disparities caused by a history of white privilege, “he’d be pegged as a candidate who caters only to the needs of black folks.”

“His campaign is about all folks,” Dr. West said.

Initially, Mr. Obama’s aides said, his campaign was all about Iowa, whose mostly white electorate had established a reputation for launching political underdogs. He seldom talked explicitly about race, aides said. He did not publicize appearances at black churches on his press schedule. Still, his campaign reached out quietly to African-American voters, realizing that even the smallest pockets of supporters could be decisive.

Aides said Mr. Obama’s campaign was unaware of the magnitude of the tensions brewing in Jena, La., over charges of attempted murder that had been filed against six youths involved in a schoolyard fight until plans for a march, organized by Mr. Sharpton, began to appear in the news media.

Mr. Obama was the first presidential candidate to respond to Mr. Sharpton’s call to denounce what was going on in Jena, saying the cases against the students were not a matter of black versus white, but a matter of right versus wrong. He then called Mr. Sharpton to explain that he had important votes in the Senate, and that he would not attend the march because he did not want to politicize the issue.

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“We agreed on inside-outside roles,” Mr. Sharpton said, referring to himself and Mr. Obama, echoing a famous conversation between President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “I would continue my work agitating the system from the outside, and he would do what he could to make changes from the inside.”

By the fall, however, while Mr. Obama’s campaign was still trailing Mrs. Clinton among white voters in Iowa, the loss of the endorsement by Mr. Lewis, the Georgia representative, made clear that he faced troubles among black voters as well.

“He told John that that he felt like a father was stabbing him in the back,” an aide to Mr. Obama said. “Barack sees himself as an extension of the civil rights movement, and so it hurt him deeply when a leader of that movement told him he wasn’t ready.”

Aides said it proved a pivotal moment in the campaign, with some staff members — mostly white — urging Mr. Obama to stay focused on Iowa, while others — most of them black — warning that he needed to court black voters and elected officials more actively.

“Nobody put race explicitly on the table,” one aide said. “But there was certainly the feeling among some of the black staff that some of the white staff did not care enough about winning black votes.”

New efforts to reach out
In the end, Mr. Obama satisfied both groups, keeping himself focused on Iowa while dispatching his wife to South Carolina, where she delivered a major speech at South Carolina State University, a historically black college in Orangeburg.

“It took Barack a while to agree,” said Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard professor who is part of the black advisory group. “But we told him she had to be the one to confront the myths and fears of black voters.

“Here was a black woman, a mother, who grew up poor, learned to sleep without heat and rose above that to get an Ivy League education,” Professor Ogletree added. “But she was also the kind of woman who would take her shoes off because her feet hurt. She was real from the moment she stepped on stage.”

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By mid-January, Mr. Obama had so much support among black voters in South Carolina that he worried that his rivals would try to marginalize his campaign as a black-only phenomenon — a concern that later proved well-founded when former President Bill Clinton compared Mr. Obama’s campaign to Mr. Jackson’s. So before arriving in the state, Mr. Obama stopped in Atlanta to mark Martin Luther King’s Birthday.

Georgia, like South Carolina, was expected to deliver large numbers of black votes to Mr. Obama. But it was also a place where his viability as a candidate would be measured by his ability to win a respectable number of white votes.

Standing before a congregation filled with veterans of the civil rights movement, Mr. Obama talked about the struggles of a poor white woman, whose family had no health insurance and often had to choose between buying food and medicine.

While Mr. Obama has made great strides in appealing to white and black voters, his campaign has proved less effective in drawing Latino support. While a few experts point to longstanding rivalries between blacks and Hispanics over jobs and other opportunities, most faulted him as doing too little, too late.

“Obama’s campaign failed to rise to the occasion,” scolded La Opinión, the leading Spanish-language newspaper in California, which had endorsed Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama’s national field director, Cuauhtemoc Figueroa, vowed that Mr. Obama’s effort in Texas would be different.

“You are going to see Senator Obama campaign the way he did in Iowa,” Mr. Figueroa said. “We’re going to take him to little communities so that he’s not only going to touch voters with his words, he’s going to be able to reach out and physically touch them.”

Jeff Zeleny and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

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