(Photo: Dennis Van Tine/LFI)

Hillary Clinton’s campaign apparatus is now in full swing to court a part of the electorate she thought she had locked down in pre-Obama days: black women. According to one campaign source, Minyon Moore, a Hillary operative and former political director in Bill Clinton’s White House, held a strategy session last week with influential black women, like Marva Smalls (a top exec at Nickelodeon) and NYPD chaplain Suzan Johnson Cook, at Hillary’s Manhattan headquarters. “We’ve always said we need to earn every vote,” Moore says, and hopes the women will act as cheerleaders for Hillary. An ABC–Washington Post poll released last month shows that Hillary’s support among blacks has dropped dramatically (from 60 percent to 33 percent), and her support among women overall has dipped as well (from 49 percent to 40 percent)—owing almost exclusively to the fact that black women are now supporting Obama. “Black women will be key,” says Donna Brazile, a Dem strategist (still unaffiliated) and Al Gore’s former campaign manager. “What drives politics in the black community is the early support of black women. They drive the discourse. They pick a candidate, and stick with it.”

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Related:

• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Geoffrey Gray
• Table of Contents: March 26, 2007 issue of New York | Subscribe!