Hillary tanking with black voters

Rangel Remains in Clinton’s Camp in Her Battle With Obama
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
New York Times

Last summer, a Brooklyn lawmaker ran into Representative Charles B. Rangel of Harlem and they began discussing the presidential race. Mr. Rangel, 77, bluntly told the younger politician that he should get on board with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“The sentiment was that she is going to be the president if she wins and still the senator if she loses,” the Brooklyn lawmaker said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was describing a private conversation. “The message was: You don’t want to be on the wrong side.”

Again and again, Mr. Rangel has come through for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Mr. Rangel helped engineer her first campaign for the United States Senate in 2000, sweeping aside others who considered running against her in a Democratic primary. He rescued Mr. Clinton from a public relations embarrassment one year later, inviting the former president to open offices in Harlem, where he would be embraced, rather than in Midtown, where his rent would have been more than three times as much.

Now, Mr. Rangel is putting his muscle and prestige behind Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid, even as her support among African-Americans is plunging, because of the rise of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and some poorly received remarks from Mrs. Clinton and others in her camp. Recent polls found that the proportion of black Democrats who say they favor Mrs. Clinton for the nomination dropped sharply across the country, from 57 percent in October to 31 percent in a CNN poll released Friday.

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