Obama a dilemma for blacks in GOP

WASHINGTON — Black conservative talk-show host Armstrong Williams has never voted for a Democrat for president. That could change this year with Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee.

"I don't necessarily like his policies; I don't like much that he advocates, but for the first time in my life, history thrusts me to really seriously think about it," Williams said.

Obama has engendered conflicting emotions among black Republicans. They revel over the possibility of a black president but wrestle with the thought that the Illinois senator doesn't sit beside them ideologically.

"Among black conservatives, they tell me privately, it would be very hard to vote against him in November," Williams said.

Perhaps sensing the possibility of such a shift, Republican presidential candidate John McCain has made efforts to lure black voters. He recently told Essence magazine he would attend the NAACP's annual convention next month, and he noted that he recently traveled to Selma, Ala., scene of seminal voting-rights protests in the 1960s, and "talked about the need to include 'forgotten Americans.' "

J.C. Watts, a former Oklahoma congressman who once was part of the GOP House leadership, said he's thinking of voting for Obama. Watts said he's still a Republican, but he criticized his party for neglecting the black community. Black Republicans, he said, have to concede that while they might not agree with Democrats on issues, at least that party reaches out to them.

Retired Gen. Colin Powell, who became the country's first black secretary of state under President Bush, said he will not necessarily vote for McCain. "I will vote for the individual I think that brings the best set of tools to the problems of 21st-century America," he said Thursday in Vancouver, B.C., in comments reported by The Globe and Mail in Toronto.

Some are standing their ground. Michael Steele, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Maryland, said he is proud of Obama as a black man, but "come November, I will do everything in my power to defeat him."