SELMA, ALA. — It was an unlikely setting for Republican presidential hopeful John McCain to campaign in Monday: the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where black protesters were beaten in a 1965 march for voting rights.
McCain joined hands later with black women who sang gospel spirituals to him as they rode a ferry across the muddy Alabama River near Gee's Bend, a community famous for its quilts and for its role in the civil rights struggle.
"Ninety years old and I never thought I'd see this," quilt maker Nettie Young said. "Republicans don't come to this bend."
That was exactly the point.
McCain was not hunting for votes in the overwhelmingly Democratic black communities of central Alabama. Nor will he be looking for support from residents of the hurricane-ravaged 9th Ward of New Orleans on a visit later this week.
But at a time when President Bush and his party are highly unpopular, McCain's weeklong tour of places that he describes as forgotten by other presidential candidates is part of his drive to brand himself as a different kind of Republican -- one with wider appeal.
"That's the biggest obstacle he faces as a presidential candidate: how to distance himself from a very unpopular president," said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University.
McCain's visits to impoverished black and Democratic areas of the country, Abramowitz added, are mainly symbolic, projecting an image that can attract moderate white voters. The itinerary for McCain's "Time for Action" tour includes Inez, Ky., where President Lyndon B. Johnson launched his campaign against poverty; and economically hard-pressed Youngstown, Ohio.
"The time for pandering and false promises is over," McCain said in Selma. "It is time for action. It is time for change."
In 2000, Bush adopted a similar approach, campaigning as a "compassionate conservative" who cared about education and economic opportunity for the poor.
But McCain faces a daily barrage from Democrats who say the Arizona senator offers no meaningful change from Bush.
In a biting response last week to McCain's economic agenda, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York said he "looks at the hole that President Bush has dug us into and says, 'Why not more? Let's go deeper.' "
Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, Clinton's rival for the Democratic nomination, told a Philadelphia crowd that "the change this country needs will not come from a third term of George W. Bush, and that's exactly what John McCain is offering in this campaign."
