Birmingham View News Portal

But Obama spent a year going back and forth to that South Carolina.  In contrast, he has made only three trips to Alabama, including his 2007 visit to Selma in commemoration of “Bloody Sunday,” the infamous beating of civil rights marchers by state troopers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

But each visit brought large numbers of enthusiastic Whites across social and party lines.

One is Mary Katherine Backstrom, a recently-married 23-year-old who has been an Obama supporter since reading his book “The Audacity of Hope.” He is the first Democrat she plans to vote for. 

“I was raised in a Republican household,” Backstrom said.  “So it's almost like a religion, you know; you just blindly vote. “Honestly, the message started to matter to me. I started researching platforms and realized there wasn't a Republican candidate that was going to meet the needs I wanted my children to have in the future. That's what attracted me to Obama.”  

Having spent a year without health insurance, the University of  Alabama at Birmingham student said helped bring Obama's message home to her.

His speech last week at the university energized a racially-mixed crowd of about 10,000 with a message of affordable health care, money for primary education and college, fair wages, honest and effective government, equal treatment, and troop withdrawal from Iraq. 

The Jefferson County registrar’s office in Birmingham processed close to 4,000 voter registration applications between Jan. 21 and 25, a dramatic surge leading up to the Feb. 5 primary; hundreds of applications came from the university, officials said.

Statewide, voter registration is up 58,341 since November 2007, a dramatic increase compared to presidential primaries in 2004 and 2000, according to figures from Alabama's Secretary of State office.

“The thing that really fires me up about Obama in particular is, it's the most unappreciated voters who are making the difference in his campaign,” Backstrom said, “the college voters, the Black voters.”

Real estate agent Marquelon Sigler, 28, canvassed Birmingham neighborhoods Saturday for Obama. Like other Blacks, he too questioned whether the time was right for a Black president, despite being impressed with Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention and with the political platform outlined in the senator's book.

“But when I saw that he could raise the money, that people were buying into his message of hope and change, I knew he could go all the way,” Sigler said.

It's young voters like Backstrom and Sigler who Obama is successfully reaching with his message.