NEW ORLEANS — “I want to inform you that everybody in the camp here is not a Republican,” an African-American participant at a town-hall-style meeting at Xavier University told Senator John McCain of Arizona here on Thursday.

“I got that impression,” Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, replied dryly, in the middle of a pummeling from the audience about his backing for the Iraq war and his endorsement by a pastor who has blamed the sins of New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. McCain was at the end of a weeklong tour to America’s “forgotten places,” otherwise known as swaths of the country where Republicans dare not go — the Black Belt of Alabama, the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the coal-mining hollow in Appalachia where President Lyndon B. Johnson declared his war on poverty.

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