Ken Bode, Indianapolis Star
- For a while, it seemed that Barack Obama was a man who had met his times. Shelby Steele, a scholar who writes perceptively about race relations in America, put it this way: “Since the 1960s, America has undergone a moral evolution away from racism so transformative that there is now something like a desire to see a truly qualified black person in the White House.”
Obama’s candidacy rests on that assumption, and his messages of hope and change are geared to reinforce it. His personality and style bear slight resemblance to Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, the last two African-Americans who ran for president. In demeanor, Obama is more like Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Tiger Woods, Magic Johnson. The core assumption of his campaign is that whatever preconceived notions white Americans may continue to hold, the overwhelming majority of them are able to look beyond race in making judgments about people.
But we know from the experience of the last quarter-century that some voters are still not ready to accept the idea of electing a black to a major political office: mayor, governor, senator, president. In state after state, African-American candidates never seem to get the proportion of votes that pre-election polls predict they will.
