Is America Ready?

By contrast, African-Americans represent only 13 percent of the American population, and minorities rarely serve as heads of state in any country. Only two blacks--Douglas Wilder of Virginia and, this year, Deval Patrick of Massachusetts--have been elected governor since Reconstruction, and only three have been sent to the Senate--Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois and now Obama.

The benign interpretation of this disappointing history is that blacks are only one generation removed from the civil-rights movement. During that time, the argument goes, the most talented African-Americans gravitated more to business than politics, and those who did seek public office generally lacked the money to run statewide (the same problem held women back for many years). Black politicians concentrated instead on "majority-minority" House districts that have helped expand the Congressional Black Caucus to 43 members today.

While no analysts say electing a woman president is impossible, some still make that case about a black candidate. They suggest discarding analogies to the broad appeal of Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods: "There's a willingness to be entertained by African-Americans, but to be governed by them is a completely different story," says Lawrence Otis Graham, an African-American author. "White men have socialized and worked under women, but much more rarely under blacks. Whatever they say, when they go in the polling place, they won't go for it." Focus groups sponsored by Wilder during his abortive 1992 presidential campaign found that such hidden racial feelings continued to play a big role.

On the other hand, the population of racist voters is shrinking fast, for both actuarial and cultural reasons. During his 2004 Senate campaign, Obama was greeted by an enthusiastic white crowd in Cairo, Ill., the site of ongoing Ku Klux Klan violence as late as the 1970s. His top adviser, David Axelrod, recalls being stunned on the night of Obama's primary victory to find he had beaten several white candidates in an all-white Chicago ward that had nearly rioted over Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor.

The case for Obama's electability is strengthened by the example of Colin Powell, who might well have won had he run in 1996. (Powell declined partly in deference to family fears for his personal safety. Obama's family shares those concerns, and he will add a security detail if he runs. Clinton, as a former First Lady, gets Secret Service protection.) Unlike Powell, Obama has no military service to deepen his connection to core American values. But Powell and Obama share an immigrant heritage quite different from the descendants of Southern plantation slaves and a conviction, as Obama writes in his best-selling "The Audacity of Hope," that "rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America." By lifting that guilt, Obama, like Powell, has a way of making whites feel better about themselves because they like him. It's the politics of personal validation: voting as an act of self-esteem.

This taps right into the American Dream. The critic Stanley Crouch argued in a recent column titled "Not Black Like Me" that Obama--raised in Hawaii as the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas (both academics, both now dead)--is more representative of the uplifting immigrant experience than the grim African-American one: "He will have come into the White House through a side door--which might, at this point, be the only one that's open."