If identity politics might gain some black vote for obama,it can also cost him votes elsewhere.

SO how many American will agree with Wright that race is still front and center?The number is notoriously slipery,because voters don't always tell pollsters the truth.At the weekly Standard,a magazine with a neocon tilt,writer Stanley Kurtz rejects Obama's postracial message because he suspects it isn't sincere.Probing the coverage of Obama's career as an Illinois legislator in the black-oriented newpaper the Chicago Defender,Kurtz concluded,the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious.Though Kurtz's message is aimed primarily at whites,it's not so different from one angrily whispered by Jesse Jackson.I want to cut his nuts off.Jackson fumed-because he believes that Obama's race ought to determine which issues the candidate raises and how he discusses them.Either way,whether an opponent claims that Obama remains race-conscious or a supporter says he ought to be,both are rejecting the foundation of his campaign.


Figures like Jackson and Wright have invested a lifetime in the politics of black identity.Obama's success,whether it culminates in the White House or not,signals the passing of their era.So it is no wonder that younger voters have been key to his candidacy.Having grown up in the era of Oprah Winfrey,Denzel Washington,Tiger Woods and ,yes,Henry Louis Gates Jr.,they are better able to credit Obama's thesis that there's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asia America,there's the United States of America.