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How Big a Stretch?
Supporters say Barack Obama's message of unity and inclusion, plus the charisma factor, are factors in his appeal, especially to white voters.
(Tami Chappell - Reuters)
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A 2003 Gallup poll found that 92 percent of Americans are willing to vote for a qualified African American candidate for president.
Still, obstacles other than race might thwart Obama's emergence as the Democrats' candidate. He is up against another barrier buster in Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.)
In her quest to be the first female president, the two-term senator and former first lady has a more high-powered political résumé than the former state legislator and first-term senator from Illinois. Early polls show her leading the pack. The most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll put Obama at 20 percent to Clinton's 37 percent. In that poll, Obama's white support was 16 percent; Clinton's was 31 percent.
Once, polls in races between a white and black candidate were wildly unreliable. White voters have had a history of telling pollsters they will vote along their party lines when faced with a black candidate; then, in the privacy of the booth, they cross party lines to vote for the white candidate.
What Polls Suggest
Another measure of progress is that the phenomenon seems to be fading, according to a Pew Research Center paper, "Can You Trust What Polls Say About Obama's Electoral Prospects?"
In 2006, when white Republican Bob Corker beat black Democrat Harold Ford Jr. to represent Tennessee in the Senate, Corker's lead was overstated in the polls. Whites voted for Ford in largely the numbers they had told pollsters they would.
The trend toward greater racial predictability in electoral polls "does not mean that there isn't racially motivated voting," says Scott Keeter, Pew's director of survey research and one of the authors of the Obama paper.
"It doesn't mean that there aren't people still out there who won't vote for a black candidate because of their own prejudice. But it suggests that if we have pre-election polls that tell us that Barack Obama is a credible presidential contender, we can take those findings at face value in a way that we couldn't 20 years ago."
Obama cuts a unique profile in large part because of his biracial and multinational background. His father was a black Kenyan, his mother a white American. He was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, with a stepfather from that country.
That background, as well as his care in employing the rhetoric of unity and inclusion, leads some to feel he is a more acceptable kind of black politician than those who emphasize and speak angrily about race.
If he were more like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, several people said, Obama would resonate far less among whites than he does now.
"I probably wouldn't like him as much," says Joyce Heran, 53, a public school teacher and Hillsborough County Democratic Committee member. Jackson "seems to have more tunnel vision. He's focused on just the black people. I understand that, but there's a lot of other people that get stepped on, too."
