How Big a Stretch?

Mike Suarez, 42, a friend of Fueyo's and chairman of the Hillsborough County Democratic Executive Committee, pointed out what Obama did not say during his Tampa rally.

"If he were the quote-unquote traditional black candidate, he would have said something about Don Imus," said Suarez, who has not yet decided upon a candidate. "He would have said something about the Duke lacrosse decision and he would have said something about Jackie Robinson."

If Obama were to talk more sharply on issues of race and speak more like Jackson or Sharpton, "it would bother me as far as my support," Fueyo says. "It would bother me as far as I'm thinking, you're not smart. You've got to be able to have everyone hear what they want to hear."

And most whites want to hear a more muted message on race, if they want to hear about it at all, he says.

Suarez, who also identifies himself as a white Latino, says he suspects that some whites are projecting onto Obama their perception of what a black man should be -- less black.

"They want to take race out of it," says Suarez. "Because they like him so much, they want him not to be black."

Both he and Fueyo say Obama is viewed by whites in much the same way as Tony Dungy, coach of the Super Bowl champion Indianapolis Colts, and Michael Jordan, the former basketball superstar -- men not known for playing the so-called race card and who, therefore, are more acceptable.

Obama does talk about race, but in a way that does not alienate whites, Fueyo notes.

In his speech, Obama talked about how he had served African Americans, Latinos and other "disenfranchised people" in his law practice, and shared the emotions he felt upon traveling to Selma for a recent civil rights commemoration. He quoted Martin Luther King Jr., saying: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." And it doesn't bend alone, he added, but rather with the force of folks who push it along:

"At each junction of American history, ordinary folks have said, 'We don't care about the world as it is. We imagine the world as it might be.' . . . That is the moment that we are in right now. I hope that this campaign becomes the vehicle for your hopes, for your dreams, for the aspirations that you have for your children and for your grandchildren."

A Question of Timing

His words moved Heran, the teacher. After the speech, her eyes were teary, she says, because her two sons are biracial -- Pacific Islander and white -- "and I know how hard it's been."

"People say it doesn't make any difference, but sometimes it has," she adds, such as seeing her sons treated differently.

But she worries that a person of color will not land in the White House, she says, "until all those people who went through the civil rights era, until they're all dead, until our generation is dead. . . . There's too many old people. They're going to maybe vote against him because he's black."

Megan Foster, 49, has higher hopes. A grass-roots Democratic activist, Foster knew as soon as she first heard Obama speak in 2005 that he was a special politician.

"He gave us chills," she recalls. Like Bobby Kennedy, he has "the It factor," which she describes as "charisma, intelligence, someone who can just handle it all, and deliver and captivate."

Raised in Pittsburgh by Irish American parents who pulled their kids out of Catholic schools and sent them to join in the integration of the public schools, Foster is married to a black man and has multiracial kids -- black, white, Latino -- including three who are her own and two who are adopted. But, she says adamantly, "that's not the reason that I support Obama. . . . There could be some affinity, but that's not what drives me."

"If I relate to him on any level, it's as a community organizer," she says, "the fact that he gets the grass roots, and that's what I am."

Sure, she says, there will be lots of people who won't vote for Obama because of race. She calls them "the bottom 30 percent," those who still support the president and won't replace him with a Democrat anyway. But she also believes many whites are receptive to Obama's message, his campaign and his attempt to break through this most significant racial barrier in American political life.

"In politics, you have to sell yourself," she says, "and I think he's doing a heck of a job selling himself now."