Why Obamamania? Because He Runs as The Great White Hope.

This background may be what some people (mainly blacks) have meant when they asked the regrettable question of whether Obama is "black enough" to earn their votes. But Obama has always been black enough for his elite white enthusiasts, who would never presume to judge an African American's racial authenticity -- indeed, are all too happy to have such a question be kept, by prevailing norms, off limits to them.

Some pundits scratched their heads when Obama was trailing Clinton among black voters. (He's now pulled even or ahead.) But it made perfect sense. Clinton had a track record of working for African Americans' interests. Obama was not just skirting controversies such as the "Jena Six" -- the black Louisiana teenagers punished disproportionately last year for their role in a racial fracas -- but was aiming his appeals squarely at the white Iowans who he knew could make him the front-runner.

None of this is to minimize the barriers that Obama has faced and still faces because of his race. (It's possible that the so-called Bradley effect -- the inclination of some voters to support a black candidate in talking to pollsters or in public caucuses but not in private voting booths -- artificially boosted his pre-primary New Hampshire poll numbers. But as the pollster Lee Miringoff notes, those surveys actually predicted Obama's final numbers correctly while underestimating Clinton's, suggesting that late deciders gave her the win.) And racism is a far fiercer demon in America than anti-Catholic or anti-Jewish prejudice. Nor is this analysis of what stirs his enthusiasts meant to deny that an Obama presidency would be a watershed. But neither would the election of Obama be quite the same thing as the election of Jesse Jackson or Shirley Chisholm.

Ultimately, it is a fantasy of easy redemption. America's racial history -- mixed into our culture at its foundation -- will be with us always, even as personal prejudice recedes and inequality is chipped away. For all we know, a President Obama might make the so-called underclass his top priority. But Obamamania -- the phenomenon, not the man -- leads us to believe that if only we vote for an African American, an avatar of "change" and healing, we can slough off the burdens of our past -- the burdens of finding answers to problems such as the rising number of out-of-wedlock births, the obscene size of the black male population behind bars, the rotten state of city schools, the simmering white resentment about affirmative action, the black-white gap in life expectancy and the cascade of government failures that turned Hurricane Katrina from a breakdown of emergency relief into a disgraceful racial scandal.

Obama's boosters are not fired up about finally confronting those intricate and intractable problems, for which the answers lie not in identity but in politics and policy. Inspiring and exhilarating as it is, Obamamania allows us to sidestep the hardest challenges, at least for now.

David Greenberg is a historian at Rutgers University. He is at work on a history of spin in American politics.