Dark Side of the Campaign

There was a brief, shining moment, back in Iowa, when it seemed that Barack Obama's candidacy would not be about race.

That feels like a long time ago.

Although Obama hasn't framed his candidacy around race, hasn't run as a Jesse- or Sharpton-type candidate, the media are now constructing a racial narrative around his bid. There are a number of reasons for this:

· He's lost the white vote, especially among the working class, in a whole lot of states while routinely racking up 90 percent of the black vote. This gets into the guts of the strength of his candidacy, and besides, reporters love exit polls.

· The Jeremiah Wright controversy, which prompted Obama to make a major speech on race and then to publicly divorce his former pastor, dragged the question into the spotlight.

· Obama's very success, bringing him to the brink of closing out the Democratic contest, had made journalists slap their foreheads and say, " It's really happening! A major political party is about to nominate an African American . . . Wait a minute! Is the country ready to elect a black man?"

Some of this was inevitable, given that for 220 years we've only had white presidents. Even as Obama tries to run as a post-racial candidate, he understood that race could not be cordoned off as a factor in his campaign.

But how much ugliness is surfacing in the process? The question arises because of this Washington Post report on how some Obama volunteers have encountered "a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated." Reporter Kevin Merida quotes Danielle Ross, who is white, recalling her experience in Kokomo, Ind.:

"The first person I encountered was like, 'I'll never vote for a black person.' People just weren't receptive."