A Step Forward Seen For Blacks in America

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Obama's running mate, was direct on this point Tuesday in his meeting with the Delaware delegation to the Democratic National Convention. "He's going to make you proud," Biden told his home-state delegates, "I am honored to be . . . helping to make sure . . . that the first African American -- the first guy who looks at things from a perspective like no one I've worked with . . . gets to be president of the United States."

For white voters, the pride issue helps to predict their preference in the voting booth. Obama is the choice of 59 percent of those whites who said he has made them more proud, while Sen. John McCain, his Republican opponent, is favored by 57 percent of those who said Obama's being the first African American nominee has no effect on their level of pride.

Overall in the new poll, Obama trails McCain by six percentage points among white voters. McCain's lead among whites is lower than President Bush's pre-convention advantages over his Democratic opponents in 2000 and 2004. Bush went on to defeat then-Vice President Al Gore by 12 percentage points among white voters; he beat Sen. John F. Kerry by 17 points in that group. White men now favor McCain by a 22 points, similar to Bush's final margins among those voters, but Obama has the edge among white women, 50 percent to 42 percent.

White men and white women are more in sync on the role that race has played so far in the campaign. Majorities of both said in the poll that McCain and Obama were handling the issue about right. But there are large racial splits on the matter.

More than half of African Americans said McCain is overplaying Obama's racial background as a campaign issue. Just 21 percent of whites think so. About a quarter of whites think Obama, in turn, is making too big a deal out of it; 7 percent of blacks agree, and about a quarter think he should do more to focus on it.

There's more consensus one what Obama might mean to young African American males -- more than three-quarters of all Americans think Obama's election would make him a leading role model in the eyes of black men.

The poll was conducted by telephone Aug. 19 to Aug. 22, among a random national sample of 1,108 adults. The full results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. Error margins are higher for subgroups, including plus or minus four points among whites and plus or minus seven points among African Americans.

Assistant polling analyst Kyle Dropp contributed to this report.