This year's election promises to be one of the great experiments in U.S. history.
Is the country ready for an African-American president? No one knows for sure. It's increasingly clear, though, that the 2008 vote will be a referendum on the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.
Inevitably, racial attitudes are going to influence that choice. But there is growing evidence that race is losing its potency as a determining factor in U.S. politics.
Some of it comes from a pair of statewide elections in 2006. Both featured breakthrough tries by black Democrats who, in effect, were trailblazers for Barack Obama. And top Obama strategists were involved in each one.
In Massachusetts, voters chose Deval Patrick as the state's first black governor. David Axelrod, a Chicago media consultant and Obama's chief adviser, worked in Patrick's campaign and has described it as a model for Obama's presidential run.
Like Obama, Patrick ran as an outsider and challenged what he described as the old politics. He convinced voters to think of his candidacy as an unconventional, Internet-based grass-roots movement that transcended race. (The linkage between Patrick and Obama produced some uncomfortable moments for Obama during the primary campaign, when similarities between language that both men had used - put in their mouths, presumably, by Axelrod - prompted charges of plagiarism.)
Patrick won in a landslide, after a general election campaign that resembled the one Obama is running against John McCain. He exploited the public's desire for change and tied his Republican opponent to an unpopular Republican administration in the state.
Becoming governor is not the same thing as gaining the presidency, however, and culturally liberal Massachusetts is not America.
Another statewide election that year, which has gotten less attention as a potential model for Obama, took place in Tennessee, where Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. tried to become the first black elected to the Senate from the South since the 1800s.
Ford lost, but by less than 3 percentage points. The close finish sent a clear message: race was becoming less of an impediment for black candidates, even in the South.
The Democrat's defeat, according to officials of both campaign and independent analysts, had less to do with race than with issues of corruption involving members of his family and his background as a Washington insider.
