The most important political question in the Democratic race is whether Barack Obama will win the black vote. We forget that in 1988 Jesse Jackson won 13 primaries and caucuses while appealing to a smaller sector of the white vote than Obama does. If Obama were doing as well among African Americans as Jackson did, he’d now be in the lead. He’d sweep the south and probably the nomination.

Yet the African American who has a real chance of becoming president is doing worse among blacks than the one who didn’t. In one national poll, Hillary Clinton was beating Obama 57 to 33 among blacks. If Obama loses the nomination it will be because of the black vote.

The two most common theories for this phenomenon are:
1) Hillary’s women-ness trumps Obama’s black-ness for African American women.
2) Schooled in the obstacles facing blacks, African Americans believe that the nation will not elect a minority as president so they don’t want to waste their vote.
That second point reminds me of Jews and Lieberman in 2000. When Lieberman ran as Gore’s Vice President, I remember many older Jews worried that “the country is not ready for a Jewish president.” No group is more pessimistic about discrimination than the discriminated. However, in the end they did vote for the Gore-Lieberman ticket. Once in the voting booth, world-weary pessimism gave way to hope and pride.
How is Obama going about making sure this happens? In part, it’s simply by winning early. They believe that if he wins in Iowa and/or New Hampshire, he’ll convince blacks that he really can be President. But there’s something else. Obama’s campaign has been very faithy, and there’s no voting bloc in the Democratic party that’s more religious than African Americans. So if Obama wins the nomination it will be because he won the black vote, which will happen if his faith-talk helps cancel out the appeal Hillary has among African American women. This formula (Race + Faith > Gender) strikes me as shrewd as it enables him to appeal to African Ameircans powerfully without spending a lot of time on explicitly racial appeals, which could undermine his white support.