Old Polarities Persist in Dem Race

By the millions, black voters voted for the black candidate and women voted for the woman. White men seemed torn, by the millions.

Sen. Barack Obama has broken historic barriers, especially among the young, as the first black candidate with a serious chance at the presidency. Voters who might ordinarily balk at a female president have backed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in her pioneering effort.

Those gains have not been enough to erase divisions by race, a task perhaps beyond any mortal and any one election, nor lesser ones between the sexes.

And when the campaign moves beyond Democrats, the party of diversity, and into the general election, it's questionable how much room is left for such progress.

A significant minority of voters in Democratic contests have considered the race or sex of the candidates important about one in five in each case. That's according to surveys of voters in about two dozen states across the country on and since Super Tuesday.

Whether clumsy, coarse or calculating, remarks by party stalwarts or hangers-on have brought race repeatedly into the discomfort zone, which is easy to do, suggesting a post-racial political consciousness is for a more distant future.

Weeks before Geraldine Ferraro argued that the color of Obama's skin gave him an edge, fellow Clinton supporter Ed Rendell appeared to argue the opposite. The Pennsylvania governor, an important figure in the big April 22 primary, said "there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American."

On the defensive about that, he added Clinton "has the same handicap" because some voters won't vote for a woman.

By that accounting, backed by evidence in exit polls, polarized politics is still ingrained, taking bites out of "Yes we can" unity.