The poor Senator actually had to stake a claim to the tradition of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.  Hillary Clinton, whose husband was christened, 'the first black President' was the black candidate -as defined by support in that segment of the population.

That is a nice tag -black candidate- to have when you are not black, but when you are, it could be the kiss of death in America's highly racialised political society. The previous black candidate, at least the one who got a large enough number of votes to be considered a realistic candidate, had been the Rev. Jesse Jackson, he of the other Rainbow Coalition. (Kenyans seem to have lost it for American names, FORD, NARC, and Pentagon!!) Rev. Jackson had run in 1984 and 1988. It was a decent run with wins in 11 states before he finally bowed out. Perhaps because he was constantly attacked by the media with the subliminal -is America ready to vote a black president? -in the end it did seem like a bit of a fairy tale.

Now that there, fairy tale is an adjective you can use on someone's ambition only when he is of your race, it is something you can get away with saying when you are black, or Hispanic or Asian and not otherwise. In America's very race-conscious society with dominant races and oppressed ones, such an assessment, no matter how enunciated, is the epitome of condescension when directed at a black man of ambition.

Bill Clinton, previously persuaded of his negritude by Maya Angelou, did not seem to have picked on the need for sensitivity. In a bizarre series of attacks following the surprising mettle Obama showed in the first few primaries and caucuses and the rapid closing of the gap in national opinion polls between Hillary and Obama, he (Clinton) suggested that Obama's campaign was a fantasy, not unlike Rev. Jackson's 20 years earlier. Subsequently, and with more than a nudge from the Clinton camp, the message went out, Obama only wins where there is a large concentration of black voters.

Black voters have always been loyal to the Democratic Party - orphaned and neglected though they are in America's two-party system. For this reason they make for one of the most important constituencies for any Democratic Party candidate, and they factored greatly into Hillary Clinton's massive end of 2007 opinion poll leads, which were by all accounts at the time, unassailable. But Obama's subsequent victories, the stubborn resolution in the ‘Yes, We Can' clarion call and the Clintons' attacks on him rallied this section of the electorate and pushed it away from Clinton and to the Illinois Senator where they have stayed since.

This migration was not instantaneous. With the full knowledge of the entrenched discriminatory systems in American society, it took some time before black voters took Obama at all seriously (to this day there are many who will not vote for him out of fear that he will be assassinated if elected), but once they started to shift, there was no holding them back. Obama's victories, even as they have included states like snow-white Iowa and been strongest in demographics like white males, voters with more than one degree, voters with an income in excess of $100,000 and the majority of first-time and the less-than-30 year old voters, has for a fact brought in many more black voters into American politics than ever before. In Lousiana, in the Potomacs, in Georgia and it is expected today in Texas and Ohio as well, Barack Obama can rely on the overwhelming support of America's black population who see in his candidature now, a fulfilment, an acceptance of their place in American society. Gone forever are the debates on whether Obama was "Black enough," and on whether the fact that his blackness was Kenyan and not handed down from African slaves, made him any less African-American.

And it is this overwhelming increase, in what is one of the most dependable and sizeable constituencies for the Democratic Party, that is causing the Democratic Party's establishment figures, the super-delegates, and their biggest headache. It is not, as some have suggested, that the super-delegates will act to overrule the party delegates and endorse a candidate who lost the delegate race. Their problem is that black America and the majority of young voters across America have come to identify with the Illinois Senator so much, and have grown as a result so sensitive to the fact that like them he is an outsider to the hidden levers of power, that any result that does not please this group alienates the very revolution that would give the Democrats an answer to the constant boost the Republican party enjoys from the religious right.

The real threat now, is that a Hillary Clinton victory, especially an imposition of her on the party by the super-delegates, or a decision for example to count the delegates from Florida and Michigan and therefore tilt results in her favour, or a victory won on the back of the ‘kitchen-sink strategy' the Clintons now seem resolute in employing, will anger and frustrate the very part of the electorate that could be most relied upon to canvass for the party and build on a new movement that could rival the influence of Ronald Reagan for the republicans. A national coalition consisting of Obama Republicans as an answer to the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s and 1990s and with zeal as emphatic as that of the bible-thumping religious right, is at stake if Obama is refused this late in the game.

So it seems that Obama, the Illinois prophet, whether they like him or not, is their man. He is the Democrat who many polls still indicate would beat John McCain at the general election, the one who brings together a movement to the party that will probably outlast him, a coalition that has the potential to remodel American politics. But for all the brickbats about a cult, Obama merely finds himself at the head of a movement he can hardly control. Staff in hand, or not, there is no guarantee that his coalition would follow him were he not the designated driver, or return their awesome fighting machine to the Democrats in subsequent years.