An African-American candidate with left-of-center views and less than four years in the Senate appears poised to win the presidential election over a seasoned white war hero who was until lately a media darling.

And Barack Obama’s favorability rating (53 percent favorable to 33 percent unfavorable) in a recent CBS News/New York Times poll was "the highest for a presidential candidate running for a first term in the last 28 years" of that poll.

There is much to celebrate in this, even for supporters of John McCain. Win or lose, Obama has proved (if more proof were needed) that although many blacks are still mired in poverty — a legacy of our racist history — contemporary white racism has been driven to the fringes and is no longer a serious impediment to black advancement.

So, is the racial-grievance crowd celebrating? Hardly. Instead, the obsessive search for ever-more-elusive evidence of widespread white racism and sneaky appeals to it goes on.

The McCain-Palin campaign has certainly showed an ugly side as its fortunes have faded. Examples include Sarah Palin’s recent suggestion that small towns were "the pro-America areas of this great nation," for which she has had to apologize; her earlier claim that Obama had been "palling around with terrorists"; and McCain’s warnings about Obama bringing "socialism" and "welfare." The mood of some lowlifes at McCain-Palin rallies has turned uglier still.

But the complaint that this shows that McCain and Palin are peddling "racist garbage" in code, as Harold Meyerson (to pick one example) wrote in the October 22 Washington Post, seems contrived.

Is Barack Obama–now closer than ever to winning the Democratic nomination–nonetheless at a political disadvantage because of white racism, or "racial fears," or "race-baiting," or racial "double standards," as some commentators have suggested?

The evidence indicates otherwise, as it pertains both to this election and more broadly to the perennial tendency of many in the racial-grievance groups, the media, and academia to exaggerate how much white racism remains and its impact on African-Americans.

But many of the voters who have been unfairly tarred as racist do have a different flaw that Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain are working especially hard to exploit: ignorance of elementary economics and other things every high school graduate should know, which accounts for the low quality of the debate on issues ranging from the gas tax to trade to the budget.

More on voter ignorance later. First, let’s examine the notion that white racism, or efforts to fan it, underlie Obama’s recent difficulties in winning over middle-class white voters.

"It is an injustice, a legacy of the racist threads of this nation’s history," The New York Times declared in an April 30 editorial, that Obama was so widely called upon to repudiate the Rev. Jeremiah Wright while the media have given much less attention to McCain’s courtship of an equally bigoted white, far-right Texas pastor named John Hagee. The editorial pre-emptively condemned as "race-baiting" any campaign ads showing Wright in action. Times columnist Frank Rich and PBS commentator Bill Moyers voiced similar complaints. And Steve Kornacki wrote in the April 29 New York Observer that Wright was being and will be "used to stoke racial fears and prejudices about Mr. Obama."

"I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged, and I think that there’s nothing wrong with us taking that into account as we consider admissions policies at universities. I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed." — Barack Obama, May 13, 2007

This Obama response to a question by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about whether the children of two well-off Harvard law graduates should "get affirmative action" (meaning racial preferences) has potentially radical implications for a Democratic presidential contender.

Although Obama has often embraced racial preferences, the above-quoted statements — as well as his inspirational rhetoric about getting away from racial categorizing — are hard to reconcile either with the regime of racial preferences that now pervades this country or with Democratic orthodoxy on the subject.

Obama seemed to imply that "advantaged" African-Americans should not receive affirmative-action preferences — at least, not at the expense of less advantaged Asian-Americans or whites — in college admissions, or (one might extrapolate) other walks of life.

But most recipients of racial preferences are relatively advantaged. According to the most comprehensive survey of the relevant data, although white students are wealthier on average, 86 percent of the black students (and 98 percent of whites) enrolled in 28 selective colleges came from middle- or upper-class backgrounds. (The numbers come from a 1998 book, The Shape of the River, by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, both ardent champions of racial preferences.)

Playing the race card is not really Barack Obama’s style. Although happy to use his racial identity as an asset, he seeks to transcend it by getting beyond obsessing about racial grievances. This is not easy in a party that has long wallowed in the politics of group grievance. It is especially difficult when running against a woman who has so assiduously used the gender card while profiting from her own victimization at the hands of the same unfaithful husband who now joins her in tag-team distortions of Obama’s record.

Gloria Steinem took Hillary Rodham Clinton’s I-am-woman-vote-for-me approach to the limit in a New York Times op-ed by suggesting that it would be better to elect a white woman than a black man because women got the franchise 50 years later and have "no masculinity to prove."

So perhaps Obama should be forgiven for piling on a bit after other black leaders implausibly accused Clinton of showing disrespect for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when she pointed out that King needed President Johnson to push civil-rights laws through Congress. Obama was ill-advised to call Clinton’s statement "ill-advised" and "unfortunate." But would forbearance have cost him black votes?

"All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action [and of] radical feminism," David Brooks observed in his New York Times column, "are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners."

Is it too much to hope that this embarrassing identity-politics brawl proves to be a learning experience for liberals about the dangers of reflexively attributing racist, sexist, and other bigoted motives to people who disagree with or displease them?