"If he overidentifies with Sharpton, he looks like he’s only a black candidate."

"A black candidate doesn’t want to look like he’s only a black candidate.... A white candidate reaches out to a Sharpton and looks like they have the ability to reach out. It looks like they’re presidential. That’s the dichotomy."

Said — is it too obvious? — Al Sharpton.

And from Julian Bond: "A portion of black voters want Obama to give them some raw meat. Because they want so badly to have their concerns addressed and highlighted, and they expect it of him because he’s black."

From a NYT article titled "A Biracial Candidate Walks His Own Fine Line":

Too young to have experienced segregation, [Barack Obama] has thrived in white institutions. His style is more conciliatory than confrontational, more technocrat than preacher. Compared with many older politicians, he tends to speak about race indirectly or implicitly, when he speaks about it at all....

In his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama recalls sitting with a white, liberal Democrat in the Senate and listening to a black, inner-city legislator, whom he identified only as John Doe, speechifying on how the elimination of a particular program was blatant racism. The white colleague turned to Mr. Obama and said, “You know what the problem is with John? Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white.”

Mr. Obama finds a lesson in that moment: White guilt has exhausted itself. Even fair-minded whites resist suggestions of racial victimization. Proposals that benefit minorities alone cannot be a basis for the broad coalitions needed to transform the country, he concluded. Only “universal appeals” for approaches that help all Americans, he wrote in his book, “schools that teach, jobs that pay, health care for everyone who needs it” can do that, “even if such strategies disproportionately help all Americans.”