San Fran Chronicle: Obama can’t look ‘as if he’s going black’ after conference call with Jeremiah Wright

A San Francisco Chronicle item by Willie Brown. h/t Free Republic.

By my estimate, you have to build in a three- to five-point slip from the poll numbers for any black candidate on election day. To overcome the slip, you need to pump up the black vote by equal measure.

And thats not easy, because brothers and sisters arent among the top turnout groups.

In 2008, Barack Obama was able to compensate for the slip and then some. You would have thought it was Nelson Mandela coming out of jail. This time its not going to be that easy.

If Obama looks as if hes going black, he could turn off white people. So he’s largely been lying low on the race issues – visibly pushing for the Latino vote, the gay vote, the women’s vote, but not the black vote.

But last weekend, he held a conference call with a collection of black preachers that included his old pastor, Jeremiah Wright. He wanted to talk to them about getting out the vote.