Jonah: A key graf in that Wash Post piece is this one:

Born to a white mother and a black Kenyan father, reared in Hawaii by his white grandparents and for a few years in Indonesia with his Indonesian stepfather, Obama in many ways embodies the one America he often talks about: He identifies himself as African American, but his experiences are at once those of African Americans, whites, Asian Americans and immigrants.

In this sense, he’s like a poster child for the melting pot. But if I understand his background properly, his blackness isn’t rooted in the Deep South, the way it is for so many other black Americans. I agree that many whites would love to elect a black president, in a kind of national exorcism of our country’s past. Wouldn’t it be a little odd, though, if the first black president didn’t have a single ancestor who once sweated in the cotton fields of Georgia–i.e., someone who directly suffered from the sins of slavery? I don’t know that this will be an actual source of resentment for anybody except a few cranks who want to make a fetish of such things, but it is certainly a curiosity.

Final thought: One reason why Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and their ilk may not embrace Obama is because they’re jealous of him and don’t want to cede their anointment by media liberals as the spokesmen of black America.