Remember back in January and February of 2008?

Some South Carolina supporters summed up his broad appeal and message about transcending differences in a chant: “Race Doesn’t Matter.”

You could completely oppose Barack Obama as a candidate, but still see a certain noble milestone in his rise to the highest office in the land. Some would say the concept of that chant was an impossible dream or amounted to a misguided whitewashing – no pun or controversy intended – of cultural differences. But after decades in which all manner of news events triggered debates over whether racial animosity towards African-Americans was rare or pervasive in our society — Rodney King, O. J. Simpson, Tawana Brawley, the Duke lacrosse case, Imus, Michael Richards, etc. — it seemed like vast swaths of Americans wanted to turn the page and say, “Look, we’re a fundamentally decent nation, and our election of this fundamentally decent man of mixed heritage proves it.”

And then the first African-American attorney general, appointed by the first African-American president, declared that America was a “nation of cowards” when it came to discussions of race.

And then the president said that while he didn’t have all the facts, his first impression was that a cop had “acted stupidly” in arresting Prof. Henry Louis Gates, and discussed the racial profiling.

And then the Washington Post told us that the Obama-as-the-Joker poster was racist.

And now Paul Krugman explains to us that opposition to Obama’s health-care proposals is primarily driven by racism.

I can’t help but wonder how many Americans voted for Obama thinking that with an African-American president, the nation would put its bimonthly national racial controversies behind it and focus on other matters that transcended the color line. And now we find ourselves in a circumstance where, if not every criticism of the president is automatically denounced as racism, a significant percentage of them are. Keep in mind there’s plenty of legitimate criticism to be made of things such as Joker posters or protesters who try to exercise the heckler’s veto; but there is a knee-jerk reflex to label anything inconvenient as racially motivated.

If and when Obama runs for reelection, will any crowd chant “race doesn’t matter” again? Tough to imagine. We’ve seen that race will be brought up as a malicious motive, again and again, in almost every circumstance . . .