Obama's People

The New York Times is running a photo gallery, with commentary, of the chief advisors to the incoming Obama administration. It's worth the time to go through it, both as a way of becoming familiar with the "players" and seeing how these men and women behave under the floodlights of a portrait photographer.

Of course, what is most gratifying is how diverse the group of advisors is: gender, race, and age are all more representative of America than we have ever seen before. Certainly the Obama administration is not an administration of aging white men.

We are not yet at a point of post-racialism. Race is still important and will remain so until there is no such thing as "block voting," as there was in this most recent election. When 95% of African American voters, 78% of Jewish voters, and 66% of the Latino voters all elected Obama president, we can still see that primary identity politics are in large part operating in the psyches of voters. What happens in our heads is still racism and the reaction to racism.

Gwen Ifill's new book The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama is being highlighted in the Wall Street Journal today. She suggests that Obama was able to get white voters to convince blacks to support him, and to get young voters to convince their elders that Obama was the right man for the job.

Nate Silver, the guru behind fivethirtyeight.com, does an analysis in Esquire that Obama's votes came from urban voters and suburban voters who began to vote like they were still living in the city.