Challenge for Team Barack

Here's a challenge for team Barack - How do they use race to promote their candidate, but also use it as a weapon to bludgeon those who seek to inject race into the race?

As they ponder a political map that has spelled defeat for Democrats in the last two presidential elections, Barack Obama's campaign strategists are quietly laying plans to draw African American voters to the polls in unprecedented numbers by capitalizing on the excitement over the prospect of electing the nation's first black president.

It's a challenge - Position yourself as the 'post-racial' candidate, but don't allow minorities to get in the camera shot.

The strategy requires a deft touch and carries risks, however.

In large part, Obama, an Illinois senator who is the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, has succeeded so far by appealing across racial lines. Strategists say he cannot afford to appear to be exploiting race or running solely as a black candidate -- particularly as he courts moderate whites and blue-collar workers who did not support him in the primaries.

So, at the same time they'll be calling Republicans race baiters for showing photographs of Barack with his close aid Jeremiah Wright, they'll be telling folks to vote for Barack because he is black.

Obama's formula for energizing blacks while appealing to whites relies in part on demonstrating independence from the more militant traditions of black politics and using rhetoric that spans race. He has opposed monetary reparations for descendants of slaves, for example. And he has said that he does not think his daughters should benefit from affirmative action, because they have had a "pretty good deal," and he has expressed openness to programs that could help disadvantaged whites, Latinos and women.

No stone will go unturned, which makes the strategy all the more dangerous.

The push for new and nontraditional voters is so targeted and aggressive that an NAACP official in Ohio said her organization plans to pursue individuals who are incarcerated but who have not yet been tried or sentenced and, therefore, under state law, remain eligible to vote.

Can Barack pull off the double standard without getting caught and labeled as the race obsessed candidate? They think it's worth the try.

“I’m probably the only candidate who, having won the nomination, can actually redraw the political map,” Obama replied to a question about his strategy from a Concord, N.H., woman at a house party last August. Pacing around the old Victorian home, the wooden floor creaking, Obama went on: “I’ll give you one specific example: Mississippi is 40% African American, but it votes 25% African American. If we just got the African Americans in Mississippi to vote their percentage, Mississippi is suddenly a Democratic state. And Georgia may be a Democratic state. Even South Carolina starts being in play. And I guarantee you African-American turnout, if I’m the nominee, goes up 30% around the country, minimum.”