Pat Dollard | Young Americans

(AFP) - Barack Obama on Sunday rejected suggestions that prejudice could prevent his winning the US presidency in November, as Democrats mulled whether racial bias makes Hillary Clinton the better Democratic candidate.

With last week’s Pennsylvania primary showing party voters riven along racial lines, African-American Senator Obama fended off questions about his viability in the contest during a Fox News interview.

“I don’t think that race is going to be a barrier in the general election,” Obama said.

“Look, is race still a factor in our society? Yes. I don’t think anybody would deny that. Is that going to be the determining factor in a general election? No. Because I’m absolutely confident that the American people, what they’re looking for is somebody who can solve their problems.”

But an increasing focus on the demographics of the tight Clinton-Obama fight has Democratic party leaders, and the all-important superdelegates who will likely decide the nominee, studying whether American racial bias would give Republican John McCain an insurmountable edge over Obama.

In the Pennsylvania primary, Clinton captured 63 percent of the white vote, while Obama gained 90 percent of the much smaller black vote.

In exit polls 18 percent of Democratic voters in the eastern state said race influenced their decision, with 73 percent saying they would back Obama in a general election versus 82 percent for Clinton.

Democrats are concerned — and Clinton’s campaign argues — that such numbers could be significant enough to undermine the Illinois senator’s quest to become the country’s first black president.

The issue of race and the vote has surged to the point where Newsweek magazine put it on their cover of their issue out on Monday.

A Newsweek poll shows that 19 percent of voters feel the United States is not ready to elect a black president.

On the other hand, in the same poll only three percent of whites said they would be less likely to vote for Obama because of his race.

African-American Congressman Artur Davis argued that the issue is conjured up to hurt Obama.

“There are a lot of people in this town who are saying, well, Barack’s a wonderful guy, but he’s not electable because, well, at the end of the day, these white voters won’t be there,” Davis said on ABC’s This Week Sunday.

“And you ask them, well, why isn’t he electable? They say, well, he doesn’t have experience. The reality is that Barack Obama has been in political office longer than Hillary Clinton. He’s been in political office longer than George Bush had been.”

But Clinton supporter Senator Evan Bayh insisted: “It is legitimate to talk about electability — not race, but electability.”

Obama — the son of a white American mother and Kenyan father — has sought since the beginning of the nomination fought to transcend racial identity and present himself as a unifier.

But the issue keeps returning, helped by comments from Clinton’s team as well as the controversy over the fiery race-tinged sermons by the former pastor of Obama’s church.

Obama himself stoked the issue when he described a bitter class of Americans whom he said cling to guns or religion — a description taken as an slight by many white, middle-class voters.

“I think Democrats do have questions about whether or not he is going to be able to reach out and successfully win over the kind of blue-collar voters that Democrats need to win in order to take the White House back in November,” Clinton strategist Howard Wolfson said on CBS.

“Don’t assume that because Senator Clinton did well in some (states), that that means that we can’t do well in the general election with these voters,” Obama’s top tactician David Axelrod countered.

Faced by worries that bitterness between the two candidates’ supporters could kill either’s chances of beating McCain, Democratic party chairman Howard Dean insisted that they would unite come November.

“We happen to have an African-American candidate and a woman candidate, and clearly those groups of folks who have historically been disenfranchised in our political process have their favorites,” Dean said on NBC Sunday.

“At the end of the day, we have to bring that together … (and) the most important person to bring those folks together is the person who doesn’t win.”