In his presidential campaign, he has addressed race in a lengthy, comprehensive way only once: On March 18, when incendiary remarks by his former pastor threatened his campaign. “Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” Obama said in Philadelphia. He later broke all ties with the minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and has not addressed race again in anywhere near the depth he did that day.

In Denver, the party has passed up obvious opportunities to celebrate Obama’s achievement in a nation whose legacies of slavery and segregation still feel fresh to many. On Wednesday, three of the House’s most senior black members — Maxine Waters of California, Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina — addressed the convention without alluding to race.

In Denver’s hotels and restaurants, of course, talk of racial politics is more commonplace. Some of the bluntest speakers are white labor union leaders, eager to help Obama win working-class votes in key states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“There are a lot of white workers, and frankly, some of them are union members,” who refuse to vote for Obama “because they think he’s the wrong race,” Richard Trumka, the treasurer of union federation AFL-CIO, told Ohio delegates this week. “We cannot tap dance around the fact.”

“Race is a tool that is used to divide working people,” Trumka said. He called on Democratic activists to convince blue-collar workers that Republican John McCain’s policies would harm their interests.

If black delegates say little about race on the convention stage, many are privately exulting over Obama’s nomination. “This reflects what Dr. King was talking about” in the 1963 “dream” speech, said James W. Crowell, treasurer of the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Martin Luther King III said that his father’s dream is not totally fulfilled, but that Obama is wise to keep from making race central to his candidacy. The campaign, he said, “shouldn’t be about black issues or white issues. It should be about issues for every American.” Rendell, the Pennsylvania governor, said families struggling to pay their bills are more likely to vote on pocketbook issues than on matters such as race, which should help Obama.

People will choose their candidate, he said, based on “who’s most likely to help them with their financial condition. If the answer is Barack Obama, nobody’s going to care whether he’s black, green, orange, purple, fuchsia or whatever.”

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