Mark my words, Obama's difficulty on race is not so much with whites as it is with Hispanics. Just wait. You'll see.
Blacks are a smaller group than Latinos, and Latinos are growing much faster. Do a word search on Obama's speech. "Latino" appears twice. "Brown" as reference to skin color appears twice. For both words, they appear in lists, mentioned in passing.
It speaks volumes that no one in the major media, or the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party, has mentioned Obama's mere token mention of Latinos in his speech. He analyzed racial issues in purely black and white terms.
Now look at the three largest states in this country: California, Texas, and Florida. In each of those states, which is the largest minority group? How well does that group get along with black people?
Now look at the Republican heir apparent. He's an immigration moderate. Now that the Democratic Party has guilt-tripped itself into a 30-year-old definition of the racial divide, it seems to me that the path is wide open for McCain to come riding in on a (pardon the pun) white horse and reclaim a boatload of Hispanic votes put in jeopardy by the Republican anti-immigration fever.
Obama made a serious mistake by ignoring Hispanics in that speech. No one has recognized it yet, but that's a sign of how out of touch this country's political nomenklatura is with ground-level realities out there beyond the talk shows and Internet blogs. One of these years, someone will learn Spanish and go out and start asking questions.