Remember… you heard it here first. Democrats will lose the presidential race in November because, in spite of themselves, they will manage to play the race card against themselves. The "race card" that Democrats always play so cynically and so dishonestly against Republicans will fall heavily against them and ruin their chances for returning to the White House in January 2009.

Things have been looking up for Barack Obama in recent days. After defeating the Clinton political machine in the Iowa Caucuses on January 3 by a surprising eight points (37.6% to 29.5%) and losing to Clinton in the New Hampshire primary on January 8 (39% to 36%) and in the Nevada caucuses on January 19 (51% to 45%), Obama went on to score a landslide 2 to 1 victory over Clinton in South Carolina (55% to 27%).

Now, as the nation moves toward Super Tuesday on February 5, it is clear that much more will be decided in those twenty-four states than the outcome of the 2008 primaries.

In the twenty-two states up for grabs among Democrats, they can be expected to break down as follows: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah for Clinton; Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, and Massachusetts for Obama.

The long term significance of all this is that African Americans are now experiencing a level of expectation unlike anything they’ve known since emancipation and the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and 60s. For the first time, ever, they see a black man with a real shot at being elected President of the United States and they fully expect that to happen. What they don’t know is that they’re about to have the rug pulled out from under them one more time.

After having provided unequivocal support for slavery from the earliest days of the republic until emancipation, and for Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, and the KKK from emancipation through the mid-1950s, Democrats decided in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education that it was time to drop their long opposition to social, economic, and political equality for blacks and, instead, do whatever was necessary to ensnare African Americans as another captive voting bloc of the Democratic coalition.

For those who may still wonder why places like Baltimore, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Chicago, Detroit, Newark, and Watts were burning during the 1960s, there is little doubt about what caused the insurrection. It was the unrealistically high level of expectations created by Democratic promises… expectations that equated to the elimination of poverty and instant middle-class status… when all they got was more poverty, more black-on-black crime, urban blight, the purposeful destruction of the black family and… more and more promises.

Democrats raised black expectations to the heights and then let them drop. And when blacks discovered that middle class status did not come easily or automatically, as they’d been led to believe, and that economic advancement was obtainable only through education and hard work, as Republicans insisted … they became very angry and they set their own neighborhoods on fire.

Democrats did the same with women, with blue collar workers, with teachers, with public employees, with environmentalists, and with gays and lesbians. The litmus test for admission to the party was the same for all: you had to see yourself as a victim of wealthy and educated white guys (obviously Republicans). Unlike Republicans, people who share a common set of beliefs in what it is that has made our nation the envy of the world, the Democratic Party is populated by people who decide their political identity based on the color of their skin, their gender, the work they choose to do, and their sexual orientation.

But now, after more than a half century of identity politics, where white men were most often the default selection for leadership positions, an upstart young black man with an abundance of charm and sheer chutzpah has offered himself as the leader of our country.

The problem is, he’s a Democrat. And while white Democrats have long been accustomed to grinding their white Republican opponents into the dust… all the while placing their paternal arms around the shoulders of black people, assuring them that they were only doing it to protect them from those nasty old Republicans… they are now faced with the ticklish task of grinding a black man under their heel.

What this all means for the long term is that black Democrats are about to learn something they should have learned decades ago: that what really matters in Democratic politics is not black hope… but white power. They’ll give lip service to black ambitions, but if a black man gets in their way the color of his skin will very quickly become a secondary consideration.