Will race be Obama's Achilles' heel in 2012?

Last week, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty took his first steps toward a 2012 White House challenge, reminding us that it's never too early to start looking ahead to the next election. Debuting his "Freedom First" political action committee, Pawlenty gave an insightful glimpse into what might be a prevailing 2012 campaign theme.

But the real question here is not about Pawlenty. The real question, as we look ahead to 2012, is whether or not Barack Obama will be able to improve on history. More specifically, will Obama be able to use the same kind of racial strategy in 2012 as he did in 2008 to rally the nation's attention and support? What role might race play in Obama's 2012 message? With what eyes will voters see Obama's 2012 racial appeal, and how will Obama's opponents use race against him when they now have a record, not just an image, to target?

Despite what many refer to as Obama's 'de-racialized' campaign, his 'transracial' appeal or his 'post-racial' potential, race was both central and essential to Obama's 2008 message strategy. Rather than downplaying race, Obama consistently deployed complex, dynamic, subtle and often not-so-subtle Civil Rights-era tropes in his speeches and television advertisements. He wove these into an intricate, yet resonant, narrative about the potential for America's racial progress. Obama placed himself at the pinnacle of this progress narrative.

Not in 2012. Unique as he may be in terms of presidential appearance, Obama will not be able to escape the political reality that presidential re-elections are much less about the country's future than about its most recent past. Ronald Reagan summed it up best when he asked, in his famous 1980 debate, if people are better off today than they were four years ago. Progress is measured by the past. No amount of racial appeal will suffice if all Obama has to point back to as a sign of America's progress in 2012 is his 2008 racial milestone, nor if he has difficulty demonstrating to the American people that they would be better off in 2012 than they were in 2008.

In 2008, some supported Obama because he looked like them. Others who don't share the same skin promoted Obama because he provided them with the opportunity that their colorblind belief system dictated should have happened long ago. Some voted for him despite his blackness, and still others opposed him, in part, because of his race. No matter which group you belonged to, however, almost everyone hid behind the same delusion: that race should not, and did not matter. In the general election, ninety percent of all Americans polled said that race was not an important factor in their vote.

If we believe the more likely story that people voted according to one of the race-related factors above, rather than believe that the vast majority of the country disregarded race when making their voting decision, one has to wonder whether some of these categories of voters will maintain the same motivation in 2012.

It is reasonable to believe that vast majority of African-Americans and other minorities who supported Obama out of a sense of racial solidarity will do so again in 2012. When candidates in an election have been on equal footing, blacks have almost always supported the black candidate. But the same may not be likely for whites and/or those who took an "it's finally time to give a black guy a shot" approach to voting. Put simply, it may be easy for many of these voters to look back and say, "we gave him his shot," particularly the 47 percent of white Independents or the 60 percent of ideologically-moderate white who voted for Obama in 2008. This latter group of voters may fall prey to the heightened and explicit racial chord that right-leaning conservatives are likely to strike in the next presidential election.

If the first nine months of Obama's presidency are any indication, the more vociferous conservatives are likely to both hide their racial animosity behind a thin veneer of race-neutrality ("I don't not like the guy because he's black, he just doesn't represent people like me."), as well as explicitly intertwining racial apprehension and fear with their opposition to Obama's policies (e.g. Glenn Beck's and Rush Limbaugh's recent claims that Obama's health care plan is simply racial reparations in disguise). In short, whites who supported Obama in 2008 out of some ephemeral sense of temporary racial justice may fall prey to what may arguably be one of the reasonable, though still not credible, arguments of the radical right's racial noise machine: that Obama's race is just too much of a distraction to get anything done.

There is a long time between now and the next election and those days will likely be filled with their fair share of surprises. But given the racial significance of Obama's election, the increased public debate about and around race and the largely negative tone of many groups' racial rhetoric, we might do well to start thinking early and often about the ways in which race may become Obama's Achilles heel.

We would do well to start pondering the role race might play in 2012 America, when we will be looking back on, not forward to, what many think was America's last and final racial hurdle.