For an excellent analysis explaining why Barack Obama is bound to receive the Democratic nomination for president, I commend the piece appearing Tuesday in this newspaper’s Opinion page by Peter Brown, a university pollster.

Not only does simple arithmetic make it impossible for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, to gain a majority of popular-vote delegates; the nature of today’s Democratic Party leadership will not allow "super delegates" to deny Obama. They will not thwart the party’s black constituency and will not risk its backlash.

Aside from these raw political calculations, how about Obama the candidate in the eyes of today’s objective independents, if any such breed exists. Is he still in the game after the revealed statements of his longtime preacher and his own public explanation?

Yes, he is, at least through the party nomination process. Among Democrats he might emerge even stronger. He made a marvelous speech about black-white relations in America, his own family upbringing, unique in the history of U.S. politics, and his challenging association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who married Obama and his wife and baptized their children.

Obama decried Wright’s incendiary statements about America and white people but said he would not disown him any more than he would a member of his own family who similarly disappointed him. He said Wright brought him to Christianity, an accomplishment of no particular value concerning his run for the presidency but an expression of Obama’s personal ties to the preacher outsiders can respect.

Many call Obama’s speech Tuesday historic. It was, in the sense no situation quite like this has ever occurred before. That it matches Martin Luther King’s most memorable utterances is a stretch. It was not delivered in the midst of a national crisis with blood in the streets. But I do believe it saves his candidacy, for now, and it was an important message given by a person commanding a national audience. It reiterates how many black citizens regard society but, I daresay, does nothing to bring us closer together in any large sense. His candidacy is an important issue, but the instant debate is about Obama, not racial America.

Obama has defused any damage Clinton now can inflict over the Wright episode. The preacher is retired, and Obama has faced up to the embarrassment in a way most people can respect. But what is the implication for the general election?

Republicans will have no worry over losing a sustaining black constituency. Indeed, they can subtly play on racial prejudice without ever mentioning skin color. They merely will refer to Obama’s faithful allegiance to a mentor who "hates America" and endlessly recycle the preacher’s rants. This is not a valid critique of Obama’s fitness for the office he seeks, but it will resonate. How far? To what electoral effect?

I asked a political guru in Washington the other day how important the prejudice factor might be in the general election. How many voters simply would not vote for either Clinton or Obama because of gender or racial bias? If that influence amounts to 5 or 7 percent, or even 3, it could be decisive.

We don’t want to admit any such unfortunate influence exists in our enlightened electorate. No matter whether we finally decide Republican John McCain or one of the Democrats is the best choice for president, let it not hinge on simple prejudice. If we keep our minds open, we will agree either a woman or a black person in the White House, per se, is a good thing, or at least not bad. If we don’t like this woman or this black man on more substantial grounds, so be it.

We’ll never know how this subtle distinction is made in anyone’s innards but our own.

The person who is slowest in making a promise is most faithful in its performance.

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, French philosopher and writer

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