Sweeping race out the door

FORTY YEARS after Edward Brooke was elected to represent Massachusetts in the US Senate, the Commonwealth is close to claiming a partial healing of its soul. It does not matter if Deval Patrick wins the Democratic gubernatorial primary next week. It is a colossal triumph for the race to get this far without Patrick's darkness becoming a shroud.

After all, in the 40 years in between, this was the state that gave you stonings of school buses during desegregation, the spearing of a black man in front of Boston City Hall, old-boy white boardrooms that scared off black talent, a Red Sox franchise that allowed the exclusion of black players from spring training dinners well into the 1980s, and a Boston Latin where white parents ended affirmative action at the city's flagship public high school less than 10 years ago. With those historical snapshots, an outsider could remark that it is amazing that Patrick is even in the race, let alone leading it as of this writing.

In years past, it was always assumed that the polls always lied by several percentage points when it came to black candidates in elections where victory depended on wooing white voters.

On Tuesday, a poll of likely Democratic primary voters by CBS4 News found that Patrick had moved into the first significant lead of anyone in the race, with 45 percent support, compared with Chris Gabrieli at 29 percent and Thomas Reilly at 21 percent. It is no surprise that Patrick would have 67 percent support of black voters and 49 percent backing of Latino voters. Most important , he had 43 percent of white voters.

That defies any margin of racial lying to pollsters.

What is equally interesting is that Patrick 's candidacy appears to widen the range of acceptance of black candidates. When Brooke won 40 years ago, it was as a Republican. Doug Wilder of Virginia became the first and only African-American elected governor, serving from 1990-94, winning on a platform where he supported the death penalty (after an early career of opposing it). When Mike Espy became the first black person since Reconstruction to represent a Mississippi district that was equally split along racial lines, he brought along conservative and centrist white voters with support for the death penalty and his appearance in ads for the National Rifle Association.

Some would say that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, whose election in 2004 instantly made him the most visible African-American in Congress, represented progress for more liberal black candidates. It did, but Obama has yet to truly be tested in an election as he defeated inept competitors. Even as Patrick runs, many, if not most other prominent African-Americans currently running for statewide office continue to run platforms where they are compelled to send conservative signals to voters.

Representative Harold Ford of Tennessee, running for the Senate seat being vacated by Bill Frist and attempting to be the first black senator from the Old South since Reconstruction, is a Democrat who supports public display of the Ten Commandments and the repeal of the estate tax. He opposes gay marriage and voted to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq. Gubernatorial candidates Lynn Swann of Pennsylvania and Ken Blackwell of Ohio and senatorial candidate Michael Steele of Maryland are running as Republicans.

Patrick is not under as much pressure in Massachusetts to play conservative cards (he supports gay marriage), but he has blended a grass-roots liberal campaign with his post-Clinton corporate resume. Some of that resume does not please critics of Coca-Cola and Ameriquest, but for the moment, the resume has neutralized Gabrieli's pro-business credentials.

``Patrick fits perfectly in the model of black statewide candidates," said David Canon, a University of Wisconsin political science professor who wrote an award-winning 1999 book on racial voting patterns and testified this summer before a Senate committee on the Voting Rights Act. ``They are more centrist than black candidates coming from homogenous, mostly black districts. They are still left of center overall, but they have the ability to selectively stand up on a few issues to make white voters pay attention."

In a recent interview on CBS4, Patrick said about his being a black candidate, ``For some, it's a plus, for others it's a detraction. For most people it's a thing." For Massachusetts to have a race where color may be just a thing, that is a very big thing.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.