BYLINE: Peter Wallsten
LOS ANGELES: Beneath some of the sharpest assaults on Barack Obama - that he consorted with radicals, that he was condescending to small-town Americans - was a lingering question: Would white America help elect a black president?
On Tuesday, Obama rode a surge of support across voter groups.
And white Americans played a major role in putting the first black president in the White House.
Obama did not win a majority of white voters; no Democrat has since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But he ran equal to the last three Democratic candidates for president among white voters, and possibly even better than the party's 2004 nominee.
Race proved to be no discernable handicap, even among the small-town, working-class whites who were considered most resistant to the young, black newcomer from liberal Chicago.
The force propelling Obama was clear: a troubled economy that had gone from shaky in the spring and summer to frightening in autumn.
But in choosing a black American to lead in a time of crisis, the nation's voters have broken a number of long-held assumed truths about the hold of race on the country.
Racial antagonism still exists.
But with Obama's victory, voters showed that such feelings no longer hover over American politics as they have for decades.
Most symbolic of that achievement was Obama's victory in Virginia, home to the capital of the old Confederacy, where the candidate ended his 21-month campaign with a massive rally in Manassas, near the site of one of the epic battles of the Civil War.
Breaking with recent assumptions, Obama showed that a single candidate can appeal to black voters without losing whites, and to white voters without losing blacks.
"The important question was not black or white but green. That is, who was best to handle the economy," said Peter A Brown, associate director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute.
"This is a guy who five years ago was in the state senate, and Americans decided to trust him with their country. I'm not being simplistic by saying these results do demonstrate that racial attitudes have changed."
Obama's coalition cemented during one all-important week of the campaign, in mid-September, when Wall Street financial giants began to collapse and the stock market crashed - a week in which voters still uncertain what to make of the junior senator examined their shrinking retirement accounts and dwindling home values and decided to take a chance.
National exit polls on Tuesday showed that nearly three-quarters of voters disapproved of the job George Bush was doing. And the vast majority of those dissatisfied Americans showed that they were indeed ready for something completely different: a 47-year-old son of a Kenyan father and white American mother with roots in Hawaii and Indonesia.
By the time president-elect Obama addressed hundreds of thousands of cheering supporters on Tuesday night in downtown Chicago, it was hard to remember the array of reasons why many once believed his candidacy was a long-shot.
Opponents spread false internet rumours that he was a Muslim - rumours that were supposed to scare off Jewish voters in Ohio and Florida. Some speculated that Hispanics would not vote for a black candidate. Or that women, angry over the defeat of Hillary Clinton in a bruising primary, would either vote for John McCain or stay home. Or that young voters would not back Obama as strongly as his campaign had hoped.
Election Day told a different story.
Obama improved on past Democratic performances among all groups, with the singular exception of seniors. He improved on 2004 nominee John Kerry's totals among Jews, Protestants and Catholics. While Kerry split women with Bush, Obama won a decisive majority.
Moreover, Obama won 41% of white men - higher than the last five Democratic presidential nominees, according to a National Journal study of exit polls - and nearly half of white independents.
Hispanics, courted aggressively by both sides with Spanish-language ad campaigns, went overwhelmingly for Obama. McCain, once popular with Hispanics, won just 31% - a deep decline from the 40% won four years ago by Bush, and a casualty of the Republican's opposition to a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
Just as Obama helped expand the Democratic coalition - bringing with him new US senators and House members in Republican states from Florida to North Carolina - Republicans now face a drastically narrowed party.
Tuesday's results show that Bush and McCain have left the GOP appealing primarily to white conservatives at a time that Obama's ascension symbolises the growing multi-culturalism of America.
The black share of the electorate, for example, grew from 11% to 13%, no doubt a result of the excitement over Obama's candidacy and a deliberate strategy by his campaign to register new voters and contact blacks who had not participated in the past.
Gone from the Bush win column of 2004 were two pivotal, big states, Ohio and Florida, both of which boast growing ethnic diversity.
But the most reassuring numbers of all for Obama strategists may have been the results among white voters, particularly those in working-class areas and critical suburbs.
"People were looking to vote for change, including white, working-class and even well-educated whites with wealth," said Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist.
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