Black Vote Bubble Blunder?

I'm hearing that the black vote in North Carolina is very heavy, therefore a solid win for Obama. Everybody knows that black people vote black.

I've also read an article in RCP by Stephen Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom. They argue that there is something of a black church in America --that is, a church of some shared heritage and shared theology-- and that parishioner Obama's and Reverend Wright's church have nothing to do with that black church at all.

I'm arguing that the bubble is that the liberal press and the liberal Mr. Obama can't see that faith is important to the black congregant in America and that they thus might be upset by Mr. Obama calling a racist church "the black church". That might mean that a heavy black turnout in NC is in fact not good for the big O.

We'll see. As I've noted before, this is a primary. A vote for anyone is a vote for a Democrat. It's not so hard for a Democrat to vote for a Democrat. But which one? Will race be the only consideration made by the black voter? Or will what the candidate is and believes matter as well?

I still think faith will matter to many, and in this respect Obama's faith is troubling.

This is how the Thernstrom article begins:

In his recent incendiary remarks, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. claimed that criticism of his views is nothing less "an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition." Can it really be that millions of black Americans regularly choose to listen to viciously anti-white and anti-American rants on Sunday mornings?

Happily, Chicago's Trinity Church is an outlier in that regard. Most black churchgoers belong to congregations that are overwhelmingly African-American and are affiliated with one of the historically black religious denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) or the National Baptist Convention. Rev. Wright's Trinity Church, on the other hand, is a predominantly black branch of a white denomination that is not part of "the African-American religious tradition." The United Church of Christ (known until 1957 as the Congregational Church) has a little over a million members; a mere 4 percent of them are black. Fewer than 50,000 blacks in the entire nation worship at a UCC church.

In contrast, 98 percent of the National Baptist Convention's 4 million members are African Americans. Add in black Methodists and Pentecostals, as well as other black Baptists, and the total comes to more than 14 million members of an organized, predominantly African-American church. These churches include a substantial majority of all black adults today. In terms of sheer demographic weight, they clearly represent the "African-American religious tradition"-as Rev. Wright's branch of a overwhelmingly white denomination does not.

In comparing this massive demographic to Wright's church (the church to which Obama now claims allegiance, rather than to the man) the article goes on:

The web sites of Rev. Wright's Trinity Church and the national body to which it belong stand in shocking contrast. Before the Trinity site was sanitized in early 2008, its material seethed with racial animus and hostility towards America. It described itself as "Afrocentric"; its motto was "Unashamedly Black, Unapologetically Christian." Its quasi-literate foundational document, "The Black Value System," devoted much more attention to blackness than to Christianity. It is the manifesto of a church for people of the black race, designed to be an "instrument of Black self-determination." Blacks were depicted as a race apart-the scurrilous perspective that pervaded Rev. Wright's April 27 Detroit speech, in which he contended that blacks and whites had completely different brain structures, one left-dominant, the other right-dominant. This is nothing more than an updated version of the pseudo-science once used to defend segregation in the Jim Crow South.
(Snip)
Clearly, Rev. Wright does not speak for mainstream black churches-and he has done them a gross disservice by claiming to do so. He shares neither their vision nor their values....

I'm pleased by this statement. I expect some black Christian repudiation of Obama as a man who holds views antithetical to their own. I just don't know the numbers.