Shorter New York Times: Barack Obama hasn’t magically healed racial divide in the US. He’s been the Democratic nominee for more than a month. What is he waiting for?

Update 7/16 2:54 PM: Brad DeLong objects to the sample sizes used in the Times poll:

I must admit that my breath is stopped by the idea of saying anything about Black-white opinion differences based on a poll with only 300 Blacks in it. That is bizarre statistical malpractice of a high order.

It’s certainly true that the margin of sampling error for the black respondents is relatively high (six percentage points). But “statistical malpractice” seems really strong. Given the often enormous gulf between black and white opinion on many issues and the power of random sampling, we can still say with great confidence that blacks and whites have different opinions on every specific question cited in the article. (By my calculations, the margin of sampling error for the difference between black and white opinion is approximately 6.4 percentage points.)