Quota quest: of Obama's vulnerability on racial preferences.

THE election of Barack Obama threatens to become the worst thing that ever happened to race-based affirmative action. So says liberal columnist Bonnie Erbe. "What could do more damage to the argument that African Americans deserve racial preferences than a majority of Americans voting to put an African American in the White House?" she asked in July. Her answer: "Little, from where I sit."

The case for racial preferences almost certainly would weaken during an Obama presidency. Sanctimonious liberals everywhere would face a squirm-inducing question: "If racism in America is so bad, then how come ...?" The smart ones will observe that most whites actually cast their votes for John McCain (as seems likely, based on current polls). Even so, Obama's success would force the conversation about racial preferences to shift fundamentally.

To a certain extent, it already has. On the night of January 26, after Obama won South Carolina's Democratic primary, supporters at a victory party broke into a chant: "Race doesn't matter! Race doesn't matter!" The mood was so jubilant that even a veteran race hustler like Rev. Jeremiah Wright would have been tempted to join in.

Yet the case for racial preferences and their ongoing reality are separate things. Obama may inspire all kinds of happy talk about national healing. (If you think the media are already treating him as a post-racial messiah, just wait until his inauguration day.) At the same time, his administration would strive to make sure that racial bean-counting shaped voting districts, college admissions, K-12 demographics, public contracting, and business hiring.

Personnel is policy, and Obama almost certainly would nominate judges and appoint civil-rights officials from the ranks of activist organizations whose very purpose is to push the idea that race matters, contrary to what those South Carolina chanters had the audacity to hope. Just translate the name of a leading Hispanic group, the National Council of La Raza: In complete English, it's the National Council of the Race.

Obama isn't special in this regard. Nearly any Democrat in the White House would draw from the same pool of people and advance the same color-coded causes. Raul Yzaguirre, who served as president of the National Council of the Race for three decades, was a co-chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Some foes of racial preferences nevertheless have felt the urge to cheer on Obama, in the belief that his success represents at least a symbolic victory for colorblindness. Ward Connerly is both a Republican and America's best-known foe of racial preferences. In February, he sent a $500 donation to Obama. "My token contribution wasn't an endorsement," says Connerly, who supported Rudy Giuliani in the GOP primaries and now plans to vote for McCain. "But I wanted to applaud his efforts to take America beyond race."