Most observers of American politics will expect the Democratic Party to have arrived at a post-racial modernity. After all, it is the party that espouses equality and racial justice, the party that attracts the vast majority of the African American vote.

But, if it has done nothing else, the 2008 race for the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination has proven that bigotry is alive and well within the party that claims liberal moorings.

And that bigotry flows from the top. Former President Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, described her rival, Senator Barack Obama's drive to clinch the nomination as a "fairy tale", a term with loaded meaning for blacks. Having been the Governor of the southern state of Arkansas, Bill Clinton would have been well aware of that. Clinton didn't stop there at obliquely race-baiting Obama. As Obama comfortably triumphed in the crucial South Carolina Democratic primary, the former President likened that win the Jesse Jackson's wins in 1984 and 1988 in the same state. Nobody mistook Jackson for anything but a narrowcast candidate who appealed to black voters. And Clinton ignored the fact that Obama had won the virtually all-white state of Iowa.

Thus the legend of Obama, the Black Candidate, was born and obediently reported and analyzed by the mainstream media, for whom race was the new black in this election cycle.

Then, before the critical Pennsylvania primaries, the Clinton camp was re-injecting race into the race. Hillary Clinton's principal surrogate, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell was offering up gems such as: "I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African American candidate". He was, of course, referring to Democratic voters. It was a nudge-nudge, wink-wink tactic that the Clintons smiled at.

And the tactic was buttressed by Clinton surrogates such as the New York Times, which embellished (and continues to do so) each report before a primary with a choice quote from an "average working class white voter" who was voting against Obama because of his race.

But these were the public statements. Obama had emerged as a candidate who tried to transcend race and that offends the Democratic Party establishment. So, there was the infamous 3 a.m. ad, which Harvard professor Orlando Patterson believes was less a national security credentials commercial but more about the fear of a nice suburban family of a black intruder.

And then the narrative of nasty black men that Obama has been associated with, even remotely: His pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright or Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam.

As Hillary Clinton stated clearly she would have left Rev. Wright's church over certain statements he had made, she not only attacked Obama but also the other 8,000-odd congregants at the Chicago church, most of them black.

America's media, network and cable news and newspapers, which finds the issue of race and racial division "sexy" and has worked hard to widen the racial divide this year, fuelling antagonism between the races, has been parroting the Clinton talking points on Obama not being able to capture white voters. What they neglected to mention (since that probably didn't fit into their agenda) was that in the last few races in Ohio, Texas, Mississippi and Pennsylvania, thousands of Republican voters voted in the Democratic party to undermine Obama, the candidate the Republicans fear most come November. That inflated the white votes for Clinton but wasn't a detail that fit into the convenient, if dishonest, media narrative.

But there's a backlash in the offing. Senior Democratic Congressman James Clyburn had this to say about the Clinton tactics: "I'm very concerned that if we keep talking as if it doesn't matter...that Obama gets 92 percent of the black vote...since he only got 35 percent of the white vote, he's in trouble. Well, Hillary Clinton only got 8 percent of the black vote. That's like saying that 92 percent, they don't matter."

There was a time when African Americans voters mattered to the Democratic Party establishment. That phase could be described as BO or Before Obama. Black voters were fine as along the Democrats could pander to them; get all their votes. But they've become a problem now that a black has emerged as a viable Presidential candidate.

The American media has often described this as an election where two groups are trying to break the glass ceiling - blacks and women. But when it comes to political capital, that claim is somewhat strange. There may have been no woman President of the United States, but there are 8 women Governors and 16 women Senators. In comparison, there are 2 black Governors (including David Paterson, who became New York's Governor after Eliot Spitzer had to resign in a blaze of inglory) and exactly one Senator - Barack Obama.

I recall closely following the 2004 Presidential elections and the ultimate swing state that resolved the matter against Democratic nominee John Kerry was Ohio. And till late into the vote count, the election could not be called simply because black voters were expected to make the critical difference.

So, while Democrats continue to take the African American electorate for granted, the amazing fact is that the party which has actually had two black Secretaries of State is the Republican Party. Which also happens to be the party that has given America its first Indian American Governor. And, by the way, the Democrats also take Indian American votes for granted.

Ultimately, what the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media in the United States have managed to accomplish in 2008 has been to leave this country far more racially charged and polarized than it has ever been before in this century.