Up a sharp flight of stairs in a Brooklyn building one enters a large room where scores of West Indians, both men and women, slam dominoes, sip drinks and talk politics on weekend evenings.

“Earlier this year, we were divided a lot,” said Lionel Blackman. “That was when the election campaign was in full swing in Barbados and people were taking sides. Now, we are all for Obama, our next president. He is going to get almost every vote in this organization.”

Welcome to Obama country

Indeed, all across America, wherever people of color assemble, the refrain and the story are the same: “Obama is the one, yes we can.”

Yes, the U.S. senator from Illinois, the Democratic Party’s presidential standard-bearer, is expected to get at least 90 percent of the millions of votes cast by Blacks and about 60 percent of the Hispanic vote. Also true, he is likely to duel out his Republican rival, 71-year-old Senator John McCain, in the rush for the under-50 vote. But what’s a fact of political life is that their combined support wouldn’t be enough to put him in the White House next January, when George W. Bush vacates the presidential mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

So, when 47-year-old Senator Obama officially accepts the nomination in Denver’s 76,000-seat Invesco Field at Mile High, Colorado on Thursday night, the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s immortal “I have a dream” speech, no one would have to remind him or the Democrats that their biggest task is to convince at least 40 percent of the overall white vote across the country to support Obama for him to win in November.

Few persons would know that better than Thom Riehle, an expert pollster.

“It is a daunting task as the first Black candidate for president,” said Riehle, founder of the widely watched and quoted Associated Press/IPSO survey. “To get there, he’s got to win roughly the same proportion of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents that all other Democrats get. If he doesn’t, he’s in a world of trouble. He can’t win it just by changing the electorate.”

Looked in another way, the Black candidate has to secure between one and two percentage points less than the votes Senator John Kerry received in 2004 and Vice President Al Gore garnered four years earlier at the turn of the century. Interestingly, both Kerry and Gore lost.

“What makes Obama’s task of scoring white votes at Kerry-Gore levels so formidable is, to put it bluntly, racial prejudice” wrote John Heinemann in the liberal New York Magazine two weeks ago.

And the results of the polls aren’t making things easier for the Senator. At best, they were a mixed blessing.

A national poll released a few days ago found that overall McCain had all but closed the gap the Democrat over the Republican a month ago, 45 percent to 42 percent. Wit a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, the race could be a statistical dead heat or Obama could be ahead by six points.

That’s a remarkable comeback for McCain who at different times had trailed Obama by as much as seven percentage points. Equally troubling is the band of Hillary supporters, half of whom plan to back Obama but one in five is for McCain, who has been praising Clinton at every opportunity. Then there is the problem with the white men, who, according to the Pew Research Center, have little enthusiasm for a Black man. Obama’s support in that group is paltry, in the mid thirties.

On the other side of the ledger, the Democrat, according to another national poll, was holding his own among white women, a few percentage points behind the McCain while he had a 10-point margin over the Republican when it came to working class voters, 47 to 37 percent.

But a big question remains: how reliable are the numbers, given the “Bradley effect,” meaning the tendency among many white voters to lie to pollsters on issues of race? They often say they can and do vote for Blacks when in fact they have no intention of backing someone other than a Caucasian, but are too embarrassed to say so.

The “Bradley effect” named after the popular Democratic Black mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, who ran for the California governor’s job more than 20 years ago. Exit polls had suggested ion the night of the election that Bradley would defeat a white Republican, but when the votes were counted he had lost – a sure telltale indication that many whites did not tell the truth.

It happened again this year in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, when Clinton won when polls had predicted her defeat the day before the vote. The scenario repeated itself in several state primary races in which the polls over-predicted Obama support, again pointing his softness among whites.

And with McCain and the Republicans reportedly gearing up to play the race card and to raise doubt about the Democrat’s background and suitability to lead the country, America’s curse, racism, as former President Bill Clinton put it, is expected to be front and center during an unpleasant national campaign.

The Republicans are adept to using race to garner political support and with an opponent whose name is Barack Hussein Obama, who happens to be Black, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if McCain plays to people’s worst fears, warn the experts.

Although head-to-head national polls indicate that the contest has tightened in recent weeks, the experts at Polster.com insist that a state-by-state analysis of the electoral map suggests that if the elections were held today, Obama would win the 270 Electoral College votes needed to put him in the White House. And that would happen, they say, even if he loses Virginia, Colorado, Florida and Missouri.

“All we care about is 271,” said David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager. But to get them, he has to downplay race during the campaign; present himself to the American people as the candidate with the domestic agenda – health care, the economy, the environment and education, in particular – that is of interest to them and that pales in comparison with the McCain program. Clearly, hiss oratorical skills, intellect and youthful agility should give him a head start over McCain. With the economy in terrible shape, millions of jobs being lost, Americans being killed in unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and President George Bush being considered the most ineffective president in modern times, Obama is expected to link McCain to the Republican in the White House and in the Congress and therefore generate more support.

Still, it must be of concern to the Democrats that despite all the negative factors surrounding McCain and Bush, Obama isn’t much farther along in national polls.

“The big challenge for Obama is to position himself as a problem solver who will lead the nation out of its current mess, both on the domestic and foreign fronts,” J. Ann Selzer, a pollster in Iowa, said recently.

Out in Denver, where Lloyd Lovell, a West-Indian businessman, is expected to be an alternate delegate to the convention, the support for Obama is strong, especially among the young white Democrats. In addition, the mood is decidedly upbeat.

“We expect him to win in November,” he said.

In Brooklyn, the West-Indian domino players in the two-story building on Nostrand Avenue are confident of victory.

“Obama is going to be victorious, no matter what,” said Blackman.

Given their numbers and political clout, such sentiments would be reassuring if they were coming from whites.

“We recognized the racial factor of the political equation, but we are confident of victory,” said Canon Llewellyn Armstrong, Episcopal priest in New York. “Trust me, it’s going to happen.”

Millions of people are trusting he is right.