Race remains the political wild card

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Video: Decision '08

Turning Point: 2008
Nov. 5: NBC's Tom Brokaw recaps the historic election of America's first black president. Produced by msnbc.com's Kevin Flynn.

Looking back at the historic race

NBC calls an Obama win

'Change has come to America'

Decision '08 Election Night video

Barack Obama victory speech

John McCain concession speech

The candidates in pictures

Reuters	Final push Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain make their final appeals to voters.
AP file	John McCain The Republican presidential candidates' life has revolved around the public need.
Punahoe Schools via AP	The life of Barack Obama The path of the president-elect, from childhood to party leader
The Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman via AP	Sarah Palin The fast-track governor's rise from Alaska beauty queen to governor to John McCain’s running mate.
AP file	Joseph Biden The senator's legacy of public service and life filled with second chances.

A history lesson on the South
Democrats locked in generations of support in the South because they favored an end to Reconstruction. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal depended as much on the votes of Southern, white supremacist lawmakers as it did on northern liberals.

Gradually, political calculations changed, and President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, said famously he was delivering the South to the Republicans when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Four years later, Richard Nixon, a Republican, won the White House with a so-called Southern strategy that played on white anger with racial integration. In 1990, Republican Sen. Jesse Helms won re-election in North Carolina with an ad showing a close-up of two white hands crumpling a letter. "You needed that job, but they had to give it to a minority," said the narrator.

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It's not an appeal that would ever come from McCain — who spoke movingly of Martin Luther King Jr. in May at the site of the civil rights leader's assassination in Memphis.

Racial politics has changed among Democrats, as well, in the generation since Jackson was running for president with an appeal aimed almost exclusively at blacks.

"The hands that once picked cotton can now pick a president," was one of his memorable mantras.

That's not a phrase that's ever going to pass Obama's lips as he urges Americans to overcome their doubts about him.

Instead, he hopes to quietly register millions of new black voters, and put a few of those Southern states in play that have voted Republican for a generation.