Barack Obama, the candidate for United States senator from Illinois who delivered the Democrats’ keynote address last night, told NBC’s Tim Russert that Republicans don’t get the black vote “because the Democrats have consistently championed those issues, civil rights issues, voting rights issues, concern for working families, that are of greatest concern to African-American voters.” He said that “when you look at John Kerry’s record and John Edwards’s record, they represent the kinds of policies that are of importance to African-Americans.”

The fact is that the Republicans have been making headway in gaining the support of minority voters. A survey by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that 10% of blacks identified themselves as Republicans in 2002, up from 4% two years before. If the gains have been modest and if Republicans have a long way to go, the ideological ground has been shifting. And the Democrats have been strangely muted on the topic of race this year. This year’s Democratic Party platform tackles the issue of affirmative action with a single sentence: “We support affirmative action to redress discrimination and to achieve the diversity from which all Americans benefit.”

We can’t help wondering whether this muted tone derives from Mr. Kerry’s own transition on the issue. He was once much bolder about the issue. In a 1992 speech at Yale University, he called affirmative action an “inherently limited and divisive program.” He said, “The truth is that affirmative action has kept America thinking in racial terms.” The senator acknowledged that within the “vast and bewildering apparatus of affirmative action rules and guidelines…there exists a reality of reverse discrimination that actually engenders racism.”

No such tough talk will be forthcoming from Mr. Kerry in his acceptance speech on Thursday night. It’s a shame that the senator’s handlers are avoiding the hard questions, because the politics of national unity that the Democrats want to promote can’t ignore these questions about racial division. In his Yale speech, Mr. Kerry acknowledged that voters “don’t want to invest more of their scarce tax dollars in these programs that fail” or that foster a “culture of dependency.” Mr. Kerry spoke of “the excesses of the 1960s, a shift from self-reliance to indulgence and dependence, from caring to self-indulgence, from public accountability to public abdication and chaos.”

These days, it’s Mr. Bush who worries about “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” And Mr. Obama’s remarks to Mr. Russert notwithstanding, it’s Bill Cosby who has been raising the hard questions in the debate on race these days in Chicago. In remarks to the National Urban League, Mr. Bush asked,”Does the Democrat party take African American voters for granted?” So far at the convention in Boston, there’s little evidence that the Democrats intend to do much more than run from the question.