John Harwood, for the second time in eight days, is just amazed that a black man might be president. Or more specifically this week, he's amazed that lots of whites are going to vote for Obama:

Remarkably, Mr. Obama, the first black major party presidential nominee, trails among whites by less than Democratic nominees normally do.

Seems to us the press has spent an inordinate amount of time covering the issue of race in this campaign, even though the candidates themselves rarely discuss it. (Surrogates, especially on the right, are another story, of course.) And when covering the campaign and race, the press has habitually couched the issues with a sense of total astonishment; that it was “remarkable,” as Harwood put it, that Barack Obama would win huge support from white voters.

That, despite the fact that polls have shown for at least a year that Obama stood a very good chance of winning the general election. Why still the sense of wonder on Election Day?