Whether Barack Obama wins or loses the White House, his candidacy will have failed to perform the miracle of transcendence it was supposedly going to deliver: Through the raising up of this gifted, golden and miraculously anger-free man, we wounded, guilt-ridden Americans would finally be able to put our tragic racial past behind us. We could be healed.

The failure to achieve this redemptive climax rests with both political parties -- with the Democrats, for cannily exploiting racism from start to near-finish, and with Republicans, for failing to respond with boldness and a clear conscience.

The next generation of conservatives is not so tongue-tied.

Cynical observers in either party may have asserted early on that Mr. Obama's candidacy was little more than a very canny choice by the ardent leftists who control the Democratic Party and want to control more. They may have noted that the Dems had finally found their Teflon candidate -- attractive, vague, not named Clinton and impervious to criticism by dint of his race.

But if there were sages casting a skeptical eye on this bold anointing of a woefully inexperienced man, their voices were lost in the baby boomer- and Democrat-dominated media's orgy of self-congratulation: Here at long last was proof these eternal teenagers weren't like their racist parents -- they had found a black politician they could respect!

When Republicans finally started paying serious attention to the man who was poised to pluck the crown right out of Hillary Clinton's hands, Mr. Obama had already been running for a year, and the non-vetting he'd received from an entranced media passed for the real thing. The national gatekeepers of all-the-news-that-fits-our-squint deemed these Republican latecomers with their suspicious questions to be racists.

The Democrats' perversion of the race issue has gotten so brazen that someone who merely points out the undeniably true -- like Mr. Obama's controversial ties to radicals or felons of any race or nationality -- is accused of racism. Left-wing politicos have opined that racism motivates even Democratic voters who don't support Mr. Obama (as if ideas don't matter), while James Carville, the Dems' talking head from the House of Slytherin, fears rioting if Mr. Obama loses.

And the Republican Party elders, to the chagrin of us younger conservatives, have accepted the Democrats' rules of engagement. Apparently, racial absolution will have to wait another decade.

For demographers, a generation may span two decades, but in culture and politics, generational characteristics seem to move in 10-year cycles. I belong to the group born at the tail end of the baby boom, the group who came of age just in time to vote for Ronald Reagan.

We burned the Iranian flag, not the American one, on the steps to our peaceful, already integrated schools. We who grew up in the homes of Eisenhower Republicans didn't hear racist language or thought and have no cause for shame.

But we watched the kids eight or 10 years ahead of us don their ratty denim uniforms of non-conformity and jump on the tail end of a historical movement they'd paid no price to further, noisily congratulating themselves for being superior to their narrow-minded parents.

We watched the party of segregation now pushing social policies soon demonstrated to be destructive and enslaving to a new generation of blacks.

And as adults we've watched blacks who dared to be conservatives get symbolically lynched by the likes of Teddy Kennedy and Joe Biden (who, like their media counterparts, have finally found a black man they can respect!).

Perhaps older Republicans and their political operatives are silent in the face of the left's racial exploitation because they were present for and complicit with the racially divisive "Southern strategy."

Not so for us younger folk. There's a whole generation of us who have clear consciences and cheerfully defiant attitudes. For us, this presidential campaign is not a traveling revival tent, nor the ballot box an altar at which we expunge our alleged sins. It's just politics. It always was.

Slavery was always the Achilles' heel of the American ideal, a potentially fatal vulnerability in the twin pillars of liberty and common virtue on which the nation stood.

Though some would like to persuade us it still is, my generation knows that the Achilles heel and every other inch of the body politic has been rebaptized in the river of blood shed from the Civil War right up through the Civil Rights movement.

But the memory of the wound lingers. The power-hungry leftists who exploit it now are trying to turn an Achilles' heel into a Trojan horse.