"The Curtain Lifts" [updated below]

Byron York:

Obama's sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

Andrew:

I'm with Benen. What can that last phrase possibly mean, except that African-American opinion does not count as much as everyone else's? Yglesias and Weigel pile one.

York is not implying that the opinions of black people matter less, as the others suggest. All he meant is that black approval of Obama has more to do with racial identification than Obama's policy positions.

Weigel shows that York is factually wrong about the degree and reason for Obama's popularity among blacks relative to other Democratic pols, so that's a lot of egg on York's face.

But there's no "curtain being lifted" or actual racism being exposed—York simply made an unwarranted assumption about black racism and failed to look at the data to disprove it.

Update: CBS/NYT had some very high approval numbers among the black community, so maybe there is something to what York is saying. When approval is so high, polls vary, because you need a pretty large sample size to figure out how high with more precision.