It's well known by now that Barack Obama learns from his mistakes and tries hard not to make them twice. So should those of us who supported him. Even here, on what we fancy is the right side of history, we can look at our own mistakes candidly in order to learn from them, painful though that may be.

My "we" is purely rhetorical and imperial, since my own performance as a commentator was flawless. But, seriously, folks: Obama has a lot to teach about managing anger and about how to subordinate righteous moralism to strategic generosity in order to win truly moral gains.

Right though I was to insist, from years of experience, that whites would vote in large numbers for blacks (See the "Voting Wrongs" chapter in Liberal Racism, or this 1996 article from The New Republic),-I was wrong to be churlish and self-righteous toward white-liberal and black activist defenders of racial-identity politics who built their careers and politics on the presumption of racial bloc voting - and, indeed, on the presumption that racial groupthink is a good flywheel for public policy.

Wrong though their own presumptions were, those people had plausible reasons for clinging to them. And the irony is that even as Obama - the candidate I could only dream of as I wrote Liberal Racism -- vindicated the proposition that movements for justice must transcend race in order to uproot racism and some of its structural supports, I wavered in that faith as the test of Nov. 4 drew nigh.

Even as Obama exhibited extraordinary grace under pressure, I lashed out righteously and churlishly at the press critic Jack Shafer's own self-righteous and churlish denunciations of liberal columnists who were jittery about racism on the eve of the election. So doing, I got the racial jitters myself, even while admiring Obama's poise against the misplaced enthusiasms of Louis Farrakhan and of Jeremiah Wright.

In a scary (but entertaining!) post recounting massive voting fraud in Brooklyn decades ago, I anticipated at best a narrow, bitter victory for Obama. Well, lots of us were haunted by memories of Florida, 2000 and Ohio, 2004. But it didn't occur to me that elections officials themselves might be haunted, too! They didn't want to be like Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State in 2000.

So last-minute fears of massive subversion at the polls were as outsized as the right's were of Acorn. Dread that white racist voting was upon us turned out to be greater than it needed to be. I've never been so glad to have been wrong, but I've never been so sad to have been so nasty even when I've been right.

True, Obama might well have lost to racism had economic crisis not surpassed and eclipsed it. But there are always extenuating circumstances in politics. The point is that there are also societal learning curves. The lesson of the civil-rights movement at its best is to be steady and strategically smart in one's hard-won beliefs even when defeat looms large, and not to indulge histrionics or hatred.

Staying steady is a test not of the rightness of one's perceptions or one's cause but of the depth of one's character. Good perceptions plus character yield wisdom. Wisdom doesn't waste itself on the self-righteous, jittery moralism that dominated our politics, left and right, before Obama reminded us we can be better than that.

Yes, change is hard. For centuries, whites expected blacks, long excluded from power's subtlest corruptions, to come to the public arena bearing only rip-offs or rebellion, and I have known plenty of black leaders who did. But many years ago, and again last week in Dissent, I predicted that to watch blacks running political and military machines, municipalities, media organizations, and even money markets would be to watch the angels of a romanticized blackness withdraw along with the demons of a blackness feared and loathed. It would also be to surrender white racial condescension along with contempt.

It's time for both racists and racialists to acknowledge that this country's redemption has not and will not come through keeping race a central organizing principle of our polity and civic culture, let alone through using it as a wedge for partisan politics. That is another key lesson of Obama's campaign, a truth of the civil-rights movement that, at least since Lincoln, has been an unrealized truth of the American republic itself.

How can we realize it? It takes a lot of wisdom that combines sharp perceptions and character. And it takes a civic faith in this country that most of the world shared and admired on November 4.. The old Protestant hymn, "To Be a Pilgrim," which Obama would know from his United Church of Christ, a church begun by intrepid Puritans, puts it well:

Who so beset him round with dismal stories
Do but themselves confound; his strength the more is.
No foe shall stay his might, though he with giants fight.
He will make good his right to be a Pilgrim.

Yes, Obama's "new media" movement is something less than a political powerhouse. It is tied too much and yet too loosely to him alone; if he disappeared, it would, too. Nor will it always mobilize in support of positions he'll take. Obama and his movement are riding riptides that could sideline any leader and movement or tear them apart.

But there's a lot to feel good about, quietly and with some discipline, amid the mounting adversity. And, for some of us, this is a moment to face and reflect on our mistakes as well as to affirm whatever wisdom we showed.