Will Obama's effect on race parallel Tiger's?

It's not farfetched to argue that Tiger Woods' popularity helped pave the way for Barack Obama's smashing victory. That legions of golfing white businessmen already idolized Woods may well have made it less of a stretch for them and others to imagine a black man as the country's president.

For that matter, Woods, much like Obama, presents himself as something of a new "post-racial" figure crossing old color lines by virtue of his mixed ancestry.

But if Woods did indeed make it easier for some to cast their vote for Obama, the superstar golfer's impact on his own sport holds a cautionary lesson for an Obama presidency -- there's no necessary correlation between the feel-good symbolism of a pioneering racial breakthrough and actual on-the-ground progress toward a race-blind America.

Many observers predicted Woods' example would revolutionize the sociology of golf. They thought many more minority kids would be encouraged to take up the old Scottish pastime and that the sport would shed its ugly racial past once and for all. (The PGA tour had a Caucasians-only clause until 1961.) The golf establishment promotes its youth golf programs with Kumbaya-style TV ads of smiling inner-city kids, as if the game had indeed put the messy matters of race and money in the rearview mirror.

Actually, golf has gone into racial reverse by many measures. Back in the 1970s, 10 blacks played on the PGA Tour; a poor Chicano kid from Dallas, Lee Trevino, became one of the era's top golfers. Now Woods is the lone black golfer among the 125 card-holding pros, and there are no rising young junior black stars.

Two U.S.-born Latinos play on the PGA Tour, as does an increased international contingent and some exciting new Asian-American stars. Yet the circuit remains overwhelmingly comprised of whites from country club backgrounds.

So does the Tiger Woods paradox really have any relevance for an Obama presidency? I think so. If the visibility of Woods promotes the illusion of race as "fixed" in golf, the very same danger exists with Obama for the country as a whole. His election encourages a fuzzy, self-congratulatory feeling that we've exorcised the demons of slavery and Jim Crow at last. It can be easy to forget the outsized hardships facing so many black and Latino kids growing up in tough neighborhoods and just how often poverty, marginalization and brown skin still travel together in America today.

The real question is whether an Obama administration will make strides toward addressing the demons of poverty and racial inequality that still haunt 21st century America.

His election was a good opening shot. We still have a long iron over water yet to go.