Sometime before Barack Obama's strong showing on Super Tuesday, the Washington Post observed that the senator had been campaigning across this great land on a "platform of hope and change." Whether or not the Post was being arch, they had it about right.

Obama rarely speaks about policy specifics; "hope" and "change" are the two dominant messages he preaches on the stump. But he has two secondary themes: "straight talk" and "unity." They don't receive nearly as much attention: Perhaps because an examination of them shows Obama to be a somewhat conventional political figure.

During the course of his standard stump speech, Obama promises to deliver "a politics that [isn't] grounded in ideology, but in practicality. Not in spin and PR, but in straight talk." He promises to tell voters not what they want to hear, but the hard truths that they need to hear. And he portrays himself as the great uniter of the Republic. As the voiceover in one of his ads explains, "Only Barack Obama can bring a fractured people together. .  .  . He embodies the hope of our nation."

But on both of these themes, Obama's behavior is very different from his rhetoric.

Start with the straight talk. During his South Carolina victory speech, the crowd kept chanting that "race doesn't matter." It was a comforting thought in the wake of an election where more than 80 percent of African Americans voted for the African-American candidate. And Obama fed that sentiment, saying, "The assumption that African Americans cannot support the white candidate .  .  . we are here tonight to say that that is not the America that we believe in. I did not travel around this state .  .  . to see a white South Carolina, and a black South Carolina. I saw South Carolina."

But the uncomfortable truth is that race mattered very much for Obama in the early going. Not only did African Americans vote in overwhelming numbers for Obama in what looked, at least on the surface, like racial solidarity. But, as Real Clear Politics's Jay Cost discovered, a regression analysis of the voting in Nevada and South Carolina showed almost a straight-line correlation between the racial make-up of an area and the percentage of white votes Obama received: The more uniformly white an area was, the better Obama did among white voters; as the area became more racially mixed, Obama's percentage of the white vote dropped.

This phenomenon could mean any number of things and ultimately may be unimportant to the outcome of the election. But it does show that race matters to many Obama voters.

Then there's his stance on immigration. Obama is for comprehensive immigration reform. He says he wants to begin such reform by securing the border with Mexico, which he justifies by saying that we need to know who is coming into America. At the Los Angeles debate, for instance, he said "there is no doubt that we have to get control of our borders. We can't have hundreds of thousands of people coming over to the United States without us having any idea who they are."