CNN POLL: AMERICA READY FOR BLACK PRESIDENT

A new CNN poll finds seventy-two percent of white Americans and 61 percent of black Americans believe the nation is ready for a black president.

According to CNN.com, that number is higher than it was in 2006, when 65 percent of whites and 54 percent of blacks felt the same way. It's also higher than the proportion of either men or women -- 64 percent and 65 percent, respectively -- who currently believe the nation is ready for a woman in the White House.


Forty years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, roughly four in 10 individuals in both groups say that the country has fulfilled all, or at least a great deal, of King's dream. However, they have different views on whether it will ever be fully realized in the United States.


When asked whether race relations will always pose a problem in the United States, about half of black Americans, 52 percent, said yes -- and just 43 percent of whites shared that view. When posed the same question in 1993, 55 percent of blacks and 53 percent of whites thought race relations would always be a problem for the United States.

The top six concerns for both whites and blacks in making their presidential choice this year are exactly the same in the following order -- the economy, Iraq, terrorism, health care, gas prices and Iran -- though blacks place a higher level of importance on all those issues.

• The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll was released Monday and includes interviews with 1,393 adult Americans, including 743 whites and 513 blacks. It was conducted by telephone January 14-17 and has a sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.