MY CONSERVATIVE friends seem to take my opinions to be on the borderline between acceptable and suspect. But they rose almost as one to object to my objection –– expressed in last week’s column (“Re-explaining the campaign,” May 7) –– to equating Barack Obama with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. I characterized the analogy as “based on race, obviously so; and it’s not even a good analogy.”

If she were a baseball team Hillary Clinton would be 10 games out of first place with 12 games left in the season. She isn’t mathematically eliminated but she is playing out the string. Mr. Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee. The comparison to Mr. Patrick, with whom he is friends and shares a phrase maker, is going to come up again. It therefore deserves a closer look.

The criticism of what I wrote last week, if I have it right, is: 1) My insinuation that anyone’s calling Governor Patrick’s performance a model for President Obama’s performance is racist and wrong. 2) The analogy is valid. Both men are empty suits and snake-oil salesman who have mastered the art of pulling at the heartstrings of naïve white liberals. 3) Mr. Obama is, if anything, worse than Mr. Patrick –– who at least ran a government agency (Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department) and had some business experience before being infected with the political virus. 4) On his record, Senator Obama is to the left of Edward Kennedy and every other U.S. senator. I could have looked it up!

I concede that the racial issue is valid insofar as it applies to voters’ behavior. Black voters support Mr. Obama in large numbers, though there is a stubborn minority who believe he doesn’t really know the black experience. The racial issue is especially valid for white voters so eager to elect black candidates to offices serving white majorities –– governor, senator, president –– that they give them a pass. They do not do due diligence. As I put it, they should “kick the wheels . . . of an African-American Prius, just as they would a Ford’s or a Lincoln’s.”

As Mr. Patrick stumbled as governor, the assertion grew that the press had not done due diligence in 2006 because of his race, and may be giving Mr. Obama a commensurate free ride in 2008 because of his race. This is a valid point to raise. But if it is accurate its validity is in what it says about our behavior, not what it says about Messrs. Patrick and Obama.

Let us say that Jackie Robinson had failed when he was called up by the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1947. Poor work habits. Out of shape. Stayed out to all hours. Didn’t run out ground balls. To his great regret, Dodgers’ General Manager Branch Rickey releases Robinson at the end of May.

Now comes Bill Veeck, owner of the Cleveland Indians. A few weeks after Robinson joins the Dodgers, Veeck wants to make Larry Doby the first black to play in the American League. But what does everyone say? “You can’t do that! He’ll be just like Robinson. ‘Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me!’ ”

Would we consider that racist? Yes. Obviously and odiously so, and that’s what I consider contrived comparisons between Barack Obama and Deval Patrick to be.

In the event, of course, Larry Doby was just like Jackie Robinson. Followed him into the Hall of Fame.

Politics are more complicated than the child’s game many of us love, with its good calls and bad calls and simple lessons in morality. Barack Obama and Deval Patrick are inevitably differently complex human beings. My impression, knowing Mr. Patrick a little and Mr. Obama not at all, is that they are also different political beings. Why don’t we compare Mr. Patrick to Jon Corzine and Elliot Spitzer –– liberal Democrats elected governor of New Jersey and New York in 2005 and 2006? Compared to Mr. Spitzer, Mr. Patrick would smell like a rose, even before the scandal that brought the New York governor down. Why do we compare Mr. Obama to Mr. Patrick, but not to Messrs. Corzine and Spitzer? Race, I say.

A closer likeness to Mr. Patrick may be former Gov. Paul Cellucci. A man everyone liked and was happy for when he became governor. But one who seemed to lose his engagement once he achieved the Corner Office. Yes, Mr. Patrick is a great disappointment so far to many people. But that says nothing about Barack Obama except that he should be vetted.

We are just getting to know the Democratic nominee-presumptive, and comparisons to other political figures are bound to be partly or mostly wrong. Rather than seeing him in terms of anyone else, we need to know him. He seems to be a fine human being. His pronouncements about NAFTA are psychotic, but what he has said about the bandied-about gas-tax holiday is a voice of sanity in the cuckoo’s nest. Until he says what it is, his strategic vision is a black hole that should, as it stands, disqualify him from being elected president.

The press, me included, can be faulted for not doing a better job of vetting Deval Patrick in 2006. In retrospect, Tom Reilly and Kerry Healey might have made better governors, despite the execrable campaigns they ran. But the impulse of white voters to elect black candidates to the nation’s highest offices is a noble one that is not to be ridiculed –– so long as we do not surrender our critical faculty. It resumes the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and holds unprecedented promise for the future of the democracy. I intend to continue to be a part of it.

David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.