Since Barack Obama was inaugurated on the west Capitol steps four years ago, a dramatic 30-foot memorial to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. has been unveiled at the other end of the National Mall.

But a key part of the political landscape President Obama will survey as he is sworn in for a second term — that is, the number of black officials in top elective offices — hasn't changed a bit.

Obama's groundbreaking election in 2008 and his re-election in 2012 undeniably has affected the nation's racial politics, proving it's possible for an African American to win the nation's highest office and raising the aspirations of some black candidates. He sparked record turnout in two elections among African American voters.

"One of the many things significant that happened when this president was elected: It gave a much larger group of people an opportunity to be unburdened by who has traditionally done what," says Kamala Harris, who in 2010 became the first woman and first black elected attorney general of California.

"There's a bigger ripple than we tend to assign to it," says Kweisi Mfume, a former congressman and president of the NAACP.

In the admittedly short four years since the 2008 election, however, the Obama effect hasn't been reflected in more black candidates actually winning election to the Senate, the House and the nation's governorships. At the intersection of Monday's events — the federal holiday honoring King and the public inauguration of a black president for a second term — the path to the top jobs in American politics seems as steep as ever.

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"If race weren't an issue in this country, the place you would expect to see African Americans elected to statewide office with African American votes would be Southern states with large black populations," says David Bositis, an expert on minority voting and representation at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "But it's becoming a white, conservative, Republican-dominated area of the country, which means that African Americans, with a few exceptions, are out in terms of statewide office."

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MELBOURNE, Fla. — The theory was that Barack Obama's election as president in 2008 signaled a new era for black candidates trying to win statewide contests for senator or governor.

Now, Rep. Kendrick Meek is struggling with the reality.

In Florida, the 43-year-old African-American congressman, long the presumptive Democratic nominee in the state's tumultuous Senate race, is trying to fend off a surprise primary challenge from a Palm Beach billionaire and running a distant third in general-election matchups against a darling of the anti-tax "Tea Party" movement and the state's popular governor.

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David Bositis, a veteran scholar of black politics at The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, says a lack of a deep bench of African-American officeholders in lower offices also has been a factor in the paucity of nominees for prized offices this year.

And he and others say it was never realistic to expect that Obama's election, while a milestone, instantly would transform the nation's racial politics. Expectations were oversized when he won: Seven in 10 Americans predicted in a USA TODAY survey that his election would make race relations better.

Read the Full Story at USA Today.