I don't believe millions of blacks and workers always make the right choices, but neither do I believe they have always or mostly made the wrong ones. They've made progress, including in the US, both when democratic rights were absent and when "the rule of the minority has been maintained under conditions of political democracy". They've advanced when it was far more difficult and hazardous for the more politically aware among them to organize and lead than it is now, and when plutocratic control of communications was even more pronounced than it is in the age of the internet.
I think the problem may be less with them than with us, or at least some of us, who consider anything less than fundamental changes in power and property relations, anything which reforms rather than overthrows the system, as mere "crumbs". But from the perspective of unionized workers seeking card check, women trying to protect choice in abortion, environmentalists pushing for a more sane energy policy, homeowners looking for relief from foreclosures, immigrants seeking amnesty, the uninsured and underinsured seeking affordable health care, etc. - all of the varied needs reflected in the different programs developed by thousands of mass-based organizations - legislative attainment of even a fraction of their goals represents more than "crumbs". Only outsiders without experience in these organizations, whose see their programs as largely irrelevant to their own circumstances, tend to make these claims.
If working people are congenitally unable to choose what is in their interests, and "dissenting voices" such as ours are "barred" from showing them what these are, what logic keeps you on the left?
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I don't believe that workers and other oppressed groups are"congenitally incapable" of making the right decisions. With strong organizational leadership from the left, high union density, and crises that shake people out of habitual routines and ways of thinking, I think they can see through the machinations of politicians and struggle in their own name. But these conditions don't obtain right now, and haven't for some time. The working class is more atomized now than it has perhaps ever been. The Democratic Party long ago ceased to be the party of even tepid reform. We had eight years of Bill Clinton, at the end of which more people were in prison, the death was penalty more widely applied and harder to appeal, the welfare state weaker, union membership down and workers more vulnerable than when he came into office. These things didn't merely happen under Clinton. They were the direct result of his initiatives. There is no indication that Obama will govern any differently, and abundant reasons to think he will give us more of the same. You're fooling yourself if you believe that he will act to further the reformist laundry list you present above.
At best, one might argue that Obama will do less damage than McCain, as Clinton did less damage than Bush. This would be voting for a less ferocious enemy. But how do you explain the delerious enthusing over Obama, among unions, blacks and the liberal left? As Obama wrote in one of his several autobiographies, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." People should stop projecting long enough to take a sober look at this centrist-Democrat con artist.
Jim Creegan