“With all Obama wants to do and all he’s got going, it’s going to take more than four years,” said Larry Gibbons, 58, a retired restaurant manager and a Republican in Phoenix who voted for Mr. Obama’s opponent, John McCain. Speaking in a follow-up interview to the poll, he said, “Obama is attacking everything at once and I do approve of that.”

Throughout Mr. Obama’s candidacy and his young presidency, race has been a subtle thread woven through his message of change. Yet the president shies away from talking about it. In response to a question at his last news conference, Mr. Obama conceded that his election had created ‘’justifiable pride on the part of the country,” then quickly shifted gears, adding, “That lasted about a day.”

But Americans do feel differently about race and race relations with Mr. Obama in the White House, according to poll respondents who spoke in follow-up interviews. Some, like Jacqueline Luster, 60, a retired bank employee in Macedonia, Ohio, say that the times are changing, and that Mr. Obama seems to be speeding that change.

“With him as president, people seem to be working together toward the same goals, and that has helped race relations,” said Ms. Luster, who is black and a Democrat. “Before there was more of a separation, blacks working for black goals and whites for white goals. Obama has helped change the perception of blacks in a positive way, but it’s also the times.”

Another Democrat, Lisa Fleming, 49, who is white, said that even in the small Illinois town, Potomac, where she lived, she noticed “people of different races being kinder to each other” since Mr. Obama’s election. In Kansas City, a white Republican homemaker, Mary Robertson, 78, said Mr. Obama’s ‘’openness and acceptance have helped others be more open and accepting.”

The nationwide telephone survey was conducted Wednesday through Sunday with 973 adults. For purposes of analysis, blacks were oversampled in this poll, for a total of 212, and then weighted back to their proper proportion in the poll, based on the census. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for all people, and plus or minus seven points for blacks.