The qualifications campaign:real vulnerability

Is being black hurting Barack Obama in his run for President?

Well, something is hurting him, because he's not where he should be in the polls. Given the unpopularity of Bush and the state of the economy, a Democratic candidate should have a much larger lead than Obama's current spread of 3% over John McCain in the Real Clear Politics average of all polls.

Could simple racism be the explanation?

Unlikely. John McCain, an authentic war hero and a determined, media-savvy campaigner, would be a formidable opponent in any year. More than any other Republican, McCain is tough to link to Bush, given his maverick reputation.
But race appears to be playing a role - and in an unlikely way.
Since the 1930s, Gallup has been asking Americans if they would vote for a qualified black candidate for President. The good news is that the percentage of Americans who say yes has risen from well below half of us to just over 90%. Still, about 8% say they would never support a black candidate for the presidency. Given what we know from 80 years of studying how prejudice works, if 8% are willing to admit to racism in a poll, the real number may well be twice as large.
But Obama's problem with race goes much deeper than that small slice of the public that's adamantly against a black President. Obama, as a black man, is particularly vulnerable to a challenge to his qualifications.
Unqualified blacks getting into high positions reminds some white voters of the worst stereotypes of affirmative action.
Even the mere mention of affirmative action is so powerful that it can activate white prejudice. In a national split sample of white voters, half of the sample was asked their opinion about affirmative action prior to being asked a short battery of standard questions about prejudice. The other half was assessed on prejudice first. Whites who merely heard the phrase "affirmative action" first were more likely than other whites to think that blacks were violent, less intelligent and lazy.
This is why the McCain ads that focus on Obama's short résumé are so brilliant. While only a small portion of the white electorate is unwilling to vote for a qualified black candidate, a much larger percentage of whites resent it when they feel blacks are getting promoted faster because of race.
If the Republicans can subtly portray Obama as an affirmative-action nominee, McCain could well be our next President.
Defenders of McCain will argue that the attacks on Obama's scant résumé are not racial at all, that Republicans would run the same ads against a white candidate with a similar background. And it is true that Obama, if elected, would have less experience in national and international politics than any President since Lincoln. A Democratic Party that questioned George Bush's qualifications in 2000 as a two-term governor of Texas cannot easily claim that it is racist to ask Americans to compare Obama's experience to McCain's.
Still, ads about qualifications hurt Obama more than they would a white candidate, because they remind some white voters of affirmative action. That's simply how white opinion works on this issue.
Of course, McCain cannot be seen in any way to be using race against Obama directly. We know that many white voters try to maintain their "egalitarian self-concept," which is their image of themselves as nonracist and fair. Many whites want to vote for a black candidate for just that reason: to help balance out the anti-black tendencies in the electorate.