The American Debate | Barack Obama's race seems to be a second-tier issue

To appreciate how much America has changed during the last five decades, to the point where Barack Obama can visit predominantly white states and attract throngs of fawning Caucasians, it is instructive to recall the turbulent presidency of Douglass Dilman.

Dilman was actually our first black president - or, in the nomenclature of his era, our first "Negro." In the pages of Irving Wallace's bestselling 1964 novel The Man, the fictional Dilman rises to the top, only to be plagued at every turn by racist Washington politicians. He is trapped in a fake sex scandal, targeted for impeachment, and his White House dinners are boycotted. His powerful opponents view him as merely "a Negro president," because they cannot look past skin color and view the man.

It's doubtful that such a novel would sell so well today; Americans, 40 years after the civil-rights movement transformed the culture, have become far more tolerant about race. They haven't solved the culture's glaring racial inequities, of course. But they are nevertheless intrigued by Barack Obama, the freshman Illinois senator, and willing to accept him as a serious White House aspirant.

It's not that America is now "ready" to elect a black president, because that is actually the wrong formulation. As first evidenced 12 years ago when the popular Colin Powell was flirting with a Republican candidacy, America seems receptive to the idea of electing a person of quality whose race is either beside the point, or perhaps even an asset.

Obama, who launched his "exploratory" candidacy the other day, may well turn out to be more hype than substance. He lacks major-league experience (just two years in the U.S. Senate), and nobody knows whether he has the smarts and spine to survive nearly two years of smash-mouth politics on the big stage. He has a silver tongue and a sweet smile, but that doesn't mean he knows how to get us out of Iraq in one piece. Yet these are the same kinds of questions that would be raised about any charismatic white newcomer; Obama's pigmentation often seems to be a second-tier issue.

On the Republican side, there have been sporadic attempts by some grassroots activists to "draft" Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for an '08 bid, but she has averred - a smart decision on her part, given her ties to a highly unpopular president. But in an Associated Press interview last month, she did capture the current zeitgeist: "We have become capable of looking past color to see capability, and to see merit, and to overcome stereotypes . . . and that's what people look for, I think, when they are looking for a president."

Notwithstanding our society's persistent racial woes, it's no surprise that most Americans have grown more tolerant since the segregation era. The ranks of the black professionals and CEOs have swelled. Television commercials routinely feature black people hawking popular products, and the Fox TV show 24 is now on its second president of color. Meanwhile, in November, the overwhelmingly white Massachusetts electorate, which over the previous 16 years had chosen white Republicans to govern the state, opted instead for a black Democrat.

One can also argue, however, that the wind at Obama's back might not be nearly as strong as it seems. Despite the fact that Americans seem downright bullish about backing a qualified black presidential candidate - in a December Newsweek poll, 93 percent said they would vote for such a person - there is also the nagging possibility that a lot of people don't really mean it, that they merely want to sound PC when the pollster calls.

There's even a name for this kind of behavior. Actually, several names. "The Bradley effect" is named for black Democrat Tom Bradley, who ran for governor of California in 1982 after serving as mayor of Los Angeles. Whites told pollsters they were pro-Bradley, but on election day they voted for the white Republican, costing Bradley the race. Then there is the "Wilder effect," named for black Virginia Democrat Doug Wilder. While running for governor in 1989, he was thought to be ahead by 10 percentage points, buoyed by a big white vote. But in the end, he won in a squeaker because most white voters bailed out.

Jesse Jackson had a similar experience in 1988. As a presidential candidate, he was supposedly cruising toward a primary season win in heavily white Wisconsin. But what the white Democratic voters had told the pollsters, and what they actually did, turned out to be very different, and Jackson was beaten. Colin Powell was well-aware of this syndrome when he was weighing a candidacy in 1995; a friend reportedly warned him, "When they go in the booth, they ain't going to vote for you."

Some analysts have assumed that the same syndrome helped doom Harold Ford Jr., the black Democrat who lost a Senate race in Tennessee in November by only three percentage points; indeed, he was apparently hurt by a GOP TV ad that implied he partied with white girls. The facts, however, suggest otherwise. His projected share of the white vote, as measured by the pre-election polls, closely tracked his share on election day. Ford most likely was beaten because he was running in a Southern red state - and because he hailed from a family that had been tied to political corruption in Memphis.

But if the white-voter syndrome still exists - and perhaps it would be strongest in a presidential race, when more is at stake - then Obama might still have the assets to beat it. Fairly or not, black candidates who hail from the Old South and the civil-rights tradition, or who speak in the preacherly cadences of the Southern churches (someone like Jesse Jackson, in other words), are not destined to attract strong white support. As some black experts point out, such candidates often make white audiences feel uneasy or guilty.

Obama, by contrast, has no slavery in his family history. The son of a white Kansas mother and a Kenyan father, he was raised in places like Hawaii and Indonesia. When he speaks, he conjures up JFK, not Jesse ("We can do better," he said last month in New Hampshire. ". . . This is our time, a new generation that is preparing to lead."). His potential appeal is generational and multicultural. Even whites who oppose affirmative action might feel comfortable with Obama because they can view him as someone who rose on his own merits.

The successful black candidate will be someone who can make white Americans view race either as an asset or an irrelevance. The less-charitable interpretation is that whites would love to be able to congratulate themselves for backing a black person; as Bruce Llewellyn, a cousin of Colin Powell's, once told the New Yorker magazine, whites "love the idea that, 'Gee, we weren't prejudiced. A good man came, and we gave him a shot.' White people love to believe they're fair."

But here's the bottom line: Obama has been assailed lately, in some circles, for being a confirmed cigarette addict (in his words, "It's not something I'm proud of"). Rolling Stone has even asked, "Would America vote for a smoker in 2008?" If we have reached the point when cigarette smoking can compete with skin color as a voting factor, then we have, indeed, achieved a fair measure of social progress.