(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

The national media is filled with highly confident predictions that Barack Obama is about to win the presidency in a run-away. A good example is David Paul Kuhn's article today on Politico.com, breathlessly entitled Dem strategists see landslide in the making. I'm not quibbling about the accuracy of the headline — Mr. Kuhn is indeed describing what Democratic strategists are predicting. But if you actually read his article, it's filled with more of the "Why the Dems Ought To Win This Cycle" arguments we've been hearing since at least early 2007. Even with a massive and historic addition to those arguments — an economic panic that many people blame more on Bush-43 and the GOP than on the Democrats, fairly or (as I think) not — all of those "should and oughta" reasons have not yet lead to a pro-Obama breakout in the opinion polling.

Instead, as Hugh noted earlier today, the polls remain whisker-tight, vibrating like a high note being played on a violin string. The Democratic "strategists" being interviewed for these articles are all cooperating in a very deliberate expectations game — hoping to depress their opponents psychologically to depress their voting turn-out statistically — but at some point that vibrating violin string must begin to seem like those shrieking notes from the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1960 movie, Psycho. And — to stretch the analogy one delicious bit further — 1960 was the year in which the charismatic (but inexperienced) young Democrat was supposed to swamp the sweating and stubble-faced (but more experienced, especially in foreign affairs) Republican — and that race came down to a few tens of thousands of questionable votes in Daley-dominated Chicago and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas (in the latter of which, dead people who signed the election register all in the same handwriting famously voted in alphabetical order).

Writing in TIME, Joe Klein makes a very interesting observation that I think is partly true, and very revealing in ways that Klein very definitely did not intend. Klein argues (boldface mine) that

[McCain] is not the sort of person, in the end, that you want to invite into your living room for a four-to-eight-year stay.

Barack Obama is. We are witnessing something remarkable here: Obama's race is receding as he becomes more familiar. His steadiness has trumped his skin color; he is being judged on the content of his character....

Klein is exactly right that we are witnessing something remarkable here, and that Obama's race is "receding" in importance "as he becomes more familiar." And Klein's also right — unfortunately for Obama, and perhaps fatally to his campaign — that Obama is indeed being increasingly judged on the content of his character! And that's precisely why the polls aren't showing him breaking out to a big lead, despite all those "oughta be a Dem landslide" factors.

During the Democratic primaries, before Obama had clinched the nomination and solidified what the pollsters now paint as a monolithic voting block among black Americans, there were arguments about whether Obama was "black enough." I thought those were profoundly silly and insulting arguments — insulting not just to Barack Obama personally, not just to black Americans, but to all Americans of any race or political viewpoint. Now, however — while simultaneously arguing that Obama is heading for a "landslide" — Obama's admirers are pre-testing the meme that "if he loses, it can only be because of racism." Although he certainly didn't intend it, I think Klein's observation pre-explodes that premature argument.

With each debate, and with all the gathering attention as the election nears, any lingering negative significance of Obama's race is indeed fading, and he's being judged not as a "black man" but simply as "a man." And if the kind of fear that might have come into play was mainly of the "unknown black man" — the sort of fear that Obama famously attributed to his own (white) grandmother on seeing unknown black men on the street while waiting for a bus — Obama's simply no longer unknown. He is indeed a celebrity, whether because of or despite his race. In fact, with respect specifically to his race, I would wager that Barack Obama is now up into Bill Cosby/Cliff Huxtable territory in terms of his non-threateningness to all Americans regardless of his or their respective race.

But contrary to Klein's wistful thinking that voters will see "steadiness" in Obama's phlegmatic and professorial personality, what more and more voters are actually coming to recognize is that he's a young man, an inexperienced man, an untested man, a leftist man, a pro-government man, a tax-raising man, a spending-raising man, an overconfident and smug and elitist man, a reckless man who underestimates our enemies, and — therefore, based on the combination of those qualities — a very dangerous man.

His race simply has nothing to do with the growing doubts about him in the still very large number of voters who are just now finally focusing on the details of Barack Obama. To the extent that his being black was ever supposed by anyone to be "scary" to white voters, that's now disappeared for all but the most entrenched, most irredeemable outright racists.

In short, Barack Obama is not "getting any blacker" even to the limited number of people who may still find even some blacks scary simply because they're black. But he's becoming very, very scary to a great many other people for other reasons altogether.

Here's my message, then: America, you need not feel guilty for being afraid of Barack Obama. It's not racist to doubt his character and experience and judgment. It's not racist to conclude that they're lacking. He has already proved that a black man can run an entirely viable campaign for the presidency of the United States. Every one of us who looks forward to a post-racist, post-racial society — one in which we've ended racial discrimination because we've stopped discriminating on the basis of race — can be proud. But we can also refuse to vote for Barack Obama for reasons unrelated to race, and we can do so without feeling any guilt whatsoever.

In his own mangled metaphor from the second debate, Barack Obama is still "green behind the ears." Being scared of him for that reason doesn't have anything to do with the rest of him being black.