Americans more ready for black than woman in White House, poll says

However clumsily she made the point, maybe Geraldine Ferraro was right.

A poll just out this afternoon suggests that Americans are significantly more ready for a black president than for a woman in the Oval Office.

In the survey conducted by Opinion Research for CNN and Essence Magazine, 76 percent of respondents said America is ready for a black president -- and that number has grown from 62 percent in December as Barack Obama's candidacy has surged. Whites were even more confident on the point, with 78 percent saying the country is ready, compared to 69 percent of African-Americans.

Only 63 percent said America is ready for a woman as president, virtually unchanged from December.

The poll of 1,014 African-Americans and 1,001 non-Hispanic whites was conducted March 26-April 2 and has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points, and a margin of error among each subgroup of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Ferraro, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1984, caused a firestorm by suggesting to a California newspaper that Obama would not be in the same position if he were a white man or a woman of any ethnicity. She was forced to step down from a Clinton fund-raising committee.