How can I test to see if a class contains a particular attribute?

In [14]: user = User.objects.get(pk=2)  

In [18]: user.__dict__  
Out[18]:   
{'date_joined': datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 17, 15, 20, 45),  
 'email': u'[email protected]',  
 'first_name': u'',  
 'id': 2L,  
 'is_active': 1,  
 'is_staff': 0,  
 'is_superuser': 0,  
 'last_login': datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 17, 16, 15, 35),  
 'last_name': u'',  
 'password': u'sha1$44a2055f5',  
 'username': u'DickCheney'}  

In [25]: hasattr(user, 'username')  
Out[25]: True  

In [26]: hasattr(User, 'username')  
Out[26]: False  

I'm having a weird bug where more attributes are showing up than I actually define. I want to conditionally stop this.

e.g.

if not hasattr(User, 'karma'):
  User.add_to_class('karma', models.PositiveIntegerField(default=1))