No Nonsense
Obama and the Bradley factor
SENATOR John McCain's ongoing presidential campaign represents nothing less than a frontal assault on American political decency -- a campaign that is directed at character assassination has now turned into a campaign of his own self-destruction. At a time when distressed people within the country and the world outside are running for shelter from the financial market meltdown and want to hear what solutions McCain has to offer, he seems obsessed with Obama.
McCain is going to regret the "preposterous" allegations his campaign is slinging at Barack Obama, said Mary Mitchell in the Chicago Sun-Times. The "steady stream of hateful speech" from his running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, is a "turn-off" -- especially her vile accusation that Obama has been 'palling around with terrorists.' "
She twists and besmirches Obama's brief and distant-past association (2001) with William Ayers -- founder of the 1970's Weather Underground (an antiwar group) who claimed responsibility for a dozen bombings between 1970 and 1974 (when Obama was 8 years old) but was never convicted of any crime, and later named Chicago's Citizen of the Year in 1997 -- now a distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Palin tries to establish that Obama is sympathetic to the violent overthrow of the US government -- a movement Ayres is accused of organising some 38 years ago. "The Democrat" (Obama), she says, "sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." On October 6, she said to a campaign rally: "I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America."
"If you really want to talk about someone who has been cozy with radicals," said David Talbot in Salon, you should take a close look at the secessionist "America-haters" Sarah Palin and her husband have been "pallin' around with" back home in Alaska.
In the October 7 New York Times (NYT), conservative columnist David Brooks wrote: "Her demagoguery has elicited some frightening, intolerable responses."
Brooks is referring to last week's Washington Post report that claimed of a rally in which a Florida man yelled "kill him" as Palin delivered the above statement connecting Obama to terrorist -- and others in the same rally shouted epithets at a black member of a TV crew.
Obviously, Palin is doing what McCain has set her to do -- be an attack dog. In a recent campaign stump, when McCain asked the crowd "who is the real Obama?" some people in his rally yelled "terrorist." In another campaign rally, some people even shouted, "Bomb Obama."
It's not unusual for political campaigns to get ugly -- often in their final weeks and days. But McCain's atrocious campaigns tactics are unprecedented. David Brooks wrote: "They have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent's record -- into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia." But are these below the belt blows working?
All the polls are suggesting that Palin's negative ratings are a serious drag on McCain's presidential prospect because of her lack of grasp of any issues -- domestic or international. Some conservative columnists even urged McCain to drop her from the ticket. Chris Mathews of MSNBC called her a campaigner for "low information voters." In fact, McCain's strongest support comes from non-college educated and high school drop-out white voters.
The on-going financial market cataclysm and the increasingly desperate economic outlook has caused four key states -- Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida -- in which McCain once seemed well-positioned to win, to now turn Obama's way. If he bags these states, Obama will likely surpass 350 electoral votes -- well over the critical 270 needed to win the presidency -- barring the Bradley effect.
The Bradley effect is an observable fact that refers to a frequently observed discrepancy between voter opinion polls and election outcomes when a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other.
Named after Tom Bradley -- the long-time black mayor of Los Angeles, who lost the 1982 California governor's race despite being comfortably ahead in voter polls -- refers to a tendency of white voters to tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for a black candidate, and yet -- on election day -- vote for his/her white opponent. This behaviour is explained as being due to the fear of expressing their true preferences.
Among numerous past races, the Bradley effect was witnessed in the 1983 race for Mayor of Chicago, the 1988 Democratic presidential primary race in Wisconsin, 1989 Mayor of New York City, and 1989 Virginia gubernatorial election.
The Bradley factor may have tapered off over the years, but Obama must still lead McCain by a sizeable margin, 8-10% in each state he is positioned to win. This is to offset the historical Bradley effect identified in the 1989 Virginia gubernatorial election, in which Douglas Wilder's pre-election lead was 9%, but he won the race by less than half of 1%.
Running 10% behind Obama (42% vs.52%) in Gallup's nationwide daily tracking poll, McCain is behaving erratically, and has shifted his campaign from issue oriented strategies to Bradley factor increasing tactics -- smearing Obama's character and charisma. The attempt behind all this -- loudly reading out his middle name "Hussain" in campaign rallies, linking him falsely to domestic terrorists, and tracking his foreign contributors to see if they were Moslems -- is to raise enough doubts to have the Bradley effect tilt the election outcome.
Republicans, in the past, often used race baiting to make their rivals seem anti-white. This year's campaign slogan is: Obama isn't patriotic enough. "McCain and Palin are doing something different: they're using race to make Obama seem anti-American," says Peter Beinert (October 9, Time).
Political strategist Robert Shrum, writes: "I've advised candidates who, under pressure from impending defeat or in the grip of an implacable animosity toward their opponent, just couldn't help revealing their true feelings" (October 7, The Week).
Conservative columnist David Frum (American Enterprise Institute) observed: "McCain may have hoped to do to Obama what George Bush did to him in the famous South Carolina primary of 2000 -- get under his skin in a way that goads him into a self-destructive outburst" (Oct. 9, The Week).
Obama cannot have an outburst -- for sure. America may or may not elect a black president --"but it's not ready to hear a young, Harvard-educated black man" trade insults with a white war hero.
But then, Obama doesn't have to trade sneers with McCain, does he? He should keep doing what has been working for him -- follow the path of another white war hero, Napoleon Bonaparte: Never interfere with an enemy who is in the process of self-destruction.
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