To Ayers is Human, To Incite Disgraceful.

Undecided Voters and the Bradley Affect, and How the McCain Campaign is Trying to Stir Up Hatred to Steal an Election.


In 1982, Tom Bradley, the long-time mayor of Los Angeles, California, ran as the Democratic Party's candidate for Governor of California against Republican candidate George Deukmejian, who was white. The polls in the final days before the election consistently showed Bradley with a lead. Based on exit polls, a number of media outlets projected Bradley as the winner; early editions of the next day's San Francisco Chronicle featured a headline proclaiming "Bradley Win Projected." However, Bradley narrowly lost the race. Post-election research indicated that a smaller percentage of white voters actually voted for Bradley than polls had predicted, and that previously "undecided" voters had voted for Deukmejian in statistically anomalous numbers.

A month prior to the election, Bill Roberts, Deukmejian's campaign manager, predicted that white voters would break for his candidate. He told reporters that he expected Deukmejian to receive approximately 5 percent more votes than polling numbers indicated because white voters were giving inaccurate polling responses to conceal the appearance of racial prejudice. Deukmejian disavowed Roberts's comments, and Roberts resigned his post as campaign manager.

Try as I can, 1982 looms large as life in my mind. The rather large number of, still, undecided voters in this election gives me pause. What is it that they are still undecided about? History has repeatedly revealed that undecided voters tend to break away from the incumbent party’s nominee when things are not going well. In deed almost 80% of likely voters believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction, with the current president at unprecedented low opinion polls. With those two things going for him, why do so many perspective voters confess that they are still not sold on Obama? In lieu of any reasonable and rational argument to the contrary, I can only conclude that most of this undecided vote is quite simply hesitant to vote for a black candidate.

And the McCain campaign is trying to capitalize on that hesitancy with repeated attacks, not on Obama’s economic plan or his seeming lack of experience, which would be fair game in any election, but on what New York Times columnist Frank Rich called the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

They can deny it all they want, but they are clearly playing to the race card, and what worries me most is that they might actually get away with it. They know they can’t win by talking about the economy – every poll shows that – so the only thing left to do is paint Obama as “risky” or “dangerous” or “not like us.” You don’t need a road map to see where they’re going. And while the imploding economy has dominated the landscape to such an extent that once Republican states like Virginia and North Carolina are now within reach of Obama, the margin or error in both mean that at the eleventh hour they could also swing away from him and back into the Republican column. In deed, with the exception of Pennsylvania, which now seems firmly in the grasp of Obama, most of these swing states that he has a lead in, including Ohio, fall within 2 to 4 points. Bradley affect proponents say that if these uncommitted voters break like they did in 1982, Obama could easily lose between 2 to 4 points on election day. In other words what could possibly be a landslide victory might actually be a very close loss. NBC predicted that McCain would, in all probability, need to sweep all swing states to get to 274 electoral votes. Loathe though I am to admit it, given what we know about racial bigotry in this country that is not out of the realm of possibility.

So, in the midst of the most important election this nation has held in 70 years, and with the economy teetering on a depression, John McCain, the former maverick, has now turned to inciter and enabler of racist rhetoric. Shouts of “terrorist” and “traitor” and “kill him” go unchallenged by his running mate, with only veiled protestations by the man himself when a woman referred to Obama as an Arab. Shameful, vile and disgusting, and totally beneath contempt. Regardless of whether McCain actually pulls this off and manages to win the election, he has forever tarnished what was once a distinguished career in Washington and, once more, pulled the nation backwards into a past it can’t seem to keep from reliving.