Narrative Suggested
AP-Yahoo poll: Dem bigots will croak Obama run. Weird study that appears to apply vague, generalized racial stereotypes to attitudes toward a particular candidate, “suggests” a critical percentage of Dems will veer off over race. Subtext for future reference: McCain-Palin, choice of bigots. One problem pollsters failed to correct for: Their own prejudice. via Yahoo:
WASHINGTON - Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them “lazy,” ”violent” or responsible for their own troubles.
The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points.
Never mind that wildly unpopular George Bush beat John Kerry, white guy, in defiance of polls.
More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can’t win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don’t have such views.
…
“There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean there’s only a few bigots,” said Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey.
Yeah. And as the narrow focus of this study suggests, some of them are political scientists and the Obama cheerleading squad at the AP that hired them. Here’s something interesting. GOP has bigots, too. However:
Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren’t voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn’t vote for any Democrat for president — white, black or brown.
Hang on. Apparently harboring racial stereotypes doesn’t necessarily make you a bigot. AP:
Not all whites are prejudiced. Indeed, more whites say good things about blacks than say bad things, the poll shows. And many whites who see blacks in a negative light are still willing or even eager to vote for Obama.
So apparently racial prejudices are something highly complex and do not always follow simplistic patterns to assumed conclusions. Maybe something deep-seated in the human psyche, who knows, a primordial vestige, but not always bubbling up with ugly results they way some people, subject to their own prejudices, assume they will.
Now here’s something to consider. Race is a huge factor that is influencing people’s decision in this campaign. AP has given it lip service. Despite his rank inexperience and incredibly bad ideas, Obie is the nominee and is tied in polls in McCain-Palin.
On the other side of the racial question, the Illinois Democrat is drawing almost unanimous support from blacks, the poll shows, though that probably wouldn’t be enough to counter the negative effect of some whites’ views.
OK, lots of blacks are voting for Obama because he’s black. Most of them would, according to traditional patterns, be voting for the Dem anyway. Do you know any whites for whom Obama’s race has been a major, overriding factor? (It’s time, MLK Jr’s legacy, move America forward, put race behind us, etc.) I do. They probably would be voting for the Dem, anyway. So would Obama be the nominee without them? Maybe racism is a big factor in this election after all.
Here’s the best part. AP, eager to push the ugly truth of its racial narrative, buries another ugly truth:
Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that.
Three in 10 of those Democrats who don’t trust Obama’s change-making credentials say they plan to vote for McCain.
Far enough down that it won’t make the cut in a lot of newspapers. But wait, even further down:
Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama’s support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.
But in an election without precedent, it’s hard to know if such models take into account all the possible factors at play.
Subtext: AP-Yahoo pollsters don’t know what they are talking about. Study, like much pop pseudo-science, appears to employ a fair amount of reach and conjecture. Dare I say it again, prejudice. Let me help with some other factors at play in this race: Anti-evangelical, pro-abortion, anti-small town prejudices against Palin, who otherwise would be even more wildly popular among sexists eager to vote on the basis of gender. Anti-ageism vs. McCain did get a nod high up. Right alongside the canard that McCain is a Bushite, popular lefty smear on someone who has clearly been his own man.
Back to this point:
The pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. President Bush’s unpopularity, the Iraq war and a national sense of economic hard times cut against GOP candidates, as does that fact that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.
Hate to belabor the point, but there is a recent precedent neatly devoid of race that might be helpful to understanding what’s going on. It’s called “2004.” A critical percentage of Dems apparently don’t buy platitudes, glitz and hype, and in critical times apparently prefer to have grownups, people with critical experience at the helm, people who have shown they won’t cut and run when the going gets rough. But back to the racism.
The AP-Yahoo poll used the unique methodology of Knowledge Networks, a Menlo Park, Calif., firm that interviews people online after randomly selecting and screening them over telephone. Numerous studies have shown that people are more likely to report embarrassing behavior and unpopular opinions when answering questions on a computer rather than talking to a stranger.
Other techniques used in the poll included recording people’s responses to black or white faces flashed on a computer screen, asking participants to rate how well certain adjectives apply to blacks, measuring whether people believe blacks’ troubles are their own fault, and simply asking people how much they like or dislike blacks.
…
Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word “violent” strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with “boastful,” 29 percent “complaining,” 13 percent “lazy” and 11 percent “irresponsible.” When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.
AP-Yahoo effort fails to mention it, but high rates of violence and irresponsibility among blacks are major concerns of many in the black community who are victimized by the violent and irresponsible elements who dwell among them. Big theme across the black political spectrum from Louis Farrakhan to Bill Cosby.
Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.
The poll sought to measure latent prejudices among whites by asking about factors contributing to the state of black America. One finding: More than a quarter of white Democrats agree that “if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.”
Those who agreed with that statement were much less likely to back Obama than those who didn’t.
Here’s a thought unexplored in this deeply concerned handwringing study. Maybe they view Obama as an affirmative-action candidate, propelled by race beyond his own level of qualification.
The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.
Researchers used mathematical modeling to sort out the relative impact of a huge swath of variables that might have an impact on people’s votes — including race, ideology, party identification, the hunger for change and the sentiments of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s backers.
I dunno, everything I’ve seen here strongly suggests pop scientists applied their own prejudices about prejudice to arrive at their desired conclusion. Does racism exist in America? Of course it does. Just like it does in the rest of the world, among all racial and ethnic groups. Even Dems. Even blacks. Even so-called progressives, who never stop railing about old white guys and paint everyone with the bigot brush. Will it influence this race? Maybe. And if so, in a lot of ways that go far beyond the simple narrative being pushed by the AP and other Obamists. You know, the Bigots for McCain-Palin narrative.
Memeorandum’s roundup at last check strangely suggests the lefties are silent on this one. Will have to look around. Embarrassed about Dem bigotry? Embarrassed by the biased nature of this bigotry study? Apoplectic and rendered unable to post by the injustice of it all? Who knows. Will check around.
Here’s a couple of people who are taking it at face value. Oliver Willis and Donklephant.
OK, here were go. If the “doddering old fool and knowledge less (sic) beauty queen” win, they can thank the bigots. Another uncritical Koolaid-quaff over at the Moderate Voice.
Meanwhile,
Outside the Beltway: Absurd, bizarre. But if only in passing, refreshingly Obama-specific.
Riehl: Dem bigots! Where’s Kanye West when you need him?
Bloodthirsty Liberal: Republicans have a built-in excuse not to vote for Barack Obama—he’s a wild-eyed, race-mongering, terrorist-befriending, crypto-Communist. Democrats have no such excuse: they consider those some of his best qualities. So what gives? … As former Democrats ourselves, as defenders of Israel, we are more than familiar with the biases and blindness of Democrats. They could give a crap what we think about them, but this—that they are no different from those other Democrats Robert Byrd and George Wallace—this should have them quivering in their Birkenstocks.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:51 am on Saturday, September 20, 2008
2 Responses to “Narrative Suggested”
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September 21st, 2008 at 9:43 am
[...] Not for the first time, Jules Crittenden got here [...]
September 22nd, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Is the African-American vote still 90% for Obama? Interesting how no one mentions that anymore, yes?
It seems to me that any white racists in the Democratic party are balanced out by the black racists. A pox on them all.