About those racists and "real America"...

By GottaLaff

Frank Rich:

There are at least two larger national lessons to be learned from what is likely to be the last gasp of [George "macaca"] Allen-McCain-Palin politics in 2008. The first, and easy one, is that Republican leaders have no idea what “real America” is. In the eight years since the first Bush-Cheney convention pledged inclusiveness [...], the G.O.P. has terminally alienated black Americans [...], immigrant Americans (including the Hispanics...) and the extended families of gay Americans [...] Subtract all those players from the actual America, and you don’t have enough of a bench to field a junior varsity volleyball team, let alone a serious campaign for the Electoral College.

But the other, less noticed lesson of the year has to do with the white people the McCain campaign has been pandering to. As we saw first in the Democratic primary results and see now in the widespread revulsion at the McCain-Palin tactics, white Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe. Just because a campaign trades in racism doesn’t mean that the country is racist. [...]

That includes acknowledging that the so-called liberal media, among their other failures this year, have helped ratchet up this election cycle’s prevailing antiwhite bias. Ever since Obama declared his candidacy, the press’s default setting has been to ominously intone that “in the privacy of the voting booth” ignorant, backward whites will never vote for a black man.

A leading vehicle for this journalistic mind-set has been the unending obsession with “the Bradley effect” — as if nothing has changed in America since 1982, when some polls (possibly for reasons having nothing to do with race) predicted erroneously that a black candidate, Tom Bradley, would win the California governorship. In 2008, there is, if anything, more evidence of a reverse Bradley effect — Obama’s primary vote totals more often exceeded those in the final polls than not — but poor old Bradley keeps being flogged anyway. [...]

The McCain campaign is so dumb that it bought into the press’s confirmation of its own prejudices. Even though registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 1.2 million in Pennsylvania [...], even though Obama leads by double digits in almost every recent Pennsylvania poll and even though no national Republican ticket has won there since 1988, McCain started pouring his dwindling resources into the state this month. [...]

But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. [...]

Nor is America’s remaining racism all that it once was, or that the McCain camp has been hoping for it to be. There are even “racists for Obama,” [my post here] as Politico labels the phenomenon: White Americans whose distrust of black people in general crumbles when they actually get to know specific black people, including a presidential candidate who extends a genuine helping hand in a time of national crisis. [...]

The dirty little secret of such divisive politicians has always been that their rage toward the Others is exceeded only by their cynical conviction that Real Americans are a benighted bunch of easily manipulated bigots. This seems to be the election year when voters in most of our myriad Americas are figuring that out.

Whew! That was bracing. Thank you, Frank Rich.

FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver on the Bradley Effect:

By GottaLaff

Nate is wise. Very wise. We lerve Nate:

The Bradley effect emerges when voters tell pollsters one thing and then do another at the ballot booth. [...] My conclusion?

With so many "X factors" like race, cell phones and turnout, there is probably an extra margin of error this year. And polls aren't terrifically accurate to begin with. But there is no reason to conclude that the polls are systematically overestimating Obama's support; the reverse is at least as likely to be true. McCain, in all likelihood, will need to win this election fair and square—which means that he has his work cut out for him.

::stifling giggle:: Did Nate just say Gramm-pa will have to win fair and square? Actually, that's not funny at all. In fact, that is my biggest concern. The good news is that finally, the media are reporting a lot of election glitch news. It's out there in plain sight, and it's out there early.

The better news: Obama is all over this.

If voters turn out, double and triple check the results on the machines after they vote, report any problems, stand up for their rights, and refuse to allow election fraud this year, we'll pull off a resounding victory.