Barack Obama’s historic win in Iowa last night was a major step forward in American politics not just because it was the first time a black presidential candidate has won a state contest but also because, for once, white voters who told pollsters they intended to vote for Obama actually voted for him on caucus night.
It is way too soon to write the epitaph for the Bradley Effect — in part because Iowa, with its 1 percent African-American population, is hardly a bellwether for American race relations.
The final polls before the caucuses consistently showed Obama surging. For example, the Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby daily tracking poll from yesterday showed Obama with 31 percent, Edwards with 27 percent and Clinton with 24 percent. The final tally was Obama 38 percent, Edwards 30 percent and Clinton 29 percent.
The phenomenon of white voters lying to pollsters about their intent to vote for black candidates has been so commonplace that it has a name: “Bradley effect,” named for the late Tom Bradley, an African American who served five four-year terms as mayor of Los Angeles.
In 1982, Bradley ran for governor of California against a human cipher named George Deukmajian. Polls consistently showed the popular mayor of the state’s largest city with a comfortable lead over the Republican, but on election day, Deukmajian won handily. This phenomenon has been reproduced in elections in New York City and Illinois as well as North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee.
Obama has been quite aware of the Bradley effect from the start, of course:
When Obama, in effect, launched his presidential bid in Manchester, N.H., last December, he made a point of playing down the potential hazards of being a black (or mixed race) candidate in a country where four out of five voters are white.
Reflecting on the 2006 Senate election in Tennessee, Obama said, “I don’t think Harold Ford lost because of his race.”
Ford, an African-American, was the Democrat defeated by Republican Bob Corker.
“I thought that the Harold Ford election showed enormous progress. Something that hasn’t been noted is the fact that Harold Ford did better among white voters than the polls would have indicated,” Obama said.
When black candidates Doug Wilder and Tom Bradley ran for governor of Virginia in 1989 and California in 1982, respectively, polls predicted that each would get a higher share of white voters than they in fact won on Election Day.
It is way too soon to write the epitaph for the Bradley Effect — in part because Iowa, with its 1 percent African-American population, is hardly a bellwether for American race relations. Still, Obama’s success in Iowa is both a personal triumph for the senator as well as a much needed success for the American political system.
Isn’t it so strange that the pollsters were so accurate in Iowa and so inaccurate in the 2000 election? It does give one pause as to the honesty of that election.
[…] the Bradley Effect was not seen in Iowa last week, as Jon Ponder says, Wirzbicki notes that the social aspect of a public caucus could mask such racist […]
Clinton gave the nation’s highest civilian award — the Presidential Medal of Freedom — to a man who spent the vast majority of his public career and life as a proud segregationist.
1. Bill Clinton interned for J. William Fulbright in 1966-67, when Fulbright was still a segregationist. Fulbright became Clinton’s “mentor.”
2. In April 1985, Governor Bill Clinton signed Act 985 into law, making the birthdates of Martin Luther King Jr. (the preeminent leader of the civil-rights movement) and Robert E. Lee (the general who led the Confederate army) state holidays on the same day. Of course, the word “segregation” never passed Clinton’s considerable lips, but the (uncoded) message he was sending to certain of his white constituents could not have be clearer.
3. Clinton took no steps during his twelve years as governor to repeal a Confederate flag law: Arkansas Code Annotated, Section 1-5-107, provides as follows:
(a) The Saturday immediately preceding Easter Sunday of each year is designated as ‘Confederate Flag Day’ in this state.
(b) No person, firm, or corporation shall display an Confederate flag or replica thereof in connection with any advertisement of any commercial enterprise, or in any manner for any purpose except to honor the Confederate States of America. [Emphasis added.]
(c) Any person, firm, or corporation violating the provisions of this section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction shall be fined not less than one hundred dollars ($100) nor more than one thousand dollars ($1,000).
In 1989, then-Gov. Bill Clinton was sued as one of three top Arkansas officials responsible for the intimidation of black voters in his state as part of a legal action brought under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, NewsMax.com has learned.
And a year earlier the U.S. Supreme court ruled that Clinton had wrongfully tried to overturn the election of a black state representative in favor of a white Democrat.
In a related 1988 case, Clinton had tried to replace a duly elected African-American state representative with a white candidate, only to be stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court ruling came as the then-governor was fighting another court battle to preserve racial profiling in his state, a tool that Clinton later criticized while president as a “morally indefensible, deeply corrosive practice.”
But a decade earlier he approved the profiling of Hispanics by Arkansas State Police as part of a drug interdiction program in 1988, the Washington Times revealed in 1999.
“The Arkansas plan gave state troopers the authority to stop and search vehicles based on a drug-courier profile of Hispanics, particularly those driving cars with Texas license plates,” the Times said.
“A federal judge later ruled the program unconstitutional,” the paper reported. “A lawsuit and a federal consent decree ended the practice - known as the ‘criminal apprehension program’ the next year.”
Then-Gov. Clinton, however, not only criticized the profiling ban; “at one point, [he] threatened to reinstate the program despite the court’s ruling,” the Times said.
Hearing Clinton’s condemnation of racial profiling in 1999, Roberto Garcia de Posada, executive director of the Hispanic Business Roundtable, complained that the then-president “had been a strong supporter of racial profiling against Hispanics in the past.”
After he was sued in the late 1980s by the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund for failing to enforce the Voting Rights Act in Arkansas, then-Gov. Bill Clinton suggested to a group of pro-segregation whites that they were being unfairly targeted by civil rights laws as a result of the South’s loss in the Civil War.
“The meeting turned sour when one of the local whites demanded to know why, in his view, the whites were always made to pay for others’ problems. Other whites in the group began to echo his charge. …” “Bill Clinton, the lead defendant in the case, took to the podium to respond. In a tone of resignation, Clinton said, ‘We have to pay because we lost.’” Clinton was referring to the South’s Civil War loss.
Bill Clinton spent Wednesday afternoon playing golf at a country club accused of discriminating against blacks and Jews. Jake Siewert, Clinton’s rep, confirmed it was the second time Clinton has played at the Indian Creek Country Club about 20 miles north of Miami. He first played there a year and a half ago. Siewert said, “All venues are fully vetted,” and dismissed allegations of racism and anti-Semitism as “not true.”
“There’s no question about it, the club has anti-Semitic policies in place to keep out Jews,” said Earl Barber, who was on the club’s board for 14 years, and a member for 22. Barber, along with Alvah Chapman, a former chairman of Knight Ridder, and M. Anthony Burns, a trucking magnate, resigned their club memberships because of its “membership policies.”
To add insult to injury, 14 of the island’s 34 homes are owned by Jews, and although they are denied access to the club, a portion of the residents’ property tax is used for the club’s upkeep. Miller notes that he refused to meet Clinton during his 1999 visit to Indian Creek because the president was playing at the anti-Semitic club. The snub even made the local news.
When Jeb Bush was slated to pay a visit to the club, Miller informed the Florida governor of the restrictive policies, and Bush cancelled.
Bill and Hillary Clinton were scourges of the Republican Party in Arkansas because they were NOT racists. It was the Arkansas Republican racists who, in the early 1990s, welcomed the representatives of Richard Mellon Scaife, the rightwing billionaire fruitcake, who was recently caught by his wife having an affair with an ex-hooker, when theycame into Arkansas with $2.3 million to spend to bribe local officials to give them dirt on the Clintons.
These racist Arkansas Republicans took these Yankees for a ride and cleaned them out of their millions while feeding them a line of bullshit that led directly to the bogus Starr investigation and the even more bogus impeachment.
Now these Clinton haters are back — the very racists who caused the problem in the first place — trying to Swiftboat Bill Clinton on race.
And, ironically, it’s these same racists who accused Bill Clinton of having a mixed race illegitimate child — which led to what may have been the first time ever that the American taxpayers, via the Starr persecution, paid for a presidential paternity test. And, by the way, it proved he was not the father of the child.
Ain’t gonna work this time.
Finally, Newsmax is a joke and not a credible source for anything. It is a rightwing hit site that publishes falsehoods that are such obvious lies that they would not pass muster even on Fox News.
- Editors