Live from Austin!

Inspired by an awesome FARK thread:

During the 1990s, UK TV series Spitting Image included a song "Thank You Tory Voters", listing disasters caused by the Conservative government. One memorable line was "Voting Tory’s like a fart, no-one admits they’ve done it".

This was the point at which opinion pollsters noticed something interesting: Conservatives would routinely lose in every opinion poll, and then win the election. Studies were carried out, and it turned out that a surprisingly large number of people were so embarrassed by their support for the Tories that they would routinely tell opinion pollsters one thing, and then vote differently in the privacy of the voting booth.

People are starting to ask whether something similar might be happening in the US Democratic voter base. Here, it’s known as The Bradley Effect. And it’s real:

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.

[...]

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.

Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

Emphasis mine.

So a third of Democratic voters are racists. Imagine what the statistics for Republicans must look like.

The survey team also used Implicit Association Testing:

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.

From: Joe Biden
To: Barack Obama
Subject: Changes to your positions on key issues

I’ve been taking a look at your web site. There are some changes you need to make if we’re ever going to win this thing.

• Get rid of as many mentions of science as you can. That stuff scares the right-wing Christians.
• Remove the paragraph about surveillance being conducted under the rule of law. It just looks embarrassing after your FISA vote.
• Get rid of the stuff about providing opportunities for minorities to own TV and radio stations, or you’ll never get an interview on FOX.
• Remove the talk of parental controls and filtering tools. Parents don’t want to be responsible for their children’s upbringing.
• Get rid of the stuff about open government. A live feed of our meetings where we make important decisions? Are you nuts?
• Get rid of the stuff about redefining broadband to be over 200kbps. The telecoms industry doesn’t want to roll out the fiber we paid them for.
• Get rid of the paragraph about community use of the wireless spectrum, or the corporate radio stations will bury you.
• Pull all the stuff about immigration reform. Immigrants can’t vote.
• Remove the stuff about better enforcement of antitrust law.

Thanks in advance for your speedy compliance.

Joe

I’ve been a bit bemused by the anger over Obama picking Biden. It’s pretty obvious why he was the pick. Obama had been heavily criticized for (a) lack of experience, (b) being a secret Muslim, (c) being a drug user, and (d) shamelessly flip-flopping on the FISA vote.

Biden is (a) one of the longest-serving Democrats, (b) a devout Christian, (c) the guy who brought us the Drug Czar of the War On Drugs, and (d) one of the few Democrats to vote against FISA.

Yes, he voted for the Iraq war, but so did most of the Democrats. And in fairness, he tried to push through a motion saying that war was authorized only if all diplomatic channels failed, but it was shot down.

Of course, now the criticism has smoothly switched from "He has no experience" to "His VP choice has too much insider experience and doesn’t show a commitment to change".

Guardian:

Rush Limbaugh is taunting the liberal media by repeatedly airing a derogatory and racially charged song about the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Limbaugh, whose rightwing talk show is one of the most listened to in the US, has been running a song called Barack the Magic Negro, to the tune Puff the Magic Dragon.

Which seems like an appropriate reason to download the song painstakingly assembled by WNNX-FM a few years ago: Ladies and Gentlemen, Rush Limbaugh. [Backup link.]