Will racism be a factor in this election? Is the Pope Catholic? Of course racism will be a factor in the contest between Barack Obama and John McCain. After all, somewhere in excess of 95 percent of black voters are expected to pull the lever (or fill in the dot) for Obama on November 4. That’s a statistic any dictator would be proud of. And once Acorn gets through fabricating voter registrations, the number will probably rise to 123 percent, give or take a point.
So, yes, racism will likely play a role in the election, but it won’t be the only sort of racism Team Obama allows in its lexicon, i.e., white racism. A month or two ago, there was some speculation about whether the so-called “Bradley Effect” would ultimately hurt Obama. The “Bradley Effect” is named after Tom Bradley, the black candidate for governor of California in 1982 who was ahead in the polls but ultimately lost to the white candidate. How could that be? asked the pollsters and pundits. “Racism” was the all-purpose answer: People told the pollsters they were intending to vote for Bradley–that was the socially acceptable thing to say to a pollster–but, once in the privacy of the voting booth, their secret, deep-seated racism came forward and they did the wrong thing.
Maybe. Or maybe the pollsters just got it wrong. In any event, the power of the Bradley Effect, if it exists, has been widely discounted in this race (see, e.g., here), partly because pollsters say that they now have mechanisms to account for it, partly because Obama is presented as the candidate who “transcends race” (while cinching 95-plus percent of the black vote–now that’s transcendence!).
In short, you can forget about the Bradley Effect. What you should keep your eye on, however, is the Berkeley Effect, a hitherto insufficiently acknowledged psephological phenomenon I name after George, Bishop Berkeley, the 18th-century theologian, proselytizer on behalf of the virtues of tar-water, and philosophical metaphysician. Berkeley–the name, by the way, is pronounced “Barclay,” as in “barking mad”–believed that the physical world existed only in the perception of God. “To be,” he said, “is to be perceived.” You might think that the computer screen upon which you are reading this exists “out there” as an independent reality; really, though, it exists as an idea in the infinite mind of God. Our “perception” of the computer screen depends from moment to moment on God’s gracious intervention.
In essence, as the philosopher David Stove put it, Berkeley’s philosophy promulgates the doctrine of “universal hallucination.” Silly stuff, but it’s kept many philosophers in business for two and a half centuries now.
I bring it to your attention because there are, I believe, marked similarities between the media perception of Barack Obama and Bishop Berkeley’s idealism. Both depend on what the poet Coleridge, in another context, called “the willing suspension of disbelief.” The admirable thing about Berkeley’s philosophy is its consistency. Granted its premises, it is a marvelously coherent construction: quite beautiful in its elaboration. Its one defect–rather a large defect, alas–is its distance from reality. It sounds dandy; it accounts for everything; only it is utterly insane.
So it is with Obama’s campaign. For example, everyone likes to hear a candidate say he is going to cut taxes for 95 percent of tax payers. But when you ask how he plans to do that, especially when 40 percent of those who file pay no taxes to begin with, you are met with a blank, or rather, with a hostile stare. In fact, as has been shown over and over, Obama’s tax plan is in large part a covert campaign to re-institute the discredited welfare policies of the Great Society. You might have thought those policies were as thoroughly discredited as a social policy could be. You would be correct. But you would be wrong to think that just because a policy has been tried and failed, just because it has been retried and had been discredited, it would therefore be permanently retired.
No, bad ideas never die. They just lie dormant until some clever politician manages to repackage them in sufficiently seductive rhetoric. Nowadays, you don’t say “Property is theft,” as did Proudhon. You don’t say you want to “redistribute wealth,” which is a fundamental aim of Marxism. You don’t say you want to nationalize health care and transform independent citizens into wards of the state. You talk instead about “fairness” and tell people who accuse you of preventing them from realizing the American dream that you just want to “spread the wealth around.”
Does it work? Up to a point. Eventually, though, reality has a nasty habit of intruding and upsetting the hallucination. A witty anonymous blogger has drawn on Clever Hans, the famous calculating horse, and the psychological experiments about conformity that Solomon Ashe conducted at Swarthmore College in the early 1960s, to argue that Obama’s performance in the polls owes much to certain habits self-deluding exaggeration among Obama’s supporters and their allies in the media. “Will the exaggerations become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he asks, “as assumed, or are Obama supporters spinning further and further away from reality, constructing one unsupportable exaggeration on top of another — only to be stunned on election day when the actual results, once again, don’t match either their pre-vote opinion polling or their post-vote exit polling?”
I think there’s a good chance that the latter will happen. Sure, Obama might win. But the American public is, when you come right down to it, a heartily pragmatic lot. Confronted with hallucinations as public policy, I expect a good many of them to react as did Samuel Johnson when Boswell asked him whether he could refute Bishop Berkeley’s contention that the physical world did not really exist. Dr. Johnson drew back his booted foot and administered a stout kick to a convenient rock. “I refute it thus,” he told Boswell. Pedants will object that Johnson’s action did not constitute a refutation. Quite right. But it did constitute an thoroughgoing repudiation. That will be good enough for me on November 4.
Quite, right, Sir, and while we are on BHO’s “tax plan,” how can it be that so many immensely wealthy people (W. Buffet, media stars, top athletes, and Silicon Valley Barons, etc,) support Barack? Could it be that they DO NOT believe that his policies will harm them in any noticeable way? If not they, who WILL pay for all those shiny freebies he proposes?
I wholeheartedly hope you’re right, Roger, but your post depends on enough well-informed voters not only wading through the miasma of Obama’s disinformation and figuring out that his proposals are utter claptrap, and then following up their discovery of this deception by turning out to vote. I admit to going back and forth about whether there remain enough such people in the battleground states to put McCain over the top. Since the media has been Obama’s protective cocoon, I would think a series of 527 ads in key states slamming the media for their duplicitous role serving as the unofficial communications wing of Barack’s Army would produce enough such votes.
Last week Roger posted the Howard Stern interview of black in Harlem. You know the one,
where blacks automatically support Obama, they are in fact so automatic that they agree to
supporting McCains policies when they are
told that they are Obamas. This suggest that this whole Obama phenomenon is beyond the reach of reason. Roger assumes that the mass publichas any rational basis for anything it is doing. He assumes that there is a lot of thinking going on about the candidates policies.
He further assumes that the mass public knows any history pre Bush. 1965? LBJ? 1977? Carter?
No..as in all Totalitarian episodes the past
is erased from memory. If you want to look for parallels to what is about to happen in this country..dont look to LBJ or Carter or Clinton
look to Maos Cultural Revolution. Like Maoism
the USA has it own festering hysterical Ideology that is about to go utterly insane..Racial Political Correctness. Mao had his Red Guard, and Obama has his “Truth Squads”. Right now they are confined to the blogosphere but like ACORN they are sanctioned by Obama. Once in office this movement will invade every nook and cranny of our lives. And it will all be done for the noblest of motive…”equality”, “peace”, “justice”
Intrade is listing McCain contracts at around 15.5 today. That means if you are convinced of his victory, you have an easy mechanism for getting six times your money. Even if you only give him even odds of winning, it’s a great bet. So, dear hopeless wingnuts, go put your money where your mouth is.
And BTW, Obama’s tax plan is well-documented, along with his other proposals. If you have a problem with it you might as well start from the actual plan, rather than claiming all it consists of is a “blank stare”.
This is one of the funniest tropes in this election cycle, the idea that Obama’s nature is mysterious when he’s written two autobiographical works, or that his policy proposals are mysterious when they are laid out in detail and readily available on the web.
H. L. Mencken’s comment on democracy seems peculiarly appropriate to this election. He said that the theory of democracy was that the voters knew what they wanted and deserved to get it, good and hard. An Obama Administration will be the Second Coming of the Carter Administration, and that’s if we are lucky. Otherwise it will be worse. electing Obama will give it to the US good and hard.
This has been my line of thinking for the last several months: that the sort of mass delusion that has befallen so many of r Obama’s current supporters will shatter in the first week of November as they contemplate the prospect of sending this cipher to deal with Putin, Ahmadinejad, or other challengers, and as they weigh the feel-good effect of supporting a minority candidate versus the costs of a socialist-leaning administration. Much of the seeming inevitability of an Obama victory is based upon polling and media reporting of dubious veracity, so I don’t believe it will be all that surprising to the more sober followers of this campaign when Mr McCain is elected in two weeks.
Where are you and your foot, Dr. Johnson, now that we really need you?
Excellent articles from Roger Kimball and Victor D Hanson here on PJM.
Hopefully Joe Biden will continue to campaign for the McCain/Palin team as well until election day.
Zombietime has done it again – a long analysis of William Ayers’s past and present communism, with photocopies of the hard-to-get Weather Underground manifesto co-authored by “Billy”: http://www.zombietime.com/prairie_fire/. So much for the media’s whitewashing of Ayers as a mild-mannered professor.
Roger,
When asked my political opinion, I always offer a viewpoint of conservative wisdom, calmly and eloquently presented, and yet, it is heard by modern liberals (i.e., not John Locke) as if I’d said: “I, moved by an inexplicable yearning to do harm to the poor and minorities, support the criminal, evil, idiot monsters that are raping the world.” However I’m cautious, having witnessed public brawls in the past four years, around angry young Bush-haters, especially drunk ones. This is to say, due to contemporary incivility, whipped up by angry comic TV commentators and radio hosts, there are times when it is prudent to take a low profile approach to political pronouncements.
For one thing, you could be punished. One left-wing site proposed to take names from McCain’s contributors list, investigate public records, and post divorce and DUI dirt on the internet. Like the media’s intensive vetting of Joe the Plumber (rather than, say, Barak Obama).
It’s far beyond disagreeing: we think they’re wrong; they think we’re bad. In such a climate a yard sign might invite vandalism or incur local enmity (though that won’t stop me). Andrew Klavan has written about the phenomenon of “whispering” conservatives in Hollywood and elsewhere. I’ve read many accounts of covert conservatism on campus and I know there are many tight-lipped conservatives in government bureaucracies because, long ago, I was one. Ideological intolerance has given many of us cause to lay low. Careers are at stake.
A cement mason friend, recently enduring the predictable pre-election hectoring by a union rep., was asked if he planned to vote for Obama. “Absolutely,” was his response. To me, he said “not a chance.”
So it should be no surprise, with an all-Obama in-the-face media proclaiming him our rightful leader, with reports of cursing and pushing McCain-Palin supporters in New York and assaults on a volunteers, that many conservative voters, approached by a stranger and asked to go on the record, decline to place the red McCain-Palin sign on their foreheads. I suppose they’ll be even more cautious on Nov. 4, after which, if the Democrats have all national power, show trials of conservatives may begin.
oYur points are excelent, and, as usual, well expressed.
I believe that the “gut feeling” factor is going to play a large part in the outcome of this election, to McCain’s advantage. There are a lot of voters who are not sufficiently into politics to be concerned bout “issues” and “nuances of issues, and “in depth analyses” to make well-reasoned decisions, who are uneasy about Obama: about his smug self-assurance, his evidence of narcissism, his big spending agenda, even the racial bias of many of his supporters. I don’t think the polls aare covering them, and they well contribute to a “surprising upset.”
Sorry Roger:
All of the flights of fancy are on the Republican side this year. You can’t keep repackaging the same failed fairy tale, especially in these times, and selling it to the little guys, whose votes you need but whom you wouldn’t want to sit next to on the subway. Even they figure it out every 8 years or so.
e-mail correction
Six hundred million dollars! Repeat that and ask yourself; “Where is my 15 pt. lead?” That is precisely what the Obama campaign is asking. Obama is no longer the slim, well-spoken man in the finely cut suit. The time is late. We demand to see the wizard, and they cannot produce. I will not vote to shackle my small children with a nanny state. I will not vote for a lack of cultural confidence. I will not vote for a weakened, apologetic military. I will not vote for the wrong “First blackman to be president”. I will not vote for Obama. McCain/Palin 08′.
“. . . especially when 40 percent of those who file pay no taxes to begin with . . .”
Um, Roger, have you ever heard of payroll taxes? Gas taxes? You know, the kind that fund Social Security, Medicare, roads, etc.? Are you really this dumb? (Well, you do blog for pajamasmedia.com, so that answers itself.)
Mtraven:
Intrade is listing McCain contracts at around 15.5 today. That means if you are convinced of his victory, you have an easy mechanism for getting six times your money.
Still a stupid bet. If McCain wins, I’ll be happy to earn money through old-fashioned hard work rather than gambling. But if Obama wins, I’m going to need every last penny to survive the economic disaster his “well documented” tax plan, and other policies, will create.
McCain’s Intrade price has slipped to 13.6 since I last posted. You people have nothing to offer, no arguments, no policies, no vision: just an endless stream of insinuations and slurs. Nobody is buying it. You trot out stale arguments from past decades that don’t resonate with today’s voters — like calling Obama a socialist because he proposes a tax plan that’s mildly more progressive than what we have now. Nobody is buying it. Intelligent conservatives are moving over to Obama in droves: Christopher Buckley, Doug Kmiec, Colin Powell, Ken Adelman…the list just keeps growing.
Oh well. I suppose at some level you realize you have lost and you are just preparing to unleash your endless stream of crap on the Obama administration, just as you did to the Clinton administration. Look how well that worked out. You damaged him, for sure, even got him impeached, but even with all that going on his time in office looks about a thousand times better than that of his successor. You think people can’t remember that far back?
My prediction is that Obama will move the crazies (that’s most of you people) to even greater heights of slander than Clinton, but it will get less traction in the media and the public. People are waking up and getting serious — nothing like a looming economic crisis to do that.
#15–TR: For some, what is obvious is not apparent. Claiming to give 95% income tax relief, as Obama does, when 40% pay no income taxes, is, well, what? A fraud? A lie? A joke? Are you really this dumb? (Your comment speaks for itself.)
@17 mtraven: lol! There is nothing like tedious and smug leftists for a good laugh. Colin Powell a conservative? Geez, I’m surprised you didn’t include Christopher Hitchens, too.
@19 — You can use whatever label you like for Colin Powell, the fact is that he is a Republican, who served in Republican administrations, donated to the McCain campaign, was rumored to be on short list for McCain’s VP slot — but he’s thrown his support to Obama. You don’t get to his position by backing losers.
I am not Powell’s biggest fan by any means, but he did try to argue Bush out of invading Iraq, which makes him a more genuine conservative than most of the Bush administration, in my book. Conservatives are supposed to be prudent about the use of government power, not go ginning up wars for vague pseudoidealistic crusades. Didn’t you make that very point in another thread? Was that a different G. Clark?
Yes, I wrote the other post and I used the label you used. George Bush is a Republican but not even remotely a conservative. The same for John McCain. To be a Republican hardly makes one a conservative at this point.
I give Powell some small credit for being less gung-ho on the war but it takes more then that to be a conservative. We weren’t just discussing his foreign policy in this thread. And the fact that he didn’t resign over the war at the time says a lot about him. Powell is easily the most overrated public figure the US has seen in some time. I’ll add that Powell endorsed Obama in large part because of the color of his skin. The rest was just the typical blather about the messiah being a transformational figure.