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Chad Jones

I'm Watching for Barack's Language, not the hypothetical Bradley effect

October 15, 2008 by Chad Jones, Contributor (View Source) 

NEVERMIND ALL THAT TALK of the BRADLEY EFFECT

I am not denying that there will be some voters who won’t vote for Obama because of race. But they’ll be more than outweighed by the following factors:

  • 1) the full-scale roll-out of electoral organizing, as captured by Zack Exley in an HuffPost article. Exley, a former campaign staff and organizer, describes the Neighborhood Leadership Teams in the following way:
    After visiting my fourth or fifth team, it was painfully clear that an enormous amount of power is unlocked by this incredibly simple act of distributing different roles to people who actually feel comfortable taking them on. And I say "painfully" because I couldn't stop thinking about all the union and electoral campaigns I've worked on where we did not do this.

  • 2) the whole new swaths of the electorate that were not around in 1982:
  • a. didn’t vote (immigrants who weren’t even in the US, such as Latinos, Koreans, South Asians, Kenyans, Polish, Senegalese, Philipinos),
  • b. those who weren’t born yet (the Millennials), or
  • c. never felt like they had anything to vote for (i.e. the African-Americans and working folks who make up the permanent under class). They were around, but never made it to the voting booth.

    The Bradley Effect has legs in the media for a few reasons: it has a catchy name, and it allows the corporate media to talk about race when they don’t know how to address it otherwise. We cannot fathom the implications of blackness, otherness, and the presidential politic. We’re living it, and cannot forecast what it will mean for domestic USA, our appearance abroad, nor what it will mean next summer. Yet, despite all of this, the fact that Obama exhibits a new type of leadership is what matters most. As Robert Goidel says on the Baton Rogue blog of the Patchwork Nation site:


    Race may be a factor, but it can also be overcome by the right candidate with the right message at the right time.

    +++

    Getting back to shallow media analysis: on this past Sunday on CBS Sunday morning, one analyst said that ‘if Barack Obama were a white Democrat, he’d be up even more on John McCain.’ In my opinion, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

    If the Dem candidate nominee were white and male, they would be drier, wonky, stiff and the antithesis of cool.

    Obama has charisma, fight, charm, sexy that the top of the Dem ticket hasn’t seen since 1960.

    Even Clinton’s rise was tarnished by the philandering hanging over his head. Jennifer Flowers was already out, and there was plenty more that he unleashed in his two terms. And after the Republican Revolution two years into his tenure, Clinton was hardly the embodiment of cool. Saxaphones and Arsenio Hall aside.

    +++++

    What to Watch For Tonight:

    During tonight’s debate, I am not concerned with whether McCain utters the name Ayers, or just about anything else that the GOP ticket will do. Rather, I will be watching and listening to Obama closely. Scrutinizing his choice of words on the following topics:
    ... Pakistan,
    ... the middle class ... or will he dare utter working class and working poor?,
    ... clean coal,
    ... off-shore drilling.

    McCain was right to lambaste Obama’s aggressiveness and over-assertiveness with regards to Pakistan in the earlier debates. Obama can tone down the language, and throw out the hyper-masculine hawkishness. He will look stronger, further his lead in the ‘level-headed’ characteristic that is buggering McCain, and not foster greater resentment globally once he becomes President-Elect Obama.

    Relatedly, why did Obama choose to mention the lie of “clean coal” in last week’s Town Hall Meeting? When did it become meaningful to mention clean coal? Who is he speaking to when he says that? The two groups most intrigued by that language are some D.C. lobbyists for the dirty energy companies, and a handful of families that are the elite of Kentucky’s coal-mining and mountain-top removal companies. (for backstory on the horrors of mountain-top removal, see “Death of a Mountain: Strip Mining and the Leveling of Appalachia, a 2005 Harpers Weekly article. Heralded journalism ... yet horrifying in content.

    Are those families gonna vote Obama based on this singular pledge to advance dirty-clean-coal?

    I know that the coal industry was one of the .
    The Democratic National Convention was littered with advertising, promoters and parties saluting Clean Coal. Apparently, the Denver-DNC onslaught was the work of the American Coaltion for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE). For more of their shtick, go to www.americaspower.org.

    For more online muckracking into the clean coal façade, read the blogs, testimonies and data from:
    DeSmogBlog
    Coal Is Dirty .

    This is as bankrupt an idea as carbon swapping gimmicks and carbon offsets. The fact that you can carbon swap on the New York Stock Exchange should indicate the absurdity of these financial and capitalist tools.

    As said in a March 2008 Washigton Post article aptly named ‘Clean Coal: Don’t Try to Shovel That’ :
    Clean coal: Never was there an oxymoron more insidious, or more dangerous to our public health. Invoked as often by the Democratic presidential candidates as by the Republicans and by liberals and conservatives alike, this slogan has blindsided any meaningful progress toward a sustainable energy policy.

    If we want to break our addition on foreign energy, we need a president and other public leaders who won't mouth the same old, tired talking points. We need an intervention, but not by starting with the 19th century technology of 'clean coal.'


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