Two campaigns are being waged right now for the presidency of the United States. No, I'm not talking about the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign.
I'm talking about the real-world campaign and the meta-campaign.
The real-world campaign involves speeches and proposals and facts and scandals and political positions and news events.
These details, however, are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and have become subsumed by the meta-campaign, which consists of perceptions, polls, reactions, analyses and summations. Until very recently, elections were decided by real-world facts -- but not anymore. Facts and events in and of themselves are no longer important; what's important is how everyone reacts to them. And how do we find out the public's mood concerning this or that incident? Why, the media tells us, that's how.
Or so we've been led to believe.
We're all part of the campaign now. Every single one of us.
Our opinions, our actions, are bundled together as a group and used as weapons in the race for the White House.
When the media reports on what people think, either through public-opinion polling or reportage about anecdotal incidents, it becomes an endless feedback loop, in which the media's representation of most people's purported thoughts is supposed to influence everyone else's thoughts.
And then they take another poll to determine how effective the first poll was in influencing public opinion, and the cycle starts all over again. Since everyone now knows that any public expression of their political opinions might be reported by the media, even the most innocent activity becomes a calculated campaign action. Saying how you intend to vote is not simply an expression of how you intend to vote, but rather a component of the public barometer of how the majority intends to vote, which is then used by the media and the blogs to influence everyone else. Nothing is done in all innocence anymore.
It's no longer a matter of dispute that the mainstream media, overall, very strongly leans to the left.
Over 90% of journalists classify themselves politically as "liberal" to varying degrees, and innumerable instances of left-wing bias on the part of the media have been pointed out by bloggers over the years. Yes, a small subset of media outlets are identifiably conservative, but they are vastly outnumbered, both in sheer numbers and in influence, by the liberal media. This fact takes on intense importance in an era when the "news" becomes (as it has become) a subjective matter. Nearly any fact or incident can be "spun" to Obama's benefit.
Obama's supporters and his official campaign have taken great advantage of this felicitous informational landscape
-- first, that the meta-campaign trumps reality, and second, that the media is cooperative and complicit. For example, after presidential debates, the leading left-wing blogs always coordinate massive online opinion-poll-stuffing campaigns. After the Palin-Biden vice-presidential debate, the overwhelming consensus on conservative and centrist blogs was that Palin had won handily, and that Biden spoke mostly in a soporific monotone while spewing a continuous stream of easily debunked falsehoods. And yet readers of DailyKos, the Huffington Post, Democratic Underground and dozens of other top left-wing blogs swarmed en masse to vote (often repeatedly) in mainstream online polls about the debate, so that afterward, CNN (among many others) could run headlines that said "57% Think Biden Won Debate," basing their conclusion on the results of the online polls. And once enough of these articles get published, then they themselves become "proof" of the debate's supposed outcome, and before long (often just a matter of hours) it becomes a "fact" no longer up for discussion that Biden won the debate. This fact is then referenced by pundits, and slips into supposedly neutral news stories.
The illusory quest for conformist decision-making in the 2008 presidential election
Asch's Conformity Experimenthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6LH10-3H8k&eurl=http://www.zombietime.com/lefts_big_blunder/The Race Card and the Revival of the Bradley Effect
Say, for example, that you were an Obama supporter who watched the Vice Presidential debate and felt that Palin had done well and was a more effective debater than Biden
-- though not well enough to change your mind about voting for the Obama-Biden ticket. Immediately afterward you encounter an online poll, asking you to vote on who won the debate. What do you do? I suspect that most, if not nearly all, Obama supporters would lie and still vote in the poll that Biden had won the debate, even though they felt that Palin had in fact defeated him. But why do so? As an Obama supporter, you still want your candidate to win, so that every action you take should revolve around only one question: Will this help Obama win? Probably unconsciously, people assume without really thinking about why, that if enough people say Biden won the debate, then a general consensus will be reached that Biden did win the debate, and as a result some vague category of Americans who up until that point had not been Obama supporters will change their allegiances and in reality vote for Obama-Biden on election day.
The Bradley Effect, a polling phenomenon which has been discussed extensively in this election, is
a discrepancy between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in American political campaigns when a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other....
The Bradley effect refers to an alleged tendency on the part of some voters to tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for a black candidate, and yet, on election day,
vote for his/her white opponent.
Despite being a well-known phrase, the Bradley Effect is quite often misreported by the media and misunderstood by the public to mean that whites who are racist will refuse to vote for any black candidate yet will lie to pollsters about their intentions for fear of having their racist attitudes exposed. As a result, polls sometimes over-report support for black candidates in elections when they are running against white candidates. But this is a gross misapprehension of what the term means. First of all, the phrase "Bradley Effect" originally only referred to a bare-bones description of what actually happens in such races: White voters tell pollsters they intend to vote for the black candidate, but on election day they either vote for the white candidate or don't vote at all. Left out of this original definition was any notion of why this happened. But over the intervening decades since the effect was first noticed (when black Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election to lesser-known white candidate George Deukmajian, despite Bradley apparently having a substantial lead in the polls), additional layers were added to the definition in which the motivation was assumed. The causes are in fact not so clear, and are impossible to study directly. While the media and the general public often assume that the Bradley Effect is caused by actual racism, some astute analysts point out the real cause is more likely to be something much more subtle: That white voters who are in fact not racist will pretend to support a black candidate due to fear of being falsely perceived as racist.
The Bradley Effect seems to have gradually evaporated over the intervening decades since 1982, as black politicians became more commonplace and it was no longer automatically assumed that if you voted against a black candidate you did so only out of racism. That is -- until this election. Until this year, accusing your ideological opponents of racism -- a.k.a. "playing the race card" -- was for a while a taboo strategy, which only served to highlight that your campaign was becoming desperate and had no other valid lines of attack. But as election day 2008 draws near, accusations of racism have escalated exponentially, and now it seems the majority of pro-Obama pundits, journalists and bloggers routinely state as fact that all McCain supporters are racists who refuse to vote for Obama simply because he is black (and not because of his policies). The situation is even more extreme in social interactions in liberal areas, where in casual conversation the race card is played almost continuously. I live in the San Francisco area, in an artsy/intellectual/academic circle, and never once have I heard anyone professing support for McCain. If your boss mocks McCain supporters, if all your co-workers express a desire to for Palin to be raped on national TV, if your family are all Obama volunteers, if the media tries to shame everybody into voting for Obama by stating implicitly and explicitly that only a racist would do otherwise, could you have the nerve to come out of the closet as a McCain voter?
In such an environment, where admitting to disliking Obama in the interpersonal sphere has become the equivalent of social suicide, it seems very likely that the Bradley Effect is not just back, but back with a vengeance. The more that Obama supporters go unchallenged in their blanket accusations of racism against McCain supporters, the less likely anyone will publicly admit to dislike of Obama. Hence, the Bradley Effect is not an artifact of racism, but rather an artifact of false accusations of racism.
So, when the phone rings and the pollster calls -- and your Clever Hans social antennae tell you the pollster is young and liberal and likely an Obama supporter -- would you have the nerve to tell the pollster the truth that you wouldn't vote for Obama in a million years? I mean, they called you; they know your number. They know who you are. Can you be absolutely sure they aren't putting a check mark in the "Racist" box next to your name in some mysterious database?
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http://www.zombietime.com/lefts_big_blunder/[/SIZE]
