Daily Nation, Kenya

Will the `Bradley Effect’ decide outcome of poll?

By GITAU WARIGI
Posted Saturday, October 18 2008 at 16:51

In Summary Some whites had told American pollsters that they would
vote for Bradley only to vote Deukmejian instead

For years, there was something embarrassing that was taken as a given
in Kenya.

There was this ingrained belief that a certain community could never
get any of its members elected president, perhaps due to cultural
reasons.

One of the most important outcomes of the December election was the
way this myth was directly confronted. Even though Raila Odinga
narrowly missed being elected president, there is no question that
this myth was finally exploded.

Something similar is unravelling in America, but with far more
potentially momentous consequences.

Ignore the talk about economic turmoil or about Republicans and
Democrats and all that. The central issue there, or call it the
elephant in the room, is race.

Can an African-American be elected to the White House, only a mere
generation or so after the 1965 Voting Rights Act guaranteed black
Americans their right to vote?

IN MY ESTIMATION, THE MOST momentous speech Barack Obama has ever
given is one he delivered on March 18 this year on the question of
race in America.

The venue he chose, Constitution Hall in Philadelphia where the
country’s founders debated the framing of the US constitution, was
symbolic.

He was forced to speak out at a time when his campaign was threatened
with destruction by the controversy over the Rev Jeremiah White.

But rather than just respond to the pastor’s rhetoric in the manner
politicians usually do, he did something startling by placing the
matter of race in its wider context as something that was a specific
problem for America and whose resolution required deep soul-searching.

Obama’s speech may not have finished off the bigots, but it raised the
bar on the conversation of race higher than probably any other
mainstream American politician has ever placed it.

Prejudice is something that works in subtle, corrosive ways.

Once upon a time, in 1982 to be precise, a black man called Tom
Bradley, who had been mayor of Los Angeles, decided to run for
governor of the state of California. By all accounts, he was a good
and capable man.

His opponent was a white Armenian-American called George
Deukmejian. All the polls indicated Bradley was way ahead of
Deukmejian as election day approached. But when voting was over,
Deukmejian had beaten Bradley.

Ever since, this phenomenon — where white voters tell pollsters they
will vote for a black candidate when in reality they won’t — has come
to be known as the Bradley Effect.

Could this Bradley Effect ultimately undo Obama? We will soon know in
November.

All the polls in the US say Obama is way ahead of John McCain. But
people have a tendency to lie to pollsters.

Nobody likes being called a racist, or a tribalist for that
matter. Rather than risk being called that, some whites in America are
almost certainly telling the pollsters they will vote for Obama when
their real intention is to vote for McCain.

Many voters who had already cast their vote for Deukmejian in
California told exit polls they had voted for Bradley.

Then there is a fairly large and troubling group calling themselves
`Undecideds,’ meaning that they have not quite made up their minds for
whom to vote.

But surely, could anyone not yet have made up their mind with election
day less than three weeks away?

There is a tendency in Kenya, which is overwhelming among
African-Americans, to denigrate McCain as some old coot, maybe even a
bigot himself. That would be unfair.

Not many people perhaps know that, from the outset, McCain strictly
forbade any of his campaign team members from ever bringing up or in
anyway exploiting the Jeremiah Wright-Obama connection.

An even more unfortunate by-product of the American election campaign
is the manner in which African-Americans came to despise Bill Clinton
because of the bitter primary battle for the Democratic Party
nomination between Obama and Hillary Clinton.

THIS RIFT IS ONLY NOW BEING repaired after African-Americans realised
Obama stood no chance on November 4 unless the Clintons helped out. No
doubt some racial innuendoes had been peddled from the Clinton
machine.

Nonetheless the fury of the African-American reaction was completely
out of proportion.

In his appointments and even his social habits, Bill Clinton, when he
was president, was someone who showed real empathy with
African-Americans in a way no other American president had done
before.

* * * *

The Waki report has finally buried the myth peddled by certain guilty
politicians that the Rift Valley killings were `spontaneous.’

The importance of constituting a tribunal to deal with these little
Satans cannot be over-emphasised.