By Selwyn Duke

If you believe the shill media, you assume that large numbers of people are irredeemable, closet bigots who will tell pollsters they intend to vote for Barack Obama but then "go white" in the voting booth (the thought of Obama as president makes me turn white).  This is conventional "wisdom," and they call it the "Bradley Effect."  Yet now there’s a Gallup poll that exposes this as myth, showing that, on balance, people are more likely to vote for Obama because of his race.

To me, this serves as just a bit of vindication.  I have long said that the fashionable biases today benefit blacks and redound negatively upon whites and have written about this phenomenon several times, notably here and here.  And I must confess that it was exasperating when naive people would subscribe to the politically-correct narrative about "privileged white people" who always get a leg-up.

Here is what Gallup wrote on the matter:

"While 6% of voters say they are less likely to vote for Barack Obama
because of his race, 9% say they are more likely to vote for him,
making the impact of his race a neutral to slightly positive factor
when all voters’ self-reported attitudes are taken into account."

Even this, however, only beats around the bush of the truth.  I suspect that the percentage of people who are positively influenced by Obama’s race is even greater, and I’ll explain why.

The nature of biases is that people often aren’t fully aware of them, if they are in touch with them at all.  Moreover, with a racial bias such as the one in question here, people have a vested self-image interest in not admitting the truth to themselves.  After all, we’re raised with the idea that the worst fault imaginable is to be ridden with racial biases, so how likely is it that people will want to come to terms with such a thing?  Besides, we all want to believe we possess some depth and sophistication, and it’s hard to feel that way once you realize you’re influenced by such a stupid motivation. 

Now, of course, you can’t tell a poster about something of which you’re not consciously aware.  But even in the cases of those who may be cognizant of having this bias, do you think all of them will reveal it to a pollster?  Such a thing could seem embarrassing; we often want to seem deep and sophisticated to others, too, you know. 

Unfortunately, sophistication is hard to come by.  Speaking of which, come January, there will be even less of it in the White House than there is now.

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