Forrest Gump: "Sorry I got in a fight while you were having your black panther party"
Posted on 11/02/2008 10:49:40 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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.
Don’t forget the Brady Effect aka the NRA and gun owners. Obama is the WORST candidate for President with gun owners in history. Clinton and other Dems less than a deacde ago learned the danger of crossing gun owners. Obama has no clue.
The NRA members and gun owners will be motivated like they never have been before. The NRA is sending out mailers reminding gun owners we came within one vote of losing the Second Amendment.
ess
Philosophically, those “thinkers” who support moral and religious relativism are Obama supporters.
This election also represents a chance for the silent majority to flip the bird to political (in)”correctness”
Which even my liberal pals can’t stand. They won’t crossover but alot of non-libs will. People are tired of that crap.
Esse est percipi ping
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The 1960’s
BERKELY,
AYERS,
DHORN,
FONDA,
HAYDEN,
LENNON,
KERRY,
TED KENNEDY Effect =
The JOURNEY from the FALL
http://www.JourneyFromTheFall.com
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1308949/posts
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1806248/posts
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NEVER FORGET...
...it could all happen HERE..!!!
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After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”
—Boswell: Life
All I know is I would not want to be in Chicago Tues nite when the Messiah looses. There will be 1 million at this rally in down town Chicago!
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1960’s Anti-War Activists =
Teaching others how to HATE
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1960’s FOREST GUMP =
“I know how to LOVE, Jenny”
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Good article, thank you for posting this. Very thought provoking.
Excellent passage! Thanks for posting it.
He's got plenty of time to save the world, if that is his "destiny."
So far, Obama has given his Illinois constituents slums, homes they could not afford, bad schools, and abandonment of babies who survived abortion.
It's not a pretty picture.
Voters are making this decision for their children, too.
They should make sure they are not throwing away their children's birthright to be free to succeed.
Obama needs to be tested.
You may be dead on here. They definitely STOPPED patronizing network news and big city papers several years ago.
Philosopher “Barclay” ping
I wish people on our side would stop crediting that left’s conceit that the Bradley Effect is caused by covert racism.
The Bradley Effect is *not* caused by covert racism, but by obnoxious anti-racism. It is the result of people of a non-confrontational nature not wanting to deal with accusations of racism when they oppose a black candidate *for whatever reason*. It is the result of people not wanting to be thought of as racists by twits who can’t see that the reason for voting against a black candidate may very well be the content of his character rather than the color of his skin.
People hang up on pollsters or ‘go along to get along’ and falsely declare support for the black candidate (mostly the former) then show up and cast their vote in the privacy of the voting booth where no one will slander them with charges of racism for, say, voting against a Marxist with ties to Chicago machine politics (just as an example).
I wish people on our side would stop crediting that left’s conceit that the Bradley Effect is caused by covert racism.
The Bradley Effect is *not* caused by covert racism, but by obnoxious anti-racism. It is the result of people of a non-confrontational nature not wanting to deal with accusations of racism when they oppose a black candidate *for whatever reason*.
ESSE QUAM VIDERI
Now, now…exaggeration is not necessary when discussing A.C.O.R.N. They have never registered more than 110% of eligible voters in any district.
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