THE BRADLEY EFFECT

MORALITY AND THE LAW CLX
By Stephen Ellis

THE BRADLEY EFFECT

To all my dear readers: My last blog will be published for AOL on October 31, 2008. If you would like to continue to read it, it is now available at
http://www.moralityandthelawakanobodyaskedme.blogspot.com/.

To those of you (like myself) who have a fascination with the paranormal, my new blog can be read at http://www.explaininglifesmysteries.blogspot.com/.

Nobody asked me, but…

The polls all seems to have placed Barack Obama in the White House following the election scheduled for November 4, 2008. But polls do not elect our president. There is an expression: “There are lies…there are big lies…and there are polls.” Actually, I think the word “statistics” could be substituted for the word “polls”.

I will readily acknowledge that the polls taken today are much more accurate than they were fifty years ago when every poll in the country, without exception, said that, unquestionably, Thomas E. Dewey was going to be our next president…but they are still polls, and what may happen inside the voting booth can be far different than what people have said to the pollsters. Apparently, many voters have reached the point of being quasi-sophisticated: saying one thing to their friends and to the pollsters while still harboring deep prejudice in their minds.

Tom Bradley was the first Black Mayor of Los Angeles. In fact, the only other major U.S. City that had elected a Black Mayor was Cleveland, four years before Bradley was elected. Bradley was the son of a sharecropper and the grandson of a slave. He worked his way through college and law school and became an L.A. police officer before getting elected to the Los Angeles City Council. After winning two elections as a City Councilman, Bradley ran for Mayor of Los Angeles. The first time he lost to Sam Yorty, but the second time he tried, he was elected. He became an extremely popular Mayor and was re-elected for a total of twenty years as Mayor of Los Angeles.

Then, Bradley decided to run for Governor of California.

The polls showed Tom Bradley ahead almost 65% to 35% of his opponent going into Election Day…but his opponent, George Deukmejian, won. Bradley tried a second time and was again defeated by Deukmejian.

The questions naturally arose as to how the pollsters could have been so wrong.

As subsequent interviews with many of the people polled discovered, a lot of White voters had said, publicly, that they were going to vote for Bradley, but when they got into the confines of a voting booth, they did not want to vote for a Black man.

This is what has come to be called the “Bradley Effect”.

Obama is now clearly ahead in the polls…but will the Bradley Effect rear its ugly head again? Are the majority of voters across this country still unwilling to vote for a Black man? Sure, in public they announce their support for Obama, but what about in the confines of a voting booth?

I’d like to believe that in the twenty five years since Bradley lost to Deukmejian, the people of this country have matured. In our cities, Black and White couples are no longer stared at as they walk on the streets. The numbers of Black doctors and lawyers has more than tripled in those twenty five years. The numbers of children from mixed marriages (including Barack Obama) have reached the point where they are not thought of as uncommon.

Certainly prejudice against the Blacks still exists: The Ku Klux Klan still numbers about a hundred thousand in membership. White Supremist groups still abound throughout the rural areas of the Deep South and the Mid-West

The question, however, is not about how the red-neck Deep South and Midwest will vote…but about how the people who live in the cities will vote. Openly they support Obama…but will they support him in the privacy of the voting booth?

Let’s hope that the “Bradley Effect” will be relegated to the history books and that this nation has matured enough to recognize that skin color does not make the man.

As I said…nobody asked me