In my race and politics class last week we talked about the well-worn concept of White Privilege in American society. Of course, i trotted out Peggy McIntosh’s seminal article identifying numerous instances of White privilege. The concept made sense to students on an abstract level, but when I asked them to apply it to the political process, I got blank stares. One of my students shared with me Tim Wise’s article on how Sarah Palin benefits from white privilege which I shared with my class.

After reading the article, my students were surprisingly nonplussed. It made me wonder if anyone has empirically tried to test white privilege’s effect on politics? I imagine you could do some sort of experimental design where one group is given a set of candidate attributes and told the race of the candidate while the other group is given the same set of attributes and not told the race of the candidate. If anyone has seen work like this on white privilege…give a shout!

Oh…and speaking of my favorite subject from last week. I found this Sarah Palin moment on SNL odd but funny. What’s the angle here? Does she know she’s being mocked? Does the campaign want her to be mocked? The mind reels when it’s procrastinating.

Yes, no, maybe, it depends.

Check out this great post at Andrew Gelman’s blog.

HT: The Monkey Cage.

Key passage:

Voters may be to the left of the Democratic party or to the right of the Republican party on specific issues, but, on the whole, most voters don’t have that sort of ideological consistency.

Even thought the post debate flash polls declared Obama the runaway winner, I have a creeping suspicion that this presidential race is going to tighten. The McCain campaign has been remarkably undisciplined at pinning the “liberal” label on Obama. While we might be embroiled in a financial meltdown, there are certain policy positions which are do not meet what James March called the “logic of appropriateness.” One of these, support for late-term abortions, Obama handled with aplomb in last night’s debate. I’ve been wondering when the Republicans were going to go after another of Obama’s “inapprorpriate” positions in support of state laws that provide driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. Well, here ya go:

This all might be a little too late. it is difficult to change public perceptions of a candidate with 19 days left to go in the election. But if there is an underlying distrust or soft support among working class white, an ad like this might just be able to pry 1-2% back to McCain or to the sidelines…especially if the Dow keeps rising. I’m just sayin’.

From Ben Smith

Somebody in one of our disciplines has to go out and test whether or not this is an effective GOTV (get out the vote) strategy. it’s a doable study if you could get data on video game purchases by state/county/city and compare it to early voting figures in those areas. Who’s with me?

It’s a testament to the orgy of cash the Obama campaign has on hand that it can venture into these untested areas to spread it’s message. it has targeted hearing impaired voters in Missouri, and has purchased a its own cable channel on Dish Network.

I wonder if any of you have any insight into whether cyberappeals would be an effective strategy for turning out voters?

Thought I’d pass along a revealing new study by political scientists Melissa Michaelson, Lisa Garcia Bedolla and Donald Green on the factors associated with increasing voter turnout among low-income and new immigrant populations. The study is part of a larger initiative by the James Irvine foundation to increase voter turnout among underrepresented groups.

The authors found that personally contacting Latino voters was significantly more effective in increasing turnout than mailings or using pre-recorded phone calls. The study in a nutshell from a new America media article:

Using a control group that received no contact from outreach workers, researchers looked at voter turnout in the June 2006 election and found that the voters who had been contacted by volunteers were more likely to go to the polls on Election Day. Researchers identified the same trend in the 2008 primary election in California.

Here are the best practices culled from the study:

1. recruiting canvassers: stay close to home. Canvassers should ideally be drawn from the local community, either residents of the same neighborhood or representatives of a local organization or religious institution. Canvassers who are personally known to targeted voters are particularly effective at increasing turnout.
2. Canvasser training: get comfortable with the conversation. Good canvassing practices can enhance the effectiveness of a campaign. Groups that train to increase canvasser comfort with the script seem to be most effective in their outreach efforts. This training helps ensure interactions between canvassers and voters are conversational as well as informative.
3. Campaign timing: work the inal four weeks. Going to the ield too early can decrease a campaign’s effectiveness. Canvassing should not begin more than four weeks before Election Day.
4. door-to-door approach: personal contacts work best. Campaigns should ideally use face-to-face canvassing, although phone banks can be preferable for turning out widely dispersed or multilingual populations.
5. live phone banking: pre-screen, personalize and follow up. Phone bank calling is enhanced by pre-screening lists for working numbers (this increases eficiency and helps maintain canvasser morale) and by making follow-up calls to those who earlier expressed an intention to vote. While many communities can be targeted by English-speaking or bilingual English-Spanish speakers, effective phone bank calling in most Asian American communities requires a multilingual approach. The study found that turnout increased if the person making the contact knew the canvasser and if the contact was within four weeks of the election.

While this study provides great insight into increasing turnout, my hope is that we begin to pay equal attention to how new immigrant and low income groups form the political attitudes that shape how they vote in the first place.

It wasn’t too long ago that Geraldine Ferraro made her infamous comment theorizing that “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.” Her sentiment that his race conferred advantages to him was reinforced by the writings of Shelby Steele. In his book on Obama, Steele suggests that Obama is a “bargainer.” Here is how Steele describes a bargainer:

Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer’s race against him.

Here’s a good synopsis of Steele’s argument on NPR.

According to Steele, this perceived ability Obama has to absolve whites of past racial sins, makes him a particularly attractive candidate to many:

For many Americans — black and white — Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority.

Steele’s book title points to a downfall in a bargainer’s campaign:

bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don’t know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.)

Steele’s presumption that as the public got to know Obama, he would be exposed as the complex product of his mixed-race background that he is and his public support would fall. A look at the latest Gallup tracking poll 4 weeks out has Obama with an 11 point lead over Mccain. Why hasn’t it happened? Is Steele wrong? Has Obama had to hide his complexity to win? He has displayed a plodding, yet disciplined and effective, blandness since capturing the democratic nomination.

Steele also argues in the NPR interview that he can only win if he clearly specifies “who he is.” has he done so? You notice that “change” has largely been absent from recent Obama speeches? Has he become somewhat wonkish and more specific to address criticisms that he is merely an empty vessel of change? has the financial crisis eclipsed the main thesis of Steele’s book?

In all the years I’ve been following presidential elections, I’ve never heard someone from an audience call the candidate from the opposing party “a terrorist.”

Dana Milbank at the Washington post reported a similar incident at a Palin rally in florida where members of the crowd allegedly yelled “kill him” regarding Obama during her speech. Regardless of your political persuasion, this has to be a bit unsettling. I fear we’re charting into an emotional storm as this election draws near. My hope is that Mccain’s attack during tonight’s debate will be about Obama’s economic and social liberalism as reflected in his voting record rather than this absurd guilt by association.

All of us in academia can probably be tarred with a similar brush. Is anyone who works with someone with controversial views forced to resign their jobs? As a graduate student I taught in the Ethnic Studies department at the University of Colorado during the time Ward Churchill was a member of the department. Does that link me to Ward Churchill’s views? Should I have given up my teaching assistantship? Are all the members of the education department in which Bill Ayers teaches today complicit in his crimes and victims of poor judgment? How about all his students? Should they drop out of the university upon learning of their professor’s past?

What would the framers have thought of this? Come to think of it, maybe they should make a version with the framers, to satisfy the blood lust of constitutional scholars.

I was going to post on how this game feeds into a pluralist frame of democratic governance, over a deliberative frame, but that would officially make me a pinhead! I wonder if Obama or McCain staffers secretly play this game on a bad day.

In the continuing effort to make the readers of this blog feel as old as I feel somedays, I present you the Class of 2012 Mindest List from Beloit college. Here’s a description of the lilst from their website:

Each August for the past 11 years, Beloit College in Beloit, Wis., has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college. It is the creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and Public Affairs Director Ron Nief. The List is shared with faculty and with thousands who request it each year as the school year begins, as a reminder of the rapidly changing frame of reference for this new generation

Here are, in no particular order, the five most relevant to the increased “thickening” of our culture.

23. Schools have always been concerned about multiculturalism.
31. They have never been able to color a tree using a raw umber Crayola.
37. Authorities have always been building a wall along the Mexican border.
43. Personal privacy has always been threatened.
58. Radio stations have never been required to present both sides of public issues.

Do you think growing up with these things being a given fact of our student’s daily experience means for their engagement in our classrooms?

Watching the Palin-Biden debate last night, I had one of those “a-ha” moments when a theory’s power is revealed in real time.  For me, this happened as Joe Biden was speaking of aternative energy policy.  I was watching CNN’s coverage of the debate, during which the bottom of the screen flashed the read out of an EKG machine…err…I mean…the collective response from the “Perception Analyzers” of three dozen or so undeclared voters in Ohio.  When Biden was on about clean coal and global warming, the needle didn’t move.

It wasn’t until Biden employed a “frame bridging” strategy of connecting clean coal to “good paying jobs” that the lines on the monitor shot up into very positive territory.   Snow and Benford define frame bridging as a “linkage of two or more ideologically congruent but structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue or problem.” (467). The intent of which in the policy world is to gain greater support for a given policy, in this case “alternative energy”  

The “perception analyzer,” and its progeny, desipte their prima facie corniness title, do greaty aid the watching of debates.