Donald Trump and the 'Bradley Effect'

David Graham on Donald Trump's increasingly racist reelection effort:

While it’s true that a lot of the media coverage made a Clinton victory seem like a foregone conclusion, there were warning signs of her weaknesses for some time, and Biden is already doing better on several of those fronts. The presumptive Democratic nominee holds a larger lead, and a more consistent one, and he’s eating into Trump’s edge in key demographics including white voters and older voters.

The reason for this, as I wrote last week, is that voters are horrified by Trump’s handling of race issues and of protests. The president’s unfavorability rating remains high, though within its normal range, and voters still give him high marks on the economy, but there’s been an immense shift in opinion on race. White voters have changed their minds, and they’re no longer with the president—but he’s sticking to the same talking points.

I wonder if we're seeing an inversion of the "Bradley Effect" here.

The Bradley Effect is a phenomenon in which black politicians underperform their polling when voters actually cast their votes. The idea is that white voters tell pollsters they'll vote for the black candidate because they don't want to look racist but maybe are secretly a little bit racist when they go into the voting booth.

The idea is that racism and discomfort with racism can coexist in the same person. (We're large, we contain multitudes.) Republicans have exploited that discrepancy over the years by running meta-campaigns on crime and welfare while studiously avoiding going full N-word. As long as there was a plausibly non-racist explanation for a Republican candidate's position, the GOP got the benefit of the doubt. Voters could vote for the Willie Horton ad guy and still feel OK about themselves.

Donald Trump is a blunt object, though, given to saying the quiet part loud. Voters who might support a subtly racist candidate can do so and tell themselves that they're not supporting a racist candidate. But Trump is, increasingly, foreclosing that option to those voters. He is plainly trying to divide America along racial lines, defending the Confederate flag and racist team names, praising "Manifest Destiny," even going after NASCAR's one black driver -- and all of this in the last 24 hours. Voters who can look past somewhat subtle expressions of racism are finding that Trump's expressions aren't all that subtle anymore. They don't like it. And so Trump is failing.

Then again, if the Bradley Effect possibility holds, it could be that voters are telling pollsters they don't like Trump and his racism -- but will give him their support in the privacy of the voting booth. There's only one way we'll find out.

Movie night: THE PAJAMA GAME

Three thoughts about THE PAJAMA GAME:

* The original Broadway production marked Bob Fosse's emergence as an in-demand choreographer, and his work is on display here. The dances are nacently Fosse, but unmistakably so -- the hats, the herky-jerky Chaplinesque moves. Just good fun.

* I sometimes get very emotional when I see great joy expressed through dance. I found this out right after I got married -- oddly enough, during the "ABC" scene in CLERKS II. It can get embarrassing at times. But it has happened often enough that I recognize the pattern. So let's just say the performance of "Once-A-Year Day" got me a little bit verklempt.

* Why don't we have more great musical comedies about workplace labor strife?

On Trump's hope Americans will "grow numb" to death

WaPo:

The goal is to convince Americans that they can live with the virus — that schools should reopen, professional sports should return, a vaccine is likely to arrive by the end of the year and the economy will continue to improve.

White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day, according to three people familiar with the White House’s thinking, who requested anonymity to reveal internal deliberations. Americans will “live with the virus being a threat,” in the words of one of those people, a senior administration official.

I believe President Trump's political prospects are being kept alive by two groups at this point: Racists and pro-life evangelicals.

I have some sympathy for the latter group. I grew up with them, went to a conservative evangelical Mennonite college where almost everybody was pro-life. I knew four people on campus who admitted to voting for Bill Clinton in 1992, and I was one of them. I don't agree with all those folks on much these days -- but I love them still.

Admittedly, the abortion issue is a close moral call for me. I think that unborn children exist on a spectrum of bearing moral worth -- but I also think real questions of women's health and freedom is bound up in the all of this, and, for me, that settles the issue in favor of a pro-choice position. But I know a lot of people who come down on the other side, and I respect that for the most part. When I don't, it's because their acts and positions suggest to me that they're more interested in power over women than they are in saving lives.

I can kind of understand, then, why evangelicals support Trump despite his manifestly un-Christian bearing. He's giving them the judges they want to undo -- either by overturning or neutering -- Roe v. Wade. A good friend of mine once told me he was disgusted by Trump, but also felt like he should thank him. I wonder, though, how they can sustain their pro-life witness and continue to back this president.

I mean, consider again these words:

White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll...

Why? Well, because trying to save all those lives is hard. And (Trump believes, I think wrongly) that the economy will bounce back if Americans decide to live with the virus and the damage it does.

Pro-lifers tend to reject -- and can even be contemptuous of -- the many women who argue that they are unable to bring an unborn child into the world because they don't possess the economic resources (or other resources) to support that child. For pro-lifers, life trumps any economic argument.

But not now.

If Americans grow numb to death, I wonder how pro-lifers can defend the fact the president they support is OK with your grandma or spouse or child or other loved one dying or being disabled by the virus? Do they think that engenders a "culture of life?"

Maybe there's an argument that COVID was inflicted by nature, while abortions are an active choice. But when you look at America's climbing coronavirus cases and compare them to other developed countries not run by right-wing populists, it's is clear that allowing widespread death in America is a choice being made by the president and his accomplices.

Can you be truly pro-life and support President Trump? We all make moral compromises when we do politics -- purity is for the ineffective and impotent. But at some point, maybe the compromises become too much. Maybe they start to work against your professed values. I think that may be what is happening to pro-lifers right now. No one can say they weren't warned.

Movie night: THE ROCKETEER

Three thoughts about THE ROCKETEER:

* This is a movie from the last days of practical effects, before TERMINATOR 2 wowed everybody with CGI and things started to change.  By the end of the decade, George Lucas would be making movies entirely with green screen and computers. Here, though, there are lots of scenes that were shot in the real world - particularly the scenes involving airplanes. I miss real airplanes in movies.

* I was thinking that the movie owed a lot to the INDIANA JONES films, afterward looked it up -- THE ROCKETEER was directed by Joe Johnson, who got his start in movies doing effects on STAR WARS and the INDY movies. He learned at the feet of Spielberg and Lucas in the 1980s, and man, does it show. There ought to be a ROCKETEER/INDIANA JONES mashup, like Batman v Superman, or Alien v Predator.

* Alan Arkin is a sign of quality every time.

Spielberg, Lincoln and Frederick Douglass

Finally saw Spielberg's LINCOLN this week, and I loved it, but one thing bothered me: A story about the end of black slavery in America largely pushes Black people to the margins. That's somewhat understandable -- the country was run exclusively by white men, so depicting the political machinations of the age is going to be very heavily focused on white men. But it's a movie about the fate of Black Americans in which Black Americans have very little screen time.

I thought of the movie today when reading Frederick Douglass's "What tot he Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech. Particularly this part:

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. — There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

In other words: It's absurd that human beings should find their very existence and dignity as human beings debated by other humans. The existence of the debate itself, even when there are people on the right side of it, is belittling and dehumanizing.

And that kind of debate is pretty much the entirety of LINCOLN.

I'm not throwing away the baby with the bathwater here, so let me elaborate. There's a scene in LINCOLN when Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones, decides to profess a desired state of black equality that is short of what he really believes. He does this because he believes that without that rhetorical hedging, he won't get the 13th Amendment at all -- he wants the whole loaf, but he has to talk about getting half a loaf in order to get any part of the loaf at all. He compromises his ideals in order to achieve his ideals. (It's played with relative subtlety, but I'm glad the movie depicted that.)

Similarly, it was both absurd and insulting to debate the rights and freedom of Black Americans and also absolutely necessary to have that debate so that those rights and freedoms would begin to become manifest.  

I'm not sure there's a way out of that conundrum, then or now, or even what to do with this tension -- except, perhaps, to acknowledge it. Maybe wiser folk than I can offer some insight. 

KellyAnne Conway's family - and ours

If you're reasonably informed, you probably know about the Conway family. Kellyanne is a top advisor to President Trump. Her husband, George, is a Washington lawyer who has emerged as one of the president's vociferous critics. There has been a lot of speculation about their marriage, and I've tried to refrain from spending much energy or many words on the whole topic because, frankly, marriages are weird and the accommodations we make inside a marriage might be incomprehensible outside it. Plus, the soap opera aspect of it 

Their daughter, a teenager, has now joined Twitter -- and joined the fray, as another very harsh critic of Trump. She's gathered a lot of fans along the way, and said (or implied) terrible things to or about both her parents. I'm not going to link to it. If you have to find it, you have to find it.

A lot of people are rooting the whole ugly mess on. I think we should be mourning what's happening to the family. But a lot of people don't.

Maybe it's just Twitter. It's probably just Twitter. The site, as any number of observers have suggested, is filled with "vice signaling." Maybe real people are better than this. I haven't actually seen many real people lately, so it's hard to know.

We need to figure out what are politics are for. Is it just about getting ours and (bleep) everybody else? Or is it to work together, however imperfectly, to try and make the places we live better than they would be if we all just went our own ways?

I prefer the second option. 

The history of humanity is full of stories about how a righteous pursuit can shade into self-righteousness and eventually into bloody zealotry. We're not at the last stage, at least not yet. But a whole lot of us have decided we don't need to be humane to people we think are wrong -- or even to people who are demonstrably wrong. Cruel schadenfreude has become, to a remarkable degree, our national default.

This isn't to say that we can't or won't or shouldn't disagree, or that there aren't some people who deserve upbraiding for self-interested or bigoted beliefs and acts. But I don't think a lack of righteous outrage is our problem right now. We need to bring more humanity to our debates, more treating other people like they are humans with moral worth and real, complex, sometimes noble and sometimes misguided motivations -- because they are. 

Even Kellyanne Conway. Even George Conway, if you think he's the asshole in all of this. 

Coronavirus diary: Control

The biggest cause of anxiety for me during the pandemic and accompanying social upheaval has been to grapple, once again, with how much of my life - and the life of my child - really isn't under my control.

I say once again, because nine years ago at this time I was in bad state. I'd lost my job a year before and was barely scraping together an income freelancing. Then I ended up with a bout of diverticulitis that killed me and necessitated three surgeries that caused incredible pain, and a lengthier-than-expected recovery. The results broke me, physically, and nearly did so mentally. I only got by thanks to the suport of my wife and family.

So I know that things can go awry, despite your best efforts. I know that we don't always get happy endings. This sometimes puts me at odds with my dad, an incorrigible optimist -- and that optimism has served him extremely well -- but I believe that happy endings are as much about luck as anything. You can do the right thing, but stuff (the country you're born in, a random mutation in your DNA, the weather, some other driver's bad decision) will get in the way. The control we think we exercise over our own lives is mostly an illusion that can be shattered in an instant. Or, as seems to currently be the case, over weeks and months that all bleed together.

The disaster that is 2020 has brought that home, once again.

I don't know that I (or we, collectively) are going to get a happy ending. I frequently suspect not. But as I've noted, I'm given to apocalyptic thinking. I worry that I'm going to die soon of COVID. Or if not, I'll live but die someday broke and miserable, unable to provide for my wife or son. Or that my son will live a life on the margins, simply trying to survive in a world beset with financial depression, pandemics and climate change. Worse: I have no idea how to prepare him for that.

I can do what I can do. And I will. But I can't control what ultimately happens.

It's a cliche to resort to the Serenity Prayer during moments like these. (It's also longer and Jesus-ier than what usually gets quoted.)  And it feels selfish, hypocritical to pray right now, when so often I ... don't. "God, I know we don't talk often, but I need something from you." But there is wisdom there, nonetheless:

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace;
taking, as Jesus did,
this sinful world as it is,
not as I would have it.

There's even more! But this approach is all that gives me peace right now. And maybe a little hope.