I Love Donna Brazile

She's great! I find I cannot listen to most of the commentators or "journalists" on the television anymore. Actually I rarely listen to them these days - a few minutes before and after the debates (mostly to Keith Olbermann because he's funny) and on election nights. I'll take Jon Stewart over the actual "newsmen" any day. But Donna Brazile is different. She hasn't sold her ethics out for fame, at least not that I've seen (but see the disclaimer above - I don't watch much news anymore).

Today she had a wonderful Op-Ed up on CNN.com: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/16/brazile.obama/index.html

Rob Fourier, the AP's Washington Chief (and prior to that a McCain staffer-wannabe) has been writing about the "Bradley Effect" - the notion that white people will tell pollsters that they'll vote for a colored candidate and then go and do the opposite thing in the privacy of the voting booth. He's been injecting race into the campaign unnecessarily.

Today Donna addressed race and this election head on. I encourage you to read her entire piece but in part she wrote, "But what if the Bradley Effect were mere folklore? What if it proved to be less like the immutable laws of physics and more like an electoral version of the Loch Ness monster or, even more fantastical, Gov. Sarah Palin's foreign policy expertise as a result of her proximity to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's flight path?

Lance Tarrance, who was Bradley opponent George Deukmejian's lead pollster in 1982, wrote an article recently stating that the disparity between polling and electoral results in that campaign was as the result of bad polling, not racism. He posits that Bradley was always within the statistical margin of error and that his loss reflected nothing more than the inherent weaknesses of polling data in a close election.

Even if there were a Bradley Effect in effect in 1982, there is no evidence that it still exists today. Think of it: The 1980s were a time of recession, high gas prices and questionable fashion sense. Oh wait, perhaps those are bad examples of how much the country has changed in the ensuing quarter-century.

There are, however, a multitude of examples to prove just how far we've come in the past 26 years. The first and most visible: Barack Obama. iReport.com: Cornell students agree that Obama won final debate

There was no way either major party would have nominated a black man for president of the United States in the 1980s. The Rev. Jesse Jackson's historic campaign was as close as we came, and it was symbolic at best.
The greater symbolism was in the choice of Geraldine Ferraro as the first female vice presidential pick in a time when no one would have ever seriously considered a woman leading the ticket. On second thought, maybe citing a newsmaking female veep candidate is a bad choice to highlight the differences between then and now.

Yet no one can argue that huge strides haven't been made since the 1980s. If Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton had run for president the same year Tom Bradley ran for governor, neither would have advanced beyond the Iowa caucuses. The country simply wasn't ready. It is now.

Yes, racism still exists in America. Its disgusting and insidious presence is evidenced every time some rabid partisan screams "Kill him!" or "Terrorist!" when Obama's name is mentioned at McCain-Palin rallies.
There is a contingent of folks in this country who will never, under any circumstances, vote a black man, or for that matter a woman, into office. Thankfully, those hateful, intolerant few are not the ones who will decide this election.