Day of the Upset ... but not in Austin

I am admittedly a little late getting this post up, but then, I don't write about sports for a living. (To loyal readers and followers of this blog, sorry it has been so long since I've posted something. I've had ideas, believe me, but starting a law practice from scratch and keeping it afloat are very time-consuming.)

It's been a while since there's been so much upheaval in the NCAA football rankings in one week, or even in one day. On Saturday, 11th-ranked Mississipi ("Ole Miss") beat No. 3 Alabama, No. 4 Oklahoma lost to TCU, which had just made it into the AP Top 25 this season, and 12th-ranked Mississippi State battered some stupid cow college that was ranked No. 6. Add to that No. 2 Oregon's embarrassing home loss to unranked Arizona, and you had four of the top six teams losing this week, causing a scrambling of the rankings at the top of the AP poll. No. 17 Wisconsin and 18th-ranked Brigham Young University also lost to unranked teams, (Northwestern and Utah State, respectively).

Other top-ranked schools avoided being upset, most importantly No. 7 Baylor, which handed Texas its third loss at home this year. The Bears almost shut out the Longhorns, but two costly penalties against Baylor's defense on UT's last possession of the game allowed them to score a touchdown with 2:14 remaining.

The 'horns nearly scored twice in the first half, but Baylor defensive lineman Beau Blackshear successfully blocked a 52-yard field goal attempt, and safety Terrell Burt scooped up the ball and returned it 62 yards for his second career touchdown. Then, right before halftime, Texas quarterback Tyrone Swoopes fumbled the snap at the 1-yard line, and Blackshear was there to recover the ball.

The most spectacular drive of the game was easily the one kept alive by Baylor punter Spencer Roth’s faked punt and 19-yard run on fourth-and-5 in the third quarter. Three plays later, quarterback Bryce Petty completed a pass to Antwan Goodley, who ran it into the end zone for a 30-yard touchdown.

The 28-7 final score could easily have been more lopsided, but the referees took six points for Baylor off the scoreboard in the second quarter after an official review determined that Petty was stopped short of the goal line when he ran with the ball on 2nd & Goal from the 5. Texas's surprisingly strong defense managed to keep Baylor out of the end zone on its ensuing two attempts, resulting in a turnover on downs.

Much to my chagrin, the Bears chose to let our QB take a knee on the last play of the game, when Baylor had the ball on the Texas 7-yard line with one second remaining on the clock. The obvious call for me would have been to let Chris Callahan attempt a field goal. I know we didn't need the extra points, but our poor kicker could have used a confidence boost after missing five of his six field goal attempts so far this season, and to deny him that opportunity, when there was nothing on line, came across (to me, at least) as a slight at the young man.

For those of you not familiar with the history and dynamics of the Big Twelve, let me explain why this game was such a big deal. Texas used to be the big dog, the king of the conference. They're the most recent Big 12 team to win a national championship (in 2006). They are the school that produced Earl Campbell and Dallas Cowboys icons Tom Landry and Tex Schramm. Movies have been made about Texas football, even about their cheerleaders.

But, in recent years, the mighty have fallen. As mentioned earlier in this post, Texas has lost three home games already this season, putting them at 2-3 overall and 1-1 against conference opponents. They are 14½-point underdogs going in to this Saturday's game against Oklahoma, perenially played at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. Longtime coach Mack Brown, who led them to that national championship and another Big 12 conference title in 2009, stepped down at the end of the 2013 season, and the team has apparently not been doing well under his successor, Charlie Strong.

Even before Brown’s exit, the school's football program was clearly in decline. I'm told that that their 8-5 record last year made Brown the first coach in Texas history to have four straight seasons with at least four losses.

Texas's decline overlapped with Baylor's rapid ascent. In the past four years, my alma mater has played in four consecutive bowl games--a first in school history--turned out a Heisman trophy winner--another first--and won its first Big 12 title. Oh, and we've got a fancy new stadium on the north bank of the Brazos River now, too.

The unofficial passing of the torch may have come last December when Baylor defeated Texas 30-10 to win that conference title.

The feelings of resentment among other teams, especially Texas, are stark, as Jordan Garrettson reported for the AP last week:

"They're still Baylor," said John Harris, who leads Texas with 336 receiving yards. "Just because they started playing better, that's good for them. We're still Texas."

Those remarks came about six months after Longhorns linebacker Steve Edmond was reprimanded by the Big 12 for his disrespectful comments toward the Bears after spring practice.

"I really don't like Baylor. I still feel they're trash," Edmond said. "Y'all think it's funny, but I'm dead serious. They've had some good players. But I don't understand how we lost to Baylor."

These players' jeers at the new king of the Big 12 underscore what is becoming an undeniable fact: the upper echelon of the NCAA bowl subdivision (the FBS) is, to many schools, an elite club of historically dominant teams, and they don't like it when schools they used to beat the tar out of improve themselves and break into that upper echelon. I'm sure it hasn't been fun for Texas, Oklahoma or Baylor's old archrival, Texas A&M, to hear sportscasters gush over Baylor this season and last and how we're now the stars of the Big 12 and had the No. 1 offense in the FBS last season after years of ridicule and derision.

Baylor's upcoming game against TCU is also significant for many reasons, including some of the same. See, no matter what they say now, TCU was grateful to be a part of the Big 12 after the conference reshuffling in 2011-12. For years, the Horned Frogs felt that their football team was underrated and underranked. A 13-0 record and a Rose Bowl victory in 2011 brought them national renown on a level they had not enjoyed since the days of Abe Martin. (I'm sure former Horned Frog LaDainian Tomlinson's star power helped as well.) It's fair to say that a lot of TCU students, alums and other fans expected them to be the talk of the Big 12 when they joined the conference in 2012.

But it was not to be. Roughly eleven months after the Horned Frogs capped their undefeated season with their first Rose Bowl win, Robert Griffin III won the Heisman Trophy, a high honor in a remarkable season for Baylor. RG3 proved to be not only a stellar quarterback but a recruiting boon like nothing Baylor's football program had ever had before. Although they had some adjustments to make in its first season post-RG3, the Bears still managed to finish a respectable 8-5, including a stunning upset of then No. 1-ranked Kansas State and a Holiday Bowl victory over UCLA. Meanwhile, despite a 49-21 rout of Baylor in October, TCU finished their debut season as a Big 12 team with a bowl game loss to Michigan State and a 7-6 record overall (4-5 in conference games). They ended the year unranked for the first time since 2007. More importantly, Baylor was picking up a lot of high school talent that would otherwise have gone to other schools, such as TCU. One of BU's most potent weapons this year and last, running back Shock Linwood, was once a commit to TCU. So was current Baylor defensive lineman Andrew Billings.

 

The long-running Baylor-TCU rivalry (which I've just learned has been nicknamed "The Revivalry") got even hotter last year, when Baylor defeated the Horned Frogs 41-38 in Fort Worth on their way to that Big 12 title. After the game, TCU coach Gary Patterson unloaded on his Baylor counterpart. Sports columnist Gil LeBreton wrote for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

“The bottom line,” Patterson said, “is he’s picking on the wrong guy.”

It was one of a steamy series of Patterson-issued “bottom lines” Saturday. His voice shook with anger, even though Patterson claimed he wasn’t mad.

He professed, more than once, that he had “respect for him” and “respect for his program,” even as he questioned the Bears’ class.

At the root of it, Patterson tried to explain, was Baylor senior safety Ahmad Dixon’s targeting penalty on Frogs receiver Trevone Boykin and what Briles did or didn’t do in the wake of it.

“Here’s the bottom line to it,” Patterson said, “No. 6 [Dixon] beats a guy up at the beginning of the season and he didn’t get suspended. He takes a shot today, and I want him kicked out.

 And the head coach comes across the field at me.”

Patterson contended that while officials were discussing the penalty, Briles came onto the field and yelled something at him.

Their postgame handshake later, Patterson reported, was brief, but went right to the sore spot at hand.

“I didn’t say anything,” the TCU coach said. “He said, ‘Leave it on the field.’

 I said not. You come across the field at me and later you want me to leave it on the field? No.”

Dixon was arrested on a misdemeanor assault charge in a September incident. He was not suspended from the team, leading Patterson to say Saturday, “They didn’t correct the problem a long time ago.”

Instead of Briles admonishing Dixon for Saturday’s illegal third-quarter hit, Patterson became further agitated that TV cameras spotted the ejected player still sitting on the Baylor bench.

“I’ve got coaches up in the box saying he’s laughing on TV underneath his towel,” Patterson said. “Well, I didn’t think it was that funny.”

Patterson continued, “The bottom line is, we’re not going to do that. Gary Patterson lives in Fort Worth. If he’s got a problem with me, here’s where I live.”

Read

“No, I just told him his kids did a great job and good luck during the rest of the year and then in recruiting,” Briles said.

But Patterson took the brief interchange more personally.

“He comes across the field at me?” Patterson said. “Nuh-uh.

“I didn’t build this program to back down to anybody, and I’m not going to do it to him. Not in recruiting or in anything we do.”

Briles, expectedly, responded to Patterson's rant with customary Baylor class:

“No, I just told him his kids did a great job and good luck during the rest of the year and then in recruiting,” Briles said.

But Patterson took the brief interchange more personally.

“He comes across the field at me?” Patterson said. “Nuh-uh.

 I didn’t build this program to back down to anybody, and I’m not going to do it to him. Not in recruiting or in anything we do.”

Perhaps Patterson, who deserves credit for what he's done as TCU head coach, was truly upset about what Dixon did (BTW, Gary, football is called a "contact sport" for a reason.) and what he perceived as Baylor's failure to "correct the problem" sooner, but methinks it was a column by the very popular and respected Randy Galloway in the Star-Telegram earlier that month that really got the notoriously hot-tempered coach's goat. Under the biting headline "Gary Patterson is no longer the flavor of the fall," the doyen of Texas sports writers described the recent (and sudden) reversal of fortune for the Horned Frogs' football program and its illustrious coach thusly:

What the heck happened to Gary in Fort Worth?

Just one year ago, after taking a backup quarterback into Austin on Thanksgiving night and beating Texas, there were columns being written on why Gary Patterson should NOT be the leading candidate to replace Mack Brown.

Those columns were in response to Austin stories that the UT money boys wanted to hire GP, hire him like right now. But with all the outside crap involved with that particular job, a dug-in Patterson didn’t seem to be a guy who would tolerate the program’s built-in distractions.

Even in a somewhat disappointing first season (2012) in the Big 12, Patterson’s reputation didn’t lose luster. In August, in a conference poll of players, the question was what coach would you like to play for other than your own?

Patterson was the players’ choice.

But at the moment, with TCU struggling, GP has dropped off the hot list of college coaches. He’s not even lukewarm.

Guess who Randy called "the new football flavor of the fall"?

I'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count. But you can see him and his team in action Saturday afternoon against TCU.

Stacy Snaps Sinitic Streak

(Photo by Wojciech Migda)

In an encouraging development for the hundreds of Americans who are interested in women's golf, Stacy Lewis won the Women's British Open this weekend. The reigning LPGA player of the year birdied the last two holes on the Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland, to finish at 72 (even-par) for the day and eight under overall. It was an exciting and impressive victory, as well as a long-awaited occurence for LPGA spectators who were anxious to see a White girl win again.

Oh, did that sound inappropriate? Sorry; my sense of when it is and isn't appropriate to bring up the race of newsmakers must be out of step with modern social mores. I didn't think there was anything racial about Stacy Lewis winning the Women's British Open, but apparently, I was wrong.

 

During the final round of the tournament, one of the male announcers on the Golf Channel mused that "the last 10 tournaments" have all been "won by Asian women." The Sports Xchange began its article announcing Lewis's win by declaring that the 28-year-old "ended a streak of 10 major championships by Asian players with a victory on Sunday...." Countless other sports media noted in one way or another that Lewis’ win breaks a run of 10 straight majors won by "Asian" players. (Golfweek supplemented this bit of trivia with the fact that Lewis's "victory in the 2011 Kraft Nabisco Championship had been the last major not to fall to an Asian.")

There's been a lot of efforts recently to inject race into matters of national interest that are not inherently racial: e.g., the George Zimmerman/Travon Martin case, the controversy over New York City's "Stop & Frisk" policy and certain states changing their voting laws. The individuals who have perpetrated these efforts probably have varying motives for doing so, but I can't conceive of a good reason for racializing non-racial things. In the case of Stacy Lewis's victory at St. Andrews, it is significant and a propos that this was the first time an American won a major LPGA tournament since 2011, but why not just say that? Why even bring up the race of the other winners?

It's no secret that women from the Far East have come to dominate the LPGA Tour in recent years, so I'm not that surprised that nearly every sportscaster and golf journalist who reported on the 2013 Women's British Open made sure to work this Asian-winning-streak talking point into their coverage. I'm just so sick of people injecting race into things that aren't naturally racial.

When I was a kid, a Japanese friend of mine and his family were sent to an internment camp, like hundreds of thousands of other Japanese-Americans who were guilty of nothing other than sharing a heritage with a nation that had attacked us. It was a sad chapter in American history, and although it didn't seem right to me at the time, I didn't really understand what was going on. Once I was older and understood what was done to my friend and his family and other Japanese families and German-American families and why it was done, I wasn't sure how to feel; I felt angry, confused, furious and saddened. What happened to those Americans was wrong, so very wrong, and of course the people responsible for it rationalized their actions at the time, but then, don't the leaders of any government that oppresses its people always do that?

So, if you think I'm making a big fuss about something that's just small potatoes, then you need to understand where I'm coming from. Having seen the U.S. progress from a country with internment camps and segregated schools to a society in which so many people value tolerance and diversity above all else, I have an instant dislike for attempts to racialize any issue that isn't (or shouldn't be) racial. Years ago, the late Mike Wallace asked Morgan Freeman in an interview, "How are we going to get rid of racism?" Before Wallace had even finished his question, Freeman responded, "Stop talking about it." I couldn't agree more.

Media censored the race of the victim in brutal Florida school bus mob beating

This is outrageous.

Where is the media attention?

Justice for this victim!!

I guess Sharpton and the rest of the scum don't care about white victims of brutal, black, drug-pushing thugs........

They just care about the thugs. Thugs like Trayvon Martin.

These vicious animals should be punished.

http://topconservativenews.com/2013/08/media-censored-the-race-of-the-victim-in-brutal-florida-school-bus-mob-beating/

Politifact F---s Up, Again

This pretty much says it all:

Pretty much. I would only add that PolitiFact has a history of faux journalism, characterized by sloppy work, specious analysis and selective fact-checking. Only once since the site first named its "lie of the year" has the label been bestowed on an actual lie (last year, when they appropriately dubbed the Democrats' talking point that congressional Republicans voted to "end Medicare" the lie of the year).

In 2009, "death panels" received the non-honor, but of course, that was not a statement, and therefore cannot technically be a lie. The following year, PolitiFact claimed that calling Obamacare a "government takeover of health care" was not only a lie but deserved the 2010 "Lie of the Year" aphorism. Their explanation relied heavily on a very narrow logical framework:  

 

"'Government takeover' conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees," Politifact creator/editor Bill Adair and deputy editor Angie Drobnic Holan wrote. "But the law Congress passed, parts of which have already gone into effect, relies largely on the free market."

So, according to PolitiFact, because Obama and the Democrats weren't technically nationalizing the American health-care industry, calling Obamacare "a government takeover" was 100% false. (Throughout the year, the web site gave different versions of the claim a "Pants on Fire" rating, which means that the assertion is not only false but "ridiculous".)

Now, once again, PolitiFact has failed to help "find the truth in politics," its stated mission. Perhaps most disgraceful is that the statement it dubbed the 2012 "Lie of the Year" wasn't made, at least not the way PolitiFact analyzed it.

As Gutfeld mentioned, this year's dubious distinction went to Mitt Romney's statement that Barack Obama "sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China" at the cost of American jobs. Back in October, Politifact posted about the claim and ruled it a "Pants on Fire!" falsehood. The problem? The ad in which the claim was uttered didn't say that the Italian manufacturers who bought Chrysler were going to build Jeeps in China "at the cost of American jobs;" it didn't even imply as much. PolitiFact added that last part. Without it, the statement is not only accurate but true. As Bloomberg News reported, "Fiat SpA (F), majority owner of Chrysler Group LLC, plans to return Jeep output to China and may eventually make all of its models in that country, according to the head of both automakers’ operations in the region." (emphasis added)

So it sounds like, even if the Romney campaign had claimed that American jobs would be lost as a result of the production of Jeeps in China, it would have had some justification for doing so. Not according to PolitiFact, who called the ad "brazenly false."

Maybe they just don't know the meaning of the word "false". Or "brazenly". Or "fact". Somebody should get Angie Drobnic Holan a dictionary for Christmas

Yeah, It Was a Stupid Thing to Say. Can we PLEASE Stop Talking About It?

 Its been less than three full days since NBC sportscaster Bob Costas used his halftime segment on Sunday Night Football to expound on the tragic murder-suicide perpetrated by Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, and I'm already sick of hearing about it. If you watched FOX News in the last 48 hours, then you've probably seen or heard about Costas's remarks. Basically, Costas stired up a controversy when he echoed the sentiments expressed by Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock in his Sunday column. Here's a piece byan excerpt of what Whitlock wrote:

Jovan Belcher, a starting linebacker for the Chiefs, murdered the mother of his child shortly before 8 a.m. Saturday. He hopped in his car, drove to the Kansas City Chiefs practice facility, thanked Romeo Crennel and Scott Pioli — and shot himself in the head in front of his coach and general manager around 8:10 a.m.

Within two hours, the NFL instructed the Carolina Panthers to travel to Kansas City as scheduled in preparation for Sunday’s noon kickoff. By 3 p.m., the Chiefs announced that Crennel and team captains had decided to play Sunday’s game as planned.

Short of terrorist attack and weather disaster, nothing slows the NFL.

A 25-year-old kid gunned down his 22-year-old girlfriend in front of his mother and three-month-old child, and all he could think to do in the immediate aftermath is rush to thank his football coach and football employer. Belcher’s last moments on this earth weren’t spent thanking the mother who raised him or apologizing to the child he would orphan. His final words of gratitude and perhaps remorse were reserved for his football gods.

It should come as no surprise that Crennel, Chiefs players, Pioli, owner Clark Hunt and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell quickly agreed not to delay Sunday’s football congregation at Arrowhead Stadium.

Football is our God. Its exaggerated value in our society has never been more evident than Saturday morning in my adopted hometown. There’s just no way this game should be played.

Twenty-eight hours after witnessing one of his starting linebackers take his life, Crennel will stand on the sideline as young men play a violent game. Twenty-eight hours after one of their best friends killed the mother of his child and himself, Chiefs players will take the field and play a violent game.

Football is a game of emotion. Football is a game in which the coaches and players preach about treating each other as family.

How can they play Sunday? Why should they?

Belcher and his girlfriend didn’t die in a car accident 30 minutes away from Arrowhead Stadium. This isn’t some tragedy Crennel and Pioli heard about. Belcher crashed his car through the gates of the Chiefs practice facility. He pointed a gun to his head in front of Crennel and Pioli. He killed himself within a quarter of a mile of Arrowhead Stadium, where the players and coaches work.

I just don’t get it. And I’m not trying to vilify the Chiefs for choosing to play Sunday’s game. It shouldn’t be their decision. Roger Goodell should’ve made this call. Crennel, Pioli and Kansas City players are justifiably still in a state of shock.

I wholeheartedly agree, and if these were the sentiments Bob Costas chose to repeat on national TV Sunday night, then he wouldn't have evoked the ire of the emotive Right. But Costas didn't question the wisdom/sensibility/propriety of going ahead with a football game the day after one of the teams' star players killed his girlfriend in front of their child and then committed suicide in front of his coach and GM. Instead, he chose to quote or paraphrase the following lines from Whitlock's article:  

Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead.

In the coming days, Belcher’s actions will be analyzed through the lens of concussions and head injuries. Who knows? Maybe brain damage triggered his violent overreaction to a fight with his girlfriend. What I believe is, if he didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.

Costas made it clear that he shared Whitlock's view, telling the audience that, while he did "not always agree" with Whitlock, the columnist had "said it so well that we may as well just quote or paraphrase from the end of his article." 

Bob Costas’s little speech didn’t prevent me from enjoying finally watching my Cowboys win a game. Truth be told, I didn’t even watch it when it aired. Like most football fans, I spend halftime not watching whatever filler material networks come up with to fill time in between the second and third quarters. I only learned about what he had said Monday morning on the news. It seemed to be a hot topic, at least on cable news.

Now I'm getting sick of hearing about it. What Bob Costas did on Sunday night wasn't right, and it wasn't wrong. It was stupid. It was stupid because he chose to adopt as his own the opinions of a man who in other venues has called the NRA "the new KKK." It was stupid because Costas himself, like many anti-gun celebrities, benefits from the protection of armed guards. It was stupid because "our current gun culture" is not characterized by an increase in violent crime, at least not if you believe in statistics. 

I live in Texas. Actually, I live in Arlington, about four miles west of the stadium where Costas gave his little speech Sunday night. We have a right-to-carry law. Since the law was passed in 1996, our violent crime rate has dropped 20%, and the murder rate is down 31%. In 2010, there were actually 229 fewer murders, 748 fewer rapes and 9,011 fewer aggravated assaults than in 1996. (Our population increased by about 6 million, or 31%, in the same time span.) If handguns don't make us safer, then the knowledge that a murderer/rapist/robber's would-be prey might be packing surely has.

Finally, because Costas's controversial comments were, in his own words, prompted by a desire to get some "perspective" on this tragedy, here's another perspective on this hubbub by Whitlock's fellow Fox Sports columnist Jen Floyd Engel, with whom I do not always agree: 

This is not simply about guns. This is about rights. It is a slippery slope from doing something in the interest of public safety to giving up what we hold dear. The slope is greased with fear, with a self-righteous belief that we know better than the framers of the Constitution. And it is all based on informal fallacy.

The idea that if we just ban all guns then Kasandra Perkins doesn't die and a 3-month-old baby is not orphaned is the very essence of a stated premise that fails to support its proposed conclusion. Yes, guns are dangerous and people such as Belcher sometimes use them to do awful things. What I believe in my heart is Jovan Belcher was going to find a way to wreak havoc that day whether he had a gun or a knife or only his fists. And even the potential to stop him is not justification for willingly handing over rights guaranteed to us.

If this makes me a gun nut or a wing nut or a preachy PITA, then I'm OK with those labels. Although, I prefer Constitutionalist.

I prefer Doctor. (Seriously, I'm an M.D., but that's neither here nor there.) Whatever your take on this tragedy and guns in general, can we at least agree that there's better things for the media to fixate on right now? Oh well, if Bill O'Reilly would rather talk about this than the "War on Christmas," then so be it. I'll just watch CBS. (Their football coverage sometimes includes Lily Aldridge.) 

A Disturbing New Twist on the Bradley Effect

The defeat of Rep. Allen West (R., Fla.) means that, come January, the United States Congress will have just one black Republican member, Rep. Tim Scott of South Carolina. West's loss came as a surprise to a number of people, especially considering that every public poll of his race had shown the freshman congressman leading his Democratic opponent, Patrick Murphy. Yet, on Tuesday morning, it was West who conceded to Murphy after a two-week recount confirmed that the incumbent had fallen more than 2,000 votes short of winning a second term.

The race in West’s congressional district wasn't the only one where the outcome defied multiple polls: In Utah's newly-created 4th District, Rep. Jim Matheson, the lone Democrat in the Beehive State's congressional delegation, eked out a victory over Saratoga Springs Mayor Mia Love (R). Less than a week before Election Day, a Mason-Dixon poll showed the six-term incumbent trailing Love by an eye-popping twelve percentage points. About a month earlier, the Deseret News/KSL poll pegged Love's lead at six points, 49% to 43%, but that was a huge shift from their previous poll of the race, conducted in June, which had Matheson up by a healthy fifteen-point margin, 53% to 38%. Despite this apparent momentum toward Love and a huge voter turnout in a state that went for Mitt Romney by a wider margin than any other, Matheson managed to win with 49% of the vote to 48% for his Republican challenger.

The surprising losses of these two prominent black candidates--and the poll numbers that turned out to be so wrong--bring to mind the so-called "Bradley Effect," a phenomenon in which polls of races with one African-American candidate tend to overestimate his/her support or underestimate the support for his/her opponent, or both. The term arose out of another surprising election result, in the 1982 race for governor of California. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley (D) was poised to become the Golden State's first African-American governor. He went into Election Day with a healthy lead over his Republican opponent, then-Attorney General George Deukmejian, in all the polls. Even the exit poll results indicated a big Democratic win. Much to the Bradley campaign's chagrin, however, Deukmejian triumphed, winning the election by less than 100,000 votes out of nearly 8 million cast.

The following year, in the race for mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington, an African-American congressman from Illinois's 1st congressional district, defeated his caucasian opponent, former State Rep. Bernard Epton (R), by about 47,500 votes (less than four percentage points). Multiple polls conducted in the run-up to Election Day indicated it would be a rout for Washington. Three separate polls taken in the final weeks of the campaign showed Washington with a fourteen-point lead.

The obvious discrepancies between the pre-election polling and the actual results of these two high-profile races seemed to cry out for an explanation. Arguably, racial tensions between blacks and whites were stronger, or at least more overt, 30 years ago than they are today, so naturally race was floated as a possible factor in Bradley's loss and Washington's unexpectedly narrow win. (Veteran California pollster Mervin Field was quoted two days after the 1982 election as saying that "race was a factor in the Bradley loss.") While it was clear that these elections had turned out much differently than the polls had foretold, the notion that races between a black candidate and a white candidate presented a special problem for pollsters did not gain widespread acceptance until after a couple of elections with history-making black candidates at the end of the decade.

In 1989, a U.S. Attorney named Rudy Giuliani made his first run for mayor of New York City. Just before the election, two different polls showed him trailing his African-American opponent, Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, by double digits: Dinkins led Giuliani by fourteen points in the ABC/New York Daily News tracking survey of the race, fifteen points according to Gallup, and by eighteen points in a poll conducted by the New York Observer. Even the exit polls overestimated Dinkins's eventual two-point margin of victory.

The more infamous race that year took place in Virginia. I'll let Scott Keeter and Nilanthi Samaranayake of the Pew Research Center explain:

Virginia Democrat and African American Douglas Wilder edged white Republican Marshall Coleman by less than one percentage point to become the nation's first elected black governor. But two of three polls conducted just days before the election showed Wilder leading by double-digits; a third poll had him 4 points ahead.

The exit poll results from the Virginia governor's race were particularly jarring; according to Pew, "an exit poll conducted on Election Day showed Wilder winning by 10 points, while accurately tallying the vote in the other two statewide races." This indicated that some voters must not have been honest with poll-takers. Keeter and Samaranayake noted that, unlike other exit polls that used an anonymous written ballot to collect voters' responses, "this one had interviewers asking voters face-to-face how they voted, a situation that might increase the pressure to provide a socially desirable response."

It didn't take long for major media outfits to trumpet explanations for why the polls in these two particular elections were so far off. Two days after Election Day, the New York Times ran an article about the "broad disparities" between the polls and election results in New York and Virginia: 

In Virginia, Mason-Dixon Opinion Research Inc. acknowledged making a fundamental error in the way it conducted its Election Day polling. Its workers stopped voters outside polling places and asked them face to face how they had voted, rather than following the more widely accepted practice of having them fill out ''secret ballots'' and drop them in a box. All the New York polls used this method.

Brad Coker, Mason-Dixon's president, said that in hindsight he thought some voters might have been reluctant to admit to a poll taker that they had not voted for the black candidate, L. Douglas Wilder. The organization's Election Day polls gave a 10-point lead to Mr. Wilder, the Democrat, and at least three television stations reported the figures right after the polls closed and declared Mr. Wilder the winner. Today it appears that Mr. Wilder did defeat J. Marshall Coleman, the Republican, but by only one quarter of a percentage point.

''I'm a big supporter of pre-election polls and exit polls,'' said Peter D. Hart, a leading Democratic poll taker here, ''but only for figuring out the dynamics of an election and not who is going to win. What bothers me about yesterday is that the exit polls are obscuring the news, setting up incorrect expectations and leaving everyone talking about 'Oops, what happened?' rather than the historic story of the elections of Wilder and Dinkins.''

Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato was even more blatant in his analysis. ''Whites tell pollsters ahead of time that they are voting for the black candidate,'' he said, ''and then they go into the voting booth and can't quite pull down that lever.'' And, a Richmond Times-Dispatch article that ran the same day quoted Coker as saying, "Virginians were put on the spot: If we don't vote for Wilder, [then] we're going to be perceived of as racist." Whatever the reason was, the gap between poll results and election results in races between a black candidate and a white candidate was becoming a recurring problem.

For Wilder, it wasn't the first time his poll numbers had foretold a different election result. In 1985, he was elected lieutenant governor by three precentage points, but pre-election polls had pegged his lead at anywhere from nine to 22 points. The same polls were much more accurate with regard to the governor's race that year. In part because Wilder's experiences provided stronger evidence (and more of it) that voters lied to pollsters about voting for the black candidate than did Tom Bradley's 1982 campaign, some individuals prefer the term "Wilder Effect" to "Bradley Effect". 

Whatever you call it, the concept that the effect was attributable to white voters who were reluctant to tell poll takers they were not voting for a black candidate gained steam following the '89 elections. In 1993, ahead of Mayor Dinkins's rematch wth Giuliani, the New York Times reported on a study by Larry Hugick, the director of political and media surveys at Princeton Survey Research Associates, who concluded that, in general elections that pitted a black Democrat against a white Republican, polls consistently overestimated the black candidate's strength. Said the Times:

[Mr. Hugick] concluded that white Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent voters were more likely than blacks to be undecided, torn between their allegiance to political party and to race. These ambivalent voters told interviewers conducting polls that they were undecided, but overwhelmingly supported the white candidate in the voting booth.

Mr. Hugick speculated that some of these voters were genuinely undecided, while others were reluctant to admit they were voting against a black Democrat, perhaps worried they would be perceived as racially biased.

"To some extent, these voters are torn between party and doubts about the ability of black candidates to do a good job," he said. "It's racial stereotyping. It's a way race affects us in this country. We've understood racial intolerance is highly unacceptable, but that doesn't mean that people have internalized tolerance."

After Giuliani defeated Dinkins in another close race, Hugick sent out a memo to his clients and friends, detailing his findings and asserting that the 1993 New York mayoral election "again demonstrated that late polls in biracial general elections overstate the black candidate's vote-getting ability." Following that election, however, the Wilder/Bradley effect appeared to be waning. African-American candidates who waged multiple campaigns provided a good "control" group with which to examine whether the Bradley/Wilder effect still occurred. Polls showed Mayor Dinkins's 1993 rematch with Giuliani, for example, to be a real dead heat. Giuliani, of course, won the race by a margin comparable to Dinkins's narrow 1989 victory.

In 1990, former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, an African-American Democrat, challenged longtime Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC). Two of three independent polls conducted just before the election showed Gantt leading Helms, but none showed the controversial  senator with a lead of six percentage points, his eventual margin of victory. Six years later, when Helms again fended off a challenge from Gantt, the polls were much more accurate; the incumbent's 53%-46% win was consistent with polling that gave him a modest lead.

Similarly, when Carol Moseley Braun became the first (and, to date, only) African-American woman elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992, the election results were much closer than polls had suggested. Braun defeated Republican Richard Williamson by a ten-point margin, but polls taken just days before the election showed her with a lead ranging from 17 to 20 points. (Notably, all of these polls pegged Braun's level of support at less than the 53% of the vote she ultimately received, so it's certainly possible that everyone who claimed to be voting for Braun did actually vote for her, but if these polls were accurate, then it would mean that Williamson won nearly all of the late deciders.) Six years later, Braun lost her bid for re-election by less than 100,000 votes, or three percentage points, to Peter Fitzgerald, a wealthy state senator from the Chicago suburbs. It could have been a lot worse; pre-election polls gave Fitzgerald a lead of three to ten points. A strong turnout among Illinois's black voters may have boosted Braun.
 
The cases of Gantt and Braun suggest that, to the extent that polls significantly overstate a black candidate's support and/or undertell his/her white opponent's strength in the black candidate's first run for statewide office, this phenomenon does not repeat itself when the same black politician runs again for the same office. Tom Bradley himself got creamed by Deukmejian in their 1986 rematch, but at least the mayor wasn't misled by poll numbers that showed him to be ahead. Prior to the election, all public polls had Bradley trailing the incumbent by double digits. Though Deukmejian won re-election by a larger margin than the polls indicated he would, none greatly overtold Bradley's level of support.
 
The paucity of competitive general-election match-ups between a white candidate and a black candidate in 2000, 2002 and 2004 made it difficult to gauge whether the Bradley effect was still waning. There was the race for governor of  New York in 2002, in which incumbent Gov. George E. Pataki (R) crushed his opponents to win a third term. Pataki won 48%, finishing well ahead of the state's African-American Comptroller, H. Carl McCall (D), who took 32%, and a slew of other candidates who weren't black. Pataki had led McCall by eleven points in a survey taken in late September. 

In 2004, two members of the U.S. House of Representatives from the Atlanta area squared off against each other for the Senate seat being vacated by Georgia Democrat Zell Miller. Rep. Johnny Isakson, a white Republican, defeated Rep. Denise Majette, an African-American Democrat, winning 58% of the vote to Majette's 40%. The weekend before the election, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the results of a poll that had Isakson leading Majette by thirteen points, 49% to 36%. 
  
Then came 2008. There wasn't a single black candidate, Republican or Democrat, in a highly competitive gubernatorial or senatorial contest that year, but the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama revived talk about the Bradley/Wilder effect. Other than Obama's surprise loss to then-Sen. Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, however, there were no conspicuous gaps between Obama's poll numbers and share of the vote he actually received in the 2008 Democratic primaries. In the general election, Obama experienced a fate similar to that of Washington, Wilder and Dinkins: he won, but some polls overtold hs eventual margin of victory. A lot of polls underestimated voter support for the Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, both nationally and at the state level, but very few overestimated Obama's support. This could simply have meant that late deciders broke for McCain. Whether that's true or not, there was not a single battleground state in which all the polls were way off. Obama did not experience the Wilder effect in November.

Even before the 2008 election, there was a growing consensus among analysts who examined the data that the Wilder effect was a thing of the past. Daniel J. Hopkins, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, conducted the most extensive study and analysis I've seen of the phenomenon and concluded that "there was indeed a Wilder effect" in elections during the 1980s and early 1990s but that "this effect subsequently disappeared."

To what, then, should we attribute the salient discrepancy between the poll and election results in Utah and Florida this year? Regardless of the cause(s), this much is clear: The Wilder Effect still exists, but with a twist; the effect seems to only manifest itself in races between a black Republican and a white Democrat.

I first noticed this correlation between the presence/absence of a Bradley/Wilder effect and the political affiliations of the candidates in 2006. That year saw more competitive races for statewide office between a black candidate and a white candidate than any other election cycle I can remember. The U.S. Senate races in Tennessee and Maryland provided data for a good comparative analysis. Both featured a charismatic, energetic black politician vying against an older, duller white politician for an open U.S. Senate seat. (In Mississippi, State Rep. Erik R. Fleming, a black Democrat, challenged Sen. Trent Lott, a white Republican, for his Senate seat, but that race was not considered competitive, and Lott won re-election by a decisive margin.) 

In Tennessee, Democrats nominated Harold Ford, Jr., a five-term congressman from Memphis, to run for the seat of then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R), who was retiring. Ford and his Republican opponent, former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, traded the lead in the polls back and forth until October, when Corker appeared to be pulling away. Heading into Election Day, independent polls put Corker's lead at anywhere from three to twelve points. The only public polls that showed Ford leading were conducted by partisan Democratic pollsters. Corker did end up winning, but only by about 50,000 votes (less than three percentage points). There had been no Wilder effect in the Tennessee Senate race.

In Maryland, it was a different story. Perhaps no U.S. Senate candidate in 2006 garnered as much enthusiasm as Michael Steele. Four years after becoming Maryland's first African-American lieutenant governor, Steele appeared to be on the verge of beating the odds to win a U.S. Senate seat in a state where 55% of voters were registered Democrats. He had fought the Democratic candidate, ten-term Rep. Ben Cardin, to a draw in the polls. There was even talk of a "Reverse Wilder Effect" in the race.

“With Steele sporting a 7-point lead among white voters,” pondered RealClearPolitics’s John McIntyre just days before the election, “what happens to Cardin's lead if Steele's 12% of the black vote goes to 20% or 25%?” We found out: Steele managed to take 25% of the black vote, according to exit polls, but lost to Cardin by a 54%-44% margin.  

Having followed the 2004 elections as closely as I did, I knew how pollsters could sometimes get it wrong (This was before I looked into the history of the "Bradley Effect" and discovered just how wrong.), but the results of the Maryland Senate race had left a particularly bad taste in my mouth because (1) I had gotten my hopes up, based on what appeared to be momentum towards Steele in the final weeks of the campaign, and (2) I couldn't find another comparably high-profile race that cycle in which so many polls had been so far off.

I should mention that, in the three 2006 gubernatorial contests between a black candidate and a white candidate, there was no such disparity between the polls and the outcome. In Ohio, Republican Ken Blackwell, an African-American who had served as mayor of Cincinnati, state Treasurer and Ohio Secretary of State, lost in a rout to Ted Strickland, a white Democratic congressman from Lucasville. Strickland's 900,000-vote margin of victory accorded with polls that put him ahead of Blackwell by about 20 points. Next door, in Pennsylvania, Gov. Ed Rendell (D) held off a challenge from businessman and former Pittsburgh Steelers Wide Receiver Lynn Swann (R) to win a second term. Swann actually outperformed his standing in most polls, winning 40% of the vote to Rendell's 60%.

In Massachusetts, Deval Patrick (D) was elected the Bay State's first black governor by a 56%-35% margin. Some polls had shown him leading his opponent, Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey (R) by more, but every poll of the race had understated Healey's support. Thus, much like the 2008 presidential election, it appears that most undecided voters in the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania gubernatorial races ended up supporting the Republican. Race made no difference.

In light of this data, I was inclined to write off Steele's discouraging loss as a fluke. Then, in 2010, I was again bemused by the results of an election that did not comport with the polling. This time, it was in Colorado. Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D), an aging, white pol from Golden, faced a tough challenge from Aurora City Councilman Ryan Frazier (R), an ebullient young African-American. Things seemed to be going Frazier's way: the left leaning Denver Post endorsed him, and a desperate-looking Perlmutter actually smacked him at a debate in October. Even more encouraging, the only public poll of the race showed Frazier leading Perlmutter, 40%-39%. While a one-point lead is no cause for ecstasy, an incumbent polling at 39% is generally not considered to be in good shape. So you can imagine how disappointed I was to learn that Perlmutter won re-election. It wasn't even close; the incumbent won by nearly 25,000 votes, taking 53% of the vote to Frazier's 42%. Ouch.

Now, the losses of Love and West, belied by multiple polls, add to this pattern of black Republicans who lost elections despite poll results that showed them tied or leading their white Democratic opponents. What could explain this 21st-century version of the Wilder Effect? Are large numbers of white voters reluctant to unequivocally declare their support for a black candidate's opponent? If so, then why did Ford, Blackwell, Swann, Patrick and Obama not experience the Wilder effect? It's certainly possible that the polls in Utah and Florida, like many other polls this cycle, underestimated Democratic turnout and/or overestimated Republican turnout, but then what accounts for the unexpectedly lopsided defeats of Frazier and Steele? I will not endeavor to answer these questions in this post; my only point is that the Bradley/Wilder effect still occurs but (for whatever reason) only in races between a white Democrat and a black Republican. (Take note, Herman Cain.)

Will Obama's Machine Save Him?

Let's start out by acknowledging the obvious: History is not on President Obama's side this election year. No incumbent president in the postwar era has won reelection when the unemployment rate was above 7.2%; right now, it's 8.1% and unlikely to change very much between now and Election Day. Every president since Andrew Jackson who has won re-election has been re-elected with a greater percentage of the popular vote than he received four years earlier; no serious, intelligent person in either camp believes Obama will do better this year than the 53% he pulled in 2008. He is the first U.S. president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs. A majority of voters do not like his signature legislative achievement and want it repealed. An even larger majority thinks the country is on the wrong track. This is not an atmosphere conducive to getting re-elected.

Yet, Obama appears to be flying high. In every swing state, there's at least one poll showing him ahead of Mitt Romney. His approval rating is now slightly higher than his disapproval, depending on which poll you look at. As of the writing of this post, he's ahead in all the national polls. The percentage of voters who view him favorably has inched upward, while his negatives are slightly down. With a month and a half to go before Election Day, Romney is behind, and the president looks like he's about to close the deal.

Part of the blame for this surely lies with the Romney campaign. I know it's easy to second-guess when you're not in the heat of battle, but the Romney-Ryan campaign is clearly not waging as good a fight as they could be. (I've done my part to offer better ideas, but to no avail.) There's also the mass stupidity/gullibility of broad swaths of the electorate; a recent poll by Reason Magazine revealed how disturbingly uninformed/ignorant most voters in this country are when it comes to fiscal issues and an even basic understanding of the economy. These problems, however, would only explain why Romney isn't beating Obama. To see why the president is actually ahead in this race, you have to look beyond the lay of the land and examine the depths of what may be the greatest political machine in U.S. history.

Obama and the Democrats' ground game helped generate a historic Democratic turnout in 2008. While it remains to be seen how effective their voter turnout efforts will be in this election, they certainly didn't do much for them in 2010. Even beyond that, however, the Obama campaign is being aided by a machine that exceeds in size and scope anything Republicans have or have ever enjoyed.

You're probably familiar with the historical components of the national Democratic machine. Aside from the party operatives, there are labor unions and the pillars of their fundraising apparatus: trial lawyers, Wall Street, the Entertainment Industry and, more recently, Internet tycoons (Silicon Valley and Puget Sound). Today, however, President Obama is benefitting not just from these traditional support structures but also a network of forces devoted to keeping him in power. Here now is a rundown of these forces and a brief description of how they are helping to buoy this terrible president's poll numbers:

The Media

With the exception of talk radio, every medium in this country is dominated by the Left, and few would disargee that the right-wing rhetoric that pervades talk radio is limited to the commentary side. When it comes to delivering "hard" news, conservatives have no advantage over liberals on the airwaves, the Internet or in the print media.

Overt, delibrate bias in the press--i.e., among reporters who are supposed to cover stories in an objective fashion and not inject their own personal analysis into their reporting--is hard to spot, but there have been several clear examples in this election cycle (such as when Andrea Mitchell got caught running a misleadingly edited clip of Mitt Romney speaking in Pennsylvania on MSNBC). The more dangerous biases manifest themselves in the way journalists present the news or in the choices they make about which stories to report on and how much attention to give each one. Conclusive proof of these biases, however, is difficult to produce, unless you can get an apples-to-apples comparison of two nearly identical news stories with different political implications. We got such an example last week, when two old recordings surfaced; one showed Mitt Romney speaking at a fundraiser back in May about, inter alia, the growing culture of entitlement in America, the ongoing conflict between the Israelis and Palistenians, and the Republican party's challenges with the Latino vote. (This footage had actually been public for months, but the cleaned-up images were only recently released.) The other footage featured Barack Obama speaking at Loyola University in 1998 about how he "believe[s] in redistribution" and how government policies can effect redistribution of resources. According to the Media Research Center, from Tuesday evening (September 18) through Thursday morning (September 20), the big three networks combined spent over an hour covering the Romney footage while devoting less than six and a half minutes to the Obama tape. Romney's comments were also the lead topic of discussion in the A-blocks of Meet the Press and This Week w/ George Stephanopolous on Sunday.

It gets worse. After initially claiming to have released the full tape of Romney speaking at the fundraiser, the saboteurs who put this video out there admitted that they hadn't actually released everything they had recorded. Then, David Corn of Mother Jones, who obtained the raw footage of Romney from James Carter IV (grandson of former Pres. Jimmy Carter), acknowledged that they didn't even have a complete recording of everything the candidate said at the fundraiser. In other words, we do not know and we may never know the full context of what Governor Romney said at that fundraiser. The only tenable argument of why this doesn't render everything Romney is on tape saying meaningless (or at least not newsworthy) is that no context could possibly mitigate what he said, but as President Obama himself has averred, the out-of-context defense is not amenable to such an exception.

The more disgusting aspect of this egregious display of bias is that the network news devoted more time in the same time period to covering this Romney story than the deadly violence in the Middle East or the administration's constantly-changing narrative about the genesis of the attacks on our embassy in Cairo and the counsulate in Benghazi. To that point, on Thursday, September 13th, the New York Times ran with the headline "ENVOY DIES IN LIBYA ATTACK ON EMBASSY; A FLASH POINT FOR OBAMA AND ROMNEY". Nothing wrong with that, but in the story below, under the headline "A Challenger’s Criticism Is Furiously Returned," Times reporters Peter Baker and Ashley Parker offered the following account of the two candidates' reactions to the tragic news out of Libya:

While President Obama dealt with the killings of an ambassador and three other Americans and deflected questions about his handling of the Arab world, Mitt Romney, the Republican seeking his job, wasted little time going on the attack, accusing the president of apologizing for American values and appeasing Islamic extremists.

No mention of the president's decision to skip his intelligence briefing and head to Las Vegas for a fundraiser in the wake of what we now know was a terrorist attack. Query whether his predecessor would have gotten the same treatment had he done the same. (I can't remember; did the Times run that photo of President Bush aboard Air Force One flying over New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit?) In fairness, the article did mention President Obama's transparently political (and, in my opinion, disgracefully petty and unbecoming of the office of president) charge that Mitt Romney has "a tendency to shoot first and aim later," though Baker and Parker characterized the comment in a much more charitable fashion. (So, to recap, Mitt Romney criticizes the U.S. Embassy in Cairo for apologizing for a movie in their official statement to an attack, while the president of the United States takes a cheap shot at his challenger, using tougher language against him than he did against the terrorists who attacked us. Same thing, I guess.)

There is also the issue of media organizations using facially nonpartisan means to influence voters. Take polling, for example. In recent years, many networks and media have started commissioning thir own polls instead of relying on those done by professional pollsters, like they've historically done. This does not evince any sort of bias per se, but consider this question from a recent Bloomberg poll:

Gov. Mitt Romney has told donors that 47 percent of Americans think of themselves as "victims" who are dependent on government programs. Which best describes your reaction? (Read list. Rotate.)

41 He’s right and more people should be able to make it on their own

51 He’s wrong and most Americans work hard and sometimes need some help from the government

8 Not sure

This is what's known as a "push poll" question, one designed to "push" a political narrative, rather than collect data in an objective fashion. You might expect this from Democratic operatives masquerading as pollsters, but it has no place in a professional survey conducted for a news organization that plans to report it as news.

Special Interest Groups

Newspapers and TV Networks aren't the only once-independent entities that have long since sacrificed their objectivity for partisan endeavors. This election cycle, Obama and Democrats have benefitted from overtly partisan activities by organizations that are supposed to be apolitical. The fraternity between the American Left and, e.g., the AARP, NOW and the NAACP is no longer clandestine, but the serious problem Republicans have as yet been unable to solve is that a lot of voters--viz., the constituencies these groups purport to represent--still see these organizations as trustworthy, independent sources of information; even worse, they've fallen into the same trap that so many union members have--believing that the charlatans running these organizations have their best interests at heart.

Obama and his campaign have recognized this phenomenon and are already capitalizing on it. One Obama campaign ad--laughably entitled "Facts"--quotes the AARP as saying that Obamacare "cracks down on Medicare waste, fraud, and abuse" and "strengthens guaranteed benefits in Medicare." (For the record, AARP blessed Obamacare with its stamp of approval; this Obama ad might have some semblance of credibility if it cited to a source that had no motive to lie about the subject.) The ad also quotes the AARP as saying that Paul Ryan's Path to Prosperity "would undermine the market power of Medicare and could lead to higher costs for seniors." (There's that word "could" again!)

Some of these groups have their own political arms that cut out the middle man by simply disseminating their propaganda themselves. Planned Parenthood's PAC (Political Action Committee) has been on the airwaves in key swing states for months. This ad, which cuts a clip of Romney speaking out of context to deceive viewers into thinking the candidate aims to "get rid of" Planned Parenthood, is airing in Ohio and Virginia.

To his credit, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have tried to break through the force fields of deception these institutions have erected and maintained around their target audiences; Romney spoke at the NAACP convention last month, and Ryan addressed the AARP last week. Both got booed when they talked about repealing Obamacare, which polls continue to show is wildly unpopular with the electorate at large. These perhaps-futile efforts to appeal to the hopelessly indoctrinated exemplify the challenge faced by the Republican ticket in combatting these groups: Ignorance can be cured by knowledge, but when voters have been instilled with  misinformation that they adamantly believe is correct, confronting them with the truth just elicits a negative reaction.

The Late-Night Jesters

While Americans may be turned off by politicians and politics in general, we love our political satire, and even though most of the comics who grace our screens at night lean left politically, their humor has historically transcended partisan divides. About eight years ago, however, once the staggering popularity then-President Bush had enjoyed throughout much of his first term had subsided, the jokes made at his expense on The Late Show, Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show w/ Jon Stewart and the like took a nasty turn. Comedians--and their writers--forsook humor for haranguing. Clever satire gave way to odious vitriol. An increasingly obvious stream of hate had infected their once-witty material.

Still, there's a role for humorists to play in humbling our most powerful leaders, but what happens when a man you yourself have placed on a pedestal ascends to the presidency? Can you find it in you to mock, ridicule and deride the man you hold in such high regard with the same vigor you've exhibited in lampooning his predecessors? We got our answer to that over the past three and a half years, as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, David Letterman and the writers of SNL have handled President Obama with kid gloves; an objective, unbiased observer would easily conclude that they've actually been harder on his opposition. Consequently, when the president deigns to appear on their shows, he can expect a warm reception. (Actually, that's an understatement; what he can expect is the PG-13 equivalent of fellatio.)

After the president's aforementioned fundraiser in Las Vegas, he took time out from his busy schedule to honor The Late Show with his presence. (I'll not fault him for not rescheduling; it's not like the U.S. had just suffered another terrorist attack or anything.) Letterman predictably served up softball questions and even referenced Mitt Romney's comments from that edited fundraiser video, asking the president, "Is that what rich guys at country clubs are talking about?" (The president was allowed to give a three-minute, uninterrupted answer to this question.)

Similarly, when SNL kicked off its latest series of Weekend Update: Thursday Edition on September 20th, the first four jokes Seth Myers told were at Mitt Romney's expense; he even found a way to work in some baseless, racially-charged smear about Mitt Romney. So much of this is to be expected, but is it really so much to ask that Myers stick to making light of actual news items that have some basis in reality instead of repeating unsubstantiated rumors that are clearly designed only to malign a good man? Why couldn't he have made a joke about the scum who started or spread this slanderous lie instead of perpetuating it?

If any of this sounds like the complaints of a pessimistic Romney supporter, then I assure you that was not my purpose in writing this article. I'm simply trying to describe, by way of example, how this incomparable political machine Obama has working for him is aiding his efforts to win re-election. I think one more example of this late-night stumping for Obama is appropriate. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert seemed all too eager to make hay of the edited Romney video once its existence became widely known, but like most of the media, they treated the doctored footage of Romney noticeably differently than the tape of Obama speaking at Loyola. Stewart actually devoted two-thirds of his program on Tuesday, September 18, to material on Romney's surrepitiously-recorded remarks, but it wasn't all humor. A merciless diatribe knocking Romney for "talking to donors in a manner you would imagine cartoon rich people talk about cartoon poorer people" (which included the tasteless use of Romney's late parents against him) turned into a vituperative rant against the nominee. I'll spare you a recitation of Stewart's invective, but suffice it to say that his tone would be more appropriate, for say, an impassioned critique of the president's inexcusable reaction to the terrorist attack on our consulate in Libya. No mention of that, nor of Obama's "redistribution" comments, and the following night, when The Daily Show finally got around to addressing the Obama tape, the target of their derision was not the president but rather, FOX News. That's right, instead of lampooning Obama's remarks with anything close to the level of fervor he displayed in lambasting Romney, Stewart and his writers found a way to make FOX News, which they dubbed "Bullshit Mountain," the story. Imagine how they would have reacted had President Bush been the one shirking the duties and responsibilities of his office while his foreign policy was going up in flames (literally).

It's critical for the future of this country that Mitt Romney defeat Barack Obama this election cycle. That's not to say electing Romney and Ryan will fix everything; Obama and the Democrats have done a lot of damage over the last 44 months, some of which can't be quickly undone. (Heck, we haven't even undone all the damage done by FDR's New Deal.) I'll not pass judgment on whether the preceding list of individuals and groups supporting him are trying to hasten Americans decline or genuinely unaware of the consequences of their actions, not without clear and convincing evidence for or against either possibility. What there can be no doubt of is that Romney, Ryan and those of us who support their cause are up against a machine of unrivaled (in this country) proportions. In less than 40 days, we'll know whether we can rival its power.