There has been a lot of talk about Barack Obama and poll results that show him with a significant lead over John McCain in this year’s presidential election campaign being comparable the Tom Bradley’s run for Governor of California in 1982. Tom Bradley was ahead in pre election polls and lost that election. Many people believe that the reason for the gap between the polls and the election result for Mr. Bradley was due to white voters saying they would vote for Bradley when responding to the questioning of pollsters and then changing their mind when voting privately. The sole basis for the comparison is the fact that both Mr. Obama and Mr. Bradley are black. This seems an overly simplistic basis for making a meaningful comparison. See political history table for context.
I think that the issue of the "Bradley effect" needs to be understood in a social historical context to evaluate what meaning this idea holds in the present point at which we stand in history. To me the tenor of the times seem much different today than how I remember them in 1982. I put together and reviewed a timeline of political history, war, civil and women’s rights, income tax rates, population racial makeup, and radio, TV, and PC household penetration. In a broad sense the modern political consciousness that our society is animating break down into three long cycles.
The first cycle is from 1929 to 1952 the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and the Korean War. This is the formative period that profoundly influenced my parents and was part of the political values and beliefs they passed to me.
The second cycle was the 1953 through 1973, characterized by the great accomplishments of the civil and women’s rights movement and the mistaken and divisive Viet Nam war. I was born in 1953 and much of my political awareness was formed through my experience of these years. I remember the teachers crying when they told us president Kennedy had been shot and then sending us home for the rest of the day because it seemed they didn’t know what else to do. I saw the police turn the hoses and the dogs on the black civil rights protesters, I felt disgusted, ashamed, and angry. Looking back now that was all in one year, 1963. I was 13 when the riots erupted in watts, 1966, my parents reassured me that that section of LA was some distance from our home in Pasadena and that we would probably be OK. It was still frightening to see it on TV. I remember being bussed to my first day of school across town and seeing black kids up close for the first time that was in 1966.
Then the year of two more assassinations I was older, 15, in 1968 when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were gunned down. What an awful year. I can’t even remember how it all felt. I remember the images I saw on T.V. they were shocking. There were also the images of the Viet Nam War on T.V. all the time. This was the year the draft lottery started and it would end up affecting everyone I knew. The war was getting on everyone’s nerves, particularly the young men who were now facing an involuntary tour if duty in a war no one wanted. Between 68 and 73 a lot of the older boys in my neighborhood went to Nam and either came back or didn’t. I was subject to the last draft lottery in 1973, I got a great number and breathed a huge sigh of relief. At the end of this period I think everyone was exhausted.
The third period is the Regan ascendancy characterized by big business dominance, white male backlash against the success of the civil and women’s rights movement, and the emergence of the environmental movement. When viewed in its political context the failure of Tom Bradley to win election and become the first black Governor of California occurred at the beginning of the Regan era and was related to a cyclical change U.S. political culture. The loss of prestige of white males during the preceding cycle of the civil and women’s right movement period set the stage for a reaction and it was lead by the Republican party. This was foreshadowed by the political strategy of Richard Nixon and brilliantly executed by Ronald Regan. The most obvious sign of this strategy is the fact that the two major pieces of civil rights legislation passed during this period were passed by Democratic congresses over the veto of Regan and George H.W. Bush. Entering this period. Bradley lost his first bid for the Governors office at the beginning of this period while the horrors, triumphs, and shift of social status were fresh in the general public memory. I can understand why some white voters might have felt uneasy saying to a pollster that they were not going to vote for Bradley, saying they would, but then voting for the white Republican instead out of a lingering feeling that they had been blamed for terrible institutional racism in which they played no part. I can’t imagine the same scenario in today’s cultural climate at the end of the Regan revolution and in a circumstance where the images of the 60’s civil rights movement and institutional racism are a distant memory, not something just lived through and still resonating in the public memory, as they were when Mr. Bradley first ran for Governor of California.
There are clear signs that the end of the Regan period is at hand. This period will be a moving away, as opposed to a moving into, the dynamics that shaped the Regan era and the fact that Obama is black will not be perceived the same way that Bradley’s blackness was and therefore it will not have the same effect. I imagine that the next cycle will be formed on the economic front by the failure of unbridled capitalism and the reality of the constraint imposed on the industrial revolution by global man made rapid climate change. On the social side of the equation the generation that did not live through the 1953 to 1973 social revolution grew up with all the rights acquired during those years but without a direct experience of them to react to. The Republican appeal to 60’s reactionary sentiment is very weak with this generation and is at the turning point where the numbers will keep working against this on a generational level.
It looks like we are at the end of a long socioeconomic period that began with the crash of 1929 and ended with FDR and slowly reversed through the mid 60’s when the 91% top tax rate established under FDR went to 70% under Johnson, then 50% in Regan’s first term, then down to it’s 35% low under G.W. Bush in 2003 in the same year he began the war in Iraq. I think the top tax rate is a good indicator of the relative power of the rich over the government and it is at a historic high that cannot be sustained forever in a democracy. What remains to be seen about this long cycle is how the constraint of the environment will effect the coming adjustment.
The shorter cycle of advancing civil rights is poised for a recovery as well but I think this cycle will be different. I think this cycle will be a human rights cycle based on respect for all people and our common interests. If this potential in us is unleashed through an Obama presidency and combined with our common need to survive our own effect on our environment we could be looking at a new kind of cycle leading us into a new age of political progress.
It is really time for something new and Obama is perfectly positioned at the pivot point to take advantage of it. We should stop worrying about the Bradley effect and focus on the positive actions that are part of a historical pivot that we can’t fully appreciate until we see it in our collective rear view mirror. The main worry should be voter suppression and it seems the Obama campaign is ready for that, so let’s all have some fun getting out the vote and being part of history.