Issues, Ideology, Gender and Race in the 2008 Election

Transcript

TOM MANN: But we now know that after the most recent and dramatic economic developments and the four debates, three presidential and once vice presidential, the campaign narrative seems to be reinforcing the election fundamentals rather than diverting from those fundamentals. So a natural question to ask is, could that change in the remaining days of the campaign? Might, for example, some issue come to the surface in ways that would work to the advantage of John McCain, will Joe the plumber, who’s now become the symbol in McCain’s eyes of a classic middle class citizen striving to better himself, or will the reaction be like me, who had Bernie the plumber over at his house yesterday and faced a bill of $300 for one hour of work, will this be something different?

In any case, the question really is, is there a chance that taxes returns and becomes a focus of the campaign? There’s questions about ideology. The National Journal report on voting over this last session of Congress ranking Obama as the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate has certainly got a fair amount of attention, as well as rebuttal from others who believe that ranking itself is flawed, but the emphasis on bill errs, on radicals, on domestic terrorists, might this conjure up an image of a candidate too extreme?

We’ll also talk about candidate traits a bit, from temperament to empathy, and ask whether there’s any chance of that altering the course of the campaign in the remaining 17 days. We will look at gender of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin and ask the question of how that might play out. And finally, I suppose the most visible element on our agenda today is race. We have had literally scores of news reports and the print and broadcast media about the potential effects of race, as identity, as racial resentment, lots of uncertainty about how one projects the net effects of race as an issue, because there are obviously positive and negative forces operating, and perhaps the element that’s got the most attention is, to what extent are those racial effects visible now in the polls, and to what extent might they be invisible and not show up until election day, the so called Bradley Effect.There’s a huge body of scholarship on these questions, but some remaining differences, disagreements, and certainly uncertainty, because the reality is that we’ve never had a minority presidential candidate, and so we’re making inferences from candidates running state-wide and in congressional districts under very different conditions. It’s tough to make inferences, but we’re going to do the best we can to tell you what we know and what we don’t know.

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