The unpolled anxiety of the liberals

Bob Herbert has his usual angst about whether racist will prevent the election of the most liberal candidate for President in history. He interviews those who discount the so called Bradley effect and seems to accept their rationale. Then hes says:

...

A potential pitfall for Mr. Obama is the danger that voters who have not expressed a preference to pollsters end up voting heavily for John McCain. Those voters could shift the balance in potential swing states, especially those states where Mr. Obama is ahead but is not polling above 50 percent.

There is some evidence that lower-educated, less affluent white voters — a group that tends to favor Senator McCain — may be somewhat more reluctant than other groups to respond to pollsters.

The Bradley effect may not be real, but race in this election looms large. The question that will be answered Tuesday is whether a bad economy looms even larger.

For Herbert race does seem to loom large. He appears to assume that lower educated whites are racist which in itself seems racist to me. Lower educated white probably have much more important issues on their mind like taxes, energy and national security and many of them find Obama weak on those issues.

But in reaching this assessment to begin with it takes liberal arrogance on the part of people like Herbert. There is this assumption that if you were really smart you would vote for liberals. But that cannot be true. Otherwise why would ACORN be working so hard to get homeless people to vote for Obama? If it were about being smart why would anyone vote for Barbara Boxer or Patty Murray? For that matter why would any intelligent person vote for Joe Biden, who is the biggest dufus in this race?

The fact is there are plenty of reasons to vote against Obama that have nothing to do with his race and Herbert makes a mistake to ignore the concerns of those who disagree with him and Obama on those issues.