Black man vs. white woman

Over at the Boston Globe Ideas Section, Drake Bennett writes:

"It would be a gross oversimplification to reduce the Democratic race to the white woman versus the black man. Factors like Obama's eloquence and inexperience and Clinton's policy mastery and her association with the ambivalent legacy of her husband have played a larger role in how the race has been talked about. And indeed, this presidential contest can be seen as the country's attempt to lurch beyond a blinkered, monolithic identity politics.

But in a campaign in which it's hard to find many substantive policy differences between the leading Democratic contenders, it's notable how well the psychological research on bias predicts the race we've seen so far."

The piece explains that psychological research has discovered gender prejudice to be somewhat stickier than racial prejudice. (Full disclosure, Drake is a friend of mine.) However, to me the most interesting point is the one from above. Superficial considerations are given greater play when there are few profound, political questions raised by a campaign. The campaign is already an invitation to obsess about symbolism, personality, character, rather than program and substance. It would not actually be that surprising is some kind of superficial, gender mediated prejudices end being the determining factor. Although, even here, one has doubts that it really is a contest between prejudices. After all, if psychological race v. gender studies 'predict' the current voting outcomes, this prediction is just a correlation. It is more likely to me that this correlation is spurious. If confuses the accidental fact that the boring, establishment candidate is a white woman woman and that the more exciting, charismatic anti-establishment Democrat is black man, with the actual reasons for Obama's (very small) lead. As they tell in the first day of stats class, correlation is not causation.