Health Care BS

Not long ago, Shadowfax took issue with my use of the term “faux-progressive.” In response, I explained that I use the term to designate people who pose as progressives but spend most of their time defending the status quo. The New Hampshire primary has provided a textbook example of this phenomenon.

Before Tuesday,  most major polls showed that Barack Obama would easily beat Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary. Granite State Democrats kept telling the pollsters they were going to pull the lever for Obama, but many of these people cast their actual votes for the whitebread, establishment candidate. 

This sort of thing has happened in so many elections that it has been dubbed the “Bradley Effect.” A classic instance of the Bradley Effect was the 1988 Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin, where a huge number of Democrats told pollsters they supported Jesse Jackson but actually voted for Michael Dukakis.

This is why I worry more about HillaryCare than I do about Obama’s health care plan. In the end, no matter how often they pose as open-minded, forward thinking citizens of the world, whitebread faux-progressives will vote for one of their own.

UPDATE:

Apparently, I’m not the only one who believes the Bradley Effect may have been at work in New Hampshire. Andrew Sullivan offers these comments:

Tonight is the first primary - not a caucus. People get to vote in a secret ballot - not in front of their largely liberal peers, as in Iowa. They may have told the pollsters one thing about voting for a black man, but in the privacy of the voting booth, something else happens.

And PoliPundit has an interesting take on how a species of Bradley Effect may affect Hillary in the general election:

Imagine if Hillary does well in the general election polls all year long, and then gets crushed on election day, as hordes of voters - in the privacy of the voting booth - decide not to entrust the nuclear football to a woman.

Knowing that the positions of faux-progressives are heavily dependent on social desirability bias, I think this may well be how it turns out.

UPDATE DEUX:

In faux-progressive lore, the Bradley Effect is an artifact of conservatism. Thus, denizens of the blogosphere are striving heroically to discount its effect on yesterday’s Clinton victory. Here’s a good example from Steve Benen:

African-American candidates underperform against their poll numbers, because of what some have labeled the “Bradley Effect” … This strikes me as an unlikely explanation for Clinton’s victory.

And Jeff Fecke does his best to explain it away:

One can cite the ”Bradley Effect,” and that was perhaps part of the answer. But not all of it, nor even most of it. 

Both Benen and Fecke go on to posit implausible alternative explanations for which there is no suppporting eveidence. Nice try, guys, but this BS won’t cut it.