On Fri, 14 Nov 2008, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> Perhaps it's unfair, but after his Slate series on 'Black IQs', I'm
> inclined to think of him as a clever idiot.
I think that's exactly right. And it's not only the black IQ stuff; you should see his number crunching on abortion. I was going to put an explanatory headnote but it got too long :)
> I've been a Future Science Jesus my entire life and have convinced
> precisely one person of something using 'data'. Dorene's right:
> alliance building is key.
Esp here. In the larger blue coalition terms, there isn't much more you can ask of blacks when they are voting 96% for the Barack. And in the specific case of Proposition 8, it seems clearly to have been a failure of organization. The No forces didn't realize that huge amounts of Mormon money and organization were pouring into the campaign until they suddenly found out they were down and it was late in the game. And according to one article I read in the LAT, the outreach to the black community didn't start until 1 week before the end. The Mormons famously had targetted robocalls quoting Barack being against gay marriage. Clearly the No forces could have a counter message quoting him saying that he was for voting No, and that anyone who supported Barack should support him on this. And unlike the Republicans and Mormons, they wouldn't have been limited to robocalls to get their message out because the Dems have deep organizational roots in the black community.
So I think they clearly have done it if they'd realized early it mattered.
Leaving aside that Saletan's naive faith in the power of science is only matched by his ignorance of how it works (a common correlation) there was a kernel in the middle of his article that I found interesting that didn't seem to depend on that. But I'm now so abashed that I was too lazy to take the time to go back to his original sources at the National Black Justice Coalition and reconstruct the kernel without referencing Saletan that I'm just going to slink quietly away.
Michael