ShoutyBear: Politics. Foreign Affairs. Zarf.

Here’s one reason to be grateful for the Wall Street apocalypse: If not for this story, we’d all be forced to contend with the AP-Yahoo News poll on racial attitudes released on Saturday.

According to Wonkette’s awesome deconstruction of the AP writeup, Politico’s lede was this: “In a report sure to spark a national conversation on race, an AP-Yahoo News study reported Saturday morning that white prejudice could be a significant enough factor to sunder Barack Obama’s bid to be the first black president of the United States.”

Spark? Haven’t we been talking about this for, like, a million years already?

Said a Stanford political scientist to AP, “There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean there’s only a few bigots.” You don’t say. This is what media talking heads have been trying to SOS to the public by blinking their peepers in Morse code: When we say Barack Obama “transcends” race, we really mean he escapes the negative associations white Americans have about black Americans. Like “complaining” (29 percent). And “violent” (20 percent). And “lazy” (13 percent).

Middle class, less educated whites have been seen as Obama’s Achilles heel this election, mainly because of how soundly Hillary Clinton whupped him among those voters during the primary campaign (by 57 points in Ohio, eg). But a vote for her wasn’t necessarily a vote against him — results were often partly attributable to voters’ greater familiarity with her and the One Of Us factor, which still unbelievably holds despite overwhelming disapproval of President Bush.

Because the media and consequently many Americans don’t assign those negative views about blacks to Obama, even whites who admit to holding negative views about blacks make an exception for him. According to the poll, a third of white Democrats associated a negative adjective to blacks, yet 58 percent of that bloc said they planned to vote for Obama.

“Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama’s support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice,” the AP observes. Well, duh. This poll doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, begging the question of why anyone would need it to begin with. It might feed into a sense of buyer’s remorse some Democrats have about their nominee, but what’s the lesson there? That the parties should wait until there’s a more negligible percentage of racial bias before fronting a nominee of color?

The reality of politics is that many voters, especially the coveted undecideds, vote for candidates based on favorable associations rather than policy specifics. Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager, was probably right when he said “this election is not about issues” and is instead “about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” McCain’s camp is betting that observation is true (literally, in the case of their veep pick) because McCain has no shot otherwise. One Of Us-ness is a problem for both McCain and Obama, but in a race that will be won on the backs of white undecideds is probably worse for Obama.

Unless he starts hitting his opponent harder on that “composite view” (age, Sarah Palin’s vacuity, enormous wealth, rampant lying), Obama risks allowing the election to turn on something he doesn’t have much control over: image. He’s tried to do the working-class thing, like his awful bowling in Pennsylvania, and it just doesn’t work. He has trouble regurgitating sound bites because it’s not where he lives; meanwhile, his opponents are riding a bubble built on them (“shake things up,” etc.) He still feels the need to tell Americans that he loves his country, which only reminds them of suspicions that he really doesn’t. His absence of temper feeds the impression that he couldn’t care less if he wins so long as he gets to wake up every morning and kiss his pretty reflection.

Maureen Dowd’s Sunday column was libtard-condescending as usual but there was a very good point in it: Obama needs take back control of the conversation. There isn’t much he can do about white Americans’ racial biases. But as that poll hinted, non-racial associations may be the bigger problem. That’s something he can control, and he’d better get on it soon.

The AP-Yahoo survey methodology is based on the Implicit Association Test, a newish frontier in polling. According to the University of Washington-based researchers, nearly 80 percent of whites and 30 percent of blacks have more favorable impressions of whites. (Even blacks are racists — someone alert AP.) NPR’s “On The Media” interviewed the IAT’s creator, pysch prof Anthony Greenwald, in late August. (Listen here.) To find out how much of a racist you are, take the IAT here. The results will not be what you expected.