Word: racing
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...voters may say one thing to pollsters and do another in the voting booth. Yet at this late stage of the campaign, after dozens of interviews across this toss-up state, evidence suggests that the issue that once seemed as if it would dominate this election - Obama's race - is not consuming the people who will actually decide...
Voters in the national poll were asked about that very issue, and overwhelmingly - by more than 9 to 1 - they said Obama's race won't be a factor in how they vote. Even among black voters, only 1 in 6 said they would take Obama's race into account. Still, the question hovers over the campaign. A controversial recent survey by the Associated Press pushed white participants to react to a list of negative racial stereotypes. One-third of them put credence in at least one of the unpleasant generalizations about blacks. After some complicated statistical legerdemain...
...TIME poll asked voters whether they "personally know anyone who is more likely" - or less likely - "to vote for Obama because of his race." Again, most people said no, but this time the margin was narrower. Forty-four percent said they knew someone who would be less likely to vote for Obama, while 38% said Obama's race would be a plus for someone they knew...
This is the antiriot line of reasoning: we should punish bias crimes more severely because those crimes "can reverberate" and cause riots. This argument was developed during the 1980s. At the time, many in the Northeast feared that race-based crimes would ignite their cities. In 1986, Michael Griffith, a 23-year-old New York City immigrant from Trinidad, was targeted by a white mob when he ended up in the wrong part of Brooklyn. He was struck by a car and killed as he tried to flee his attackers. Subsequently, a then obscure Baptist minister named Al Sharpton...
Under the current, limited hate-crimes laws, bias crimes have fallen. According to FBI figures, in 1995, there were 24 hate crimes based on race for every 1 million Americans; in 2006 - the most recent year for which data are available - there were 16. Anti-gay hate crimes have fallen from 5.2 per 1 million to 4.7 per 1 million - not a huge drop, but a statistically significant one. Would a broader hate-crimes law have reduced these figures even further? I doubt it. Even if a violent criminal knows that a tough hate-crimes law exists, wouldn't that...