#50 Good Bidness, or Less-Latent Racism?

I've written previously on this blog about how the presidential polls this year may be less accurate even than in recent elections (when exit polls were noticeably inaccurate in Florida in 2000 and early on election day in Ohio in 2004). Latent racism may affect how--or even if--people reply to pollsters; hence, we may receive even less of an idea than usual who is ahead in the presidential race. I offer the following excerpts from an online article today [direct quotations from the article are so noted]:

There's a new overhang on the intersection of Interstates 10 and 4 in Tampa, Florida, as of this past June: the world's largest confederate battle flag. One driver "felt a jolt of solidarity with the lost cause and lost rights that...the battle flag represents."

The Tampa Confederate Veterans Memorial and its 139-foot flagpole features one of at least four giant "soldier's flags" flying over interstates in Florida and Alabama. With more planned in Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, and possibly South Carolina, the "interstate show of force" may be for some citizens the sign of a greater interest in the preservation of regional history. For others, it may be less-latent racism being reborn, or at least less reluctantly exhibited, in some parts of the nation.

" 'The battle flag is a profound statement...and the targets of our nerve-getting are the business community, the tourist community and the political community,' says Marion Lambert, the Brandon, Fla., beekeeper who spearheaded the Tampa flag monument....These new auto dealer-sized flags – sewn in China – may be legally untouchable. Raised on private property, the Tampa flag was OK'd by county zoning officials and the Federal Aviation Administration."

" 'It's not going to go away,' says Jim Farmer, a history professor at the University of South Carolina at Aiken. " 'There is a subculture within the white Southern population...that feels besieged by modern culture in general, and they identify the Old South and Confederacy as a way of life and a period of time before the siege began to really hit the South.' "

"To Confederate sympathizers, opposition to the flag is misguided. They say the 'soldier's flag' represents not slavery, but the valor of Southern men in their lost cause. As proof of the flag's universality,...at the June 1 flag-raising ceremony in Tampa, [as] several older white men huffed trying to raise the 72-pound flag, two black men stepped in to finish the job."

"Flag opponents say the real offense is that Southern governors raised the flags during the Civil Rights era as a provocative gesture against attempts to desegregate Southern schools."

" 'A flag may be a simple piece of cloth, but it's much more powerful than that,' says John Clark, a political science professor at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. '[And] if you start turning people away, you're talking about a substantial investment in the local economy that's going to disappear.' "

"Still, it's not clear whether the flag is actually that sensitive a topic. Recently, a Florida newspaper poll revealed that few drivers found the Tampa flag offensive...."

Now, that's Bad Bidness.