Late in Obama’s campaign I get a call to do an ‘important’ commercial. It is called THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM and was written to fight a potential BRADLEY EFFECT late in the campaign. In 1982, Mayor Tom Bradley, Los Angeles’ black mayor, was ahead in the polls for the gubernatorial election. He lost despite his supposed lead. There have been a number of explanations for this but the most simple one is that voters lie in answering the polls when a black candidate is running for office and say they will vote for him in order to deflect any notion of racism on their part. Time magazine, in a September article, mentioned various reasons to suspect an ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM and it was racism in the election as well as the BRADLEY EFFECT. We filmed the spot but it never ran. The polls were so overwhelmingly in favor of Obama in the last week of the campaign that even a BRADLEY EFFECT couldn’t stop him.