republicans

Research 2000 has a shudder inducing poll on Republican attitudes and beliefs regarding Pres. Obama. Here are the highlights via Ben Smith (Politico)

Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?
Yes 39
No 32
Not Sure 29

Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?
Yes 63
No 21
Not Sure 16

Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?
Yes 42
No 36
Not Sure 22

Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?
Yes 21
No 24
Not Sure 55

Should openly gay men and women be allowed to teach in public schools?
Yes 8
No 73
Not Sure 19

I’m not sure which one of these results is more startling. Let’s go with 63% of Republicans believing that Pres. Obama is a socialist. This suggests to me that level-headed, moderates have fled the party. I still content that this “lunatic fringe” is only a fraction of the U.S. electorate and the Republicans still have structural problems they need to work out. They are primed to get closer to control of both houses of congress, but to do that, they’ll have to win back moderates and become a “normal” party again with the same problems the Dems currently enjoy.

A few caveats are in order. Research 2000 was contracted by Daily Kos to do the poll, which doesn’t mean anything in particular, but it would be useful to look at the methodology more closely. Having said that, these results give us some good insight as to why the current president is having such trouble getting health care passed through Congress. If this poll is accurate, the Republican party is a right wing party. If you’re a Republican legislator, you run a serious risk of losing your seat to a “real republican” in upcoming primaries. This fear is allowing the Republicans to enjoy an amazing amount of party discipline. In our system, the minority always wants to be the “party of no” but is usually not able to because there are centrists who can be “peeled off” by the majority. Not so with this group of Republicans.

Update: Nate Silver looks at the crosstabs and finds marginal difference between demographic groups. Take the “socialist” question for instance:

Translation…the Republican tent is shrinking. Good for maintaining party discipline…let’s see about governing.

Last week, the Young Republicans got into a dustup over yet another Facebook flap.  This spring, we discussed how Facebook derailed an NDP candidate to provincial office in British Columbia, when the BC-Liberal opposition got wind of “racy” photos posted.  In this incident, there’s differing opinions which are arguably representations of fragmentation in the Republican Party.  According to the DailyBeast, it started with Audra Shay, vice chairman of the Young Republicans hosting a discussion on Wal*Mart endorsing Barack Obama’s health care plan.  Things unravelled when an “Eric S. Piker” made racially charged comments using the word “coon,” another ThickCulture topic from the spring {See above}.  Audra agreed with the statements, adding a LOL.

Subsequently, there were others criticizing these remarks, Cassie Wallender {a national committeewoman from the Washington Young Republican Federation} and Sean Connor {chairman of the D.C. Young Republicans}.  While these critics were “de-friended” by Audra, “Piker,” for the time being, remained a “friend.”  On Thursday, a black Republican activist, Lenny McAllister condemned these remarks and prior statements by Shay::

McAllister references a culture war going on in the Republican Party and regarding the racially charged remarks going around, he stated “You can cover cyanide with chocolate, but you still can’t call it candy.”

Her own recounting of the events, possible unaware of the screencap, paint a different picture of the events.  In her statement on 3 July, Shay went on to denounce the remarks and attributed the dustup to her political enemies capitalizing on an opportunity.  Irreparable damage may have already been done, as her upcoming bid to be Young Republican chairman may have been derailed.  

I’m not going to engage in any admonishing finger-waving on the dangers of social media, a bete-noire of mine.  I think this is beyond a matter of “political correctness” or freedom of speech issues and do reflect a growing divide between moderates and a more divisive fringe.  Indicative of this is how moderates are often criticized as being RINOs, Republicans-in-name-only, who are not sufficiently conservative. The RINO label was thrown at Wallender by Shay supporters after her criticism of the racial remarks.  In order for Republicans to move forward, they will have to deal with these issues head-on.  Will they use social media to do this?

Twitterversion:: #YoungRepublican schism over racially-charged #Facebook flap. Indicative of a larger #CultureWar within the party?  @Prof_K

Song:: Space Oddity (1990 Digital Remaster) – David Bowie

  

From the Monkey Cage: Charles Blow empirically debunks the cocktail party anecdote that Republicans are more likely to engage in illicit behavior (have affairs, get divorced, watch pornography) than Democrats. At that same time, he reminds us of the perils of ecological inference.

Using GSS data, he finds no statistical relationship between political ideology and divorce or infidelity. What’s more interesting to me is why those of us on the left like to grab on to this narrative. There seems to be a trenchant meme in popular culture about the repressed puritan who longs to “let loose.”

My wife and I recently saw Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. An otherwise funny movie except for the tired stereotype of the repressed Southern evangelicals that get enticed by the “big city’s” charms. In this image, a good Christian woman played by Patricia Clarkson is seduced by a philosophy professor and encouraged to indulge her animal spirits.

We also discover that the upstanding southern father, played by Ed Begley, is a repressed homosexual. He only discovers this in New York, of course.

Don’t get me wrong, we can go on for days about the level of hypocrisy present among the “family values crowd.” Republican politicians are having affairs so often that it’s not even news anymore. But it strikes me as interesting that we on the left so readily accept the narrative of conservatives being more sinful than liberals. It reinforces our sense of rectitude. In the same way, I imagine, that conservatives think all of us in academia are a bunch of un-reflective radicals.