“Turning Back The Clock”: What The South’s Scary Republican Electorate Says About The GOP
There has been a lot written about the make-up of the Republican primary electorate in 2012. By now, it has become clear how very conservative they are, how many of them are evangelicals, how social issues motivate many of them, and how truly angry they are at President Obama.
As I have written before, this is not your mother’s Republican Party.
But the latest polls by the reputable and respected Public Policy Polling group in Tuesday’s primary states of Alabama and Mississippi tell a pretty disturbing story. They surveyed 656 likely Republican voters in Mississippi and 600 in Alabama this past week.
In Alabama, 45 percent described themselves as “very conservative” and 36 percent as “somewhat conservative”; in Mississippi, those numbers were 44 percent and 34 percent respectively. Not a huge shock there.
In Alabama, 68 percent describe themselves as “Evangelical Christian.” In Mississippi, that percentage was 70 percent. Again, not that surprising in the deep South.
But here comes the more disturbing news: In Alabama, 60 percent do not believe in evolution. In Mississippi, the figure is 66 percent.
When it comes to interracial marriage, 29 percent of Republican primary voters in Mississippi believe it should be illegal. In Alabama, 21 percent think it should be illegal.
Now, both of those last two answers would really mean turning back the clock!
And on Barack Obama’s religion, in response to the straightforward question, “Do you think Barack Obama is a Christian or a Muslim or are you not sure?” the answers are scary. In Alabama, 14 percent say Christian, 45 percent say Muslim, 41 percent are not sure. In Mississippi, 12 percent say Christian, 52 percent say Muslim, and 36 percent are not sure.
Several years ago we saw disturbing numbers on the Muslim question, but there has been enough publicity, enough coverage, enough debunking of the false accusations, that one would think that people would have moved on. Not so.
Why do the most engaged voters in Republican primaries seem to hold views that are outright false? Is the hatred of Obama so visceral that they will believe anything that comes across the Internet? Are their views reinforced by friends and neighbors? Do they simply not believe any facts when they are presented?
The truly scary thing is that though these numbers are from two states, this is looking less like an aberration. The Republican primary voters over the last few decades have become increasing more radically conservative, the delegates to the conventions more far right, the Republican Party more rigid. It was impossible for Sen. John McCain to nominate a Tom Ridge or a Joe Lieberman as vice president—too pro-choice. The platform at each convention has become more conservative, especially on social issues. The no-tax pledge has become a needless straight-jacket, yet signed by virtually all Republicans in Congress.
But, these two polls show a remarkable closed-mindedness when it comes to issues of race and religion that many thought were settled with open-mindedness. Apparently not.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, March 14, 2012
“Keeping Things In Tumult”: Newt Gingrich Is Mitt Romney’s Secret Weapon
For someone who thinks the “elite media” has “anointed” Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich is doing a pretty good job of helping the former Massachusetts governor get the nomination.
Gingrich, a former House Speaker, has virtually no real hope of amassing the number of delegates needed to sew up the GOP nomination ahead of the convention in Tampa. His only chance is to keep things so in tumult that the party doesn’t know what to do, and then—well, anoints Gingrich at the convention. But staying in the race is arguably having the opposite effect, since Gingrich’s presence in the race serves largely to divide the anti-Romney vote. That deprives former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum of delegates in many states, especially southern states where evangelicals and social conservatives are wary of Romney. Santorum won both Mississippi and Alabama, with Gingrich second and Romney a close third in both states. But if Gingrich hadn’t been in the race, it’s likely that the votes—and the delegates proportionately assigned—would have gone to Santorum.
Santorum, too, is highly unlikely to get the delegates needed to secure the nomination. But if he was established as the single, conservative alternative to Romney, he’d be picking up more votes and delegates. And the more he gets, the more he can try to convince people that Romney’s biggest political asset—his electability—is not unique to him in the field.
It’s frustrating for candidates when the media calls someone a “front-runner” early on, because it makes it harder for so-called back-benchers to get taken seriously. It’s particularly irritating when the moniker is assigned before a single vote is cast. Hillary Clinton, for example, was deemed the “front-runner” for the Democratic nomination in 2008 even before a single primary was held. The determination was based on early polls, which themselves were driven a good deal by name recognition. But Barack Obama overcame early expectations and won both the nomination and the presidency.
Gingrich, perhaps, had a legitimate gripe about the way his chances were described last year—though staff exoduses and bad judgment (that Tiffany’s revolving line of credit? The luxury cruise vacation in the middle of a campaign?) had something to do with it, too. But Republicans are now halfway through their primary campaign, and Gingrich has won only two states—his home state of Georgia and the neighboring state of South Carolina. That’s not the fault of an “elite media” bent on nominating Romney. That’s what GOP voters are deciding.
Gingrich seems to want to stay in the race, and as long as he can do so financially, why not? But if he doesn’t make it, he should look at the primary results—not the newspapers.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, March 14, 2012
“The Snooty Eastern Establishment”: Rick Santorum Didn’t Restart The Culture War–It Never Stopped
Since the firestorm over contraception and religious freedom erupted, there seems to be some kind of consensus that the “culture war” has returned to the fore of American politics. The consensus is wrong. The culture war never stopped.
In fact, former Sen. Rick Santorum explicitly says so himself!
While campaigning in Columbus, Ohio, Santorum said President Obama’s “agenda” is,
not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.
I’ve been trying to make this case (though not in the way Santorum is making it) all along.
Out of political convenience or cultural distance, Beltway conservatives refuse to see this: Hardcore conservative opposition to Obama has always been cultural and theological. The pop-theological mainstream of American evangelicals has so thoroughly assimilated the ideal of American capitalism that any deviation, however modest, from it is tantamount to radical godless humanism. And, in an extension of an older intradenominational debate, conservative Catholics like Santorum deeply mistrust the ideal of “social justice” as championed by the Catholic left.
As I’ve argued before, the line between culture and economics is disappearing. Santorum has muddied this picture somewhat with rhetoric aimed at blue-collar voters to the effect that he doesn’t believe that if we just cut taxes, “everything will be fine.”
But such rhetoric, while interesting, is hollow; his economic agenda is full of tax cuts, and I see nothing in it that’s affirmatively different from Republican orthodoxy.
There’s a sense in which the proxy cultural war is nothing new. In Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment: Where History and Literature Intersect, historian Peter Viereck argued compellingly that the long strand of populism, from William Jennings Bryan to Robert La Follette to Joseph McCarthy, was all about “smashing Plymouth Rock” (i.e., the snooty Eastern Establishment). What McCarthy really hated about the likes of Alger Hiss wasn’t the communism per se, but his resemblance to the likes of Dean Acheson.
As McCarthy said in a famous 1950 speech in Wheeling, W.Va., the ones “who have been selling this nation out” were those
who have had all the benefits … the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in government that we can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouth are the ones who have been worst.
Unlike McCarthy, the Tea Party never felt it had to define Obama as an “enemy within”; born in Kenya, he was the “enemy without”!
Make no mistake. Such has been the animating spirit of the Tea Party all along. That’s what is fueling the Santorum “insurgency” right now. Culture war is the big picture. Fail to see it, you won’t fully understand the 2012 presidential campaign.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, February 22, 2012
Culture Wars: Republicans Are “Unprotected” on Contraception
During the 1928 presidential campaign, nutty right-wing Protestants claimed that Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated for president by a major party, was planning to extend New York’s Holland Tunnel all the way to the Vatican.
Today’s tunnel would run from the Vatican to a suburban Pentecostal megachurch.
We learned this week that U.S. Catholics support President Barack Obama’s Feb. 10 compromise on contraception in almost identical numbers to the population as a whole. Many of those sticking with the Catholic bishops in opposition are evangelical Protestants.
Historians are rubbing their eyes in wonder that the spiritual and political descendants of Protestants who founded the Know Nothing Party in the 1850s on anti-Papist ideas — who hassled not just Al Smith but also John F. Kennedy for supposed ties to Rome — are now embracing Catholics. Rick Santorum was recently greeted at Oral Roberts University by an enthusiastic crowd of 4,000.
Yes, politics makes strange bedfellows, and in this case, the Republicans, by throwing in their lot with the bishops, are using no protection. Like the controversy over the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation withdrawing support from Planned Parenthood over its provision of abortion services, this struggle leaves Republicans politically exposed.
Redefining the Debate
At first, the Komen case looked like just another example of anti-abortion activists flexing their muscles against hapless women’s health advocates. Then came a furious, highly effective counterassault fueled by liberal social media, a new counterweight to conservative talk radio in defining the terms of debate. The outcome of that flap, in which the Komen foundation reversed itself and apologized, shows that bashing Planned Parenthood may work in Republican primaries but will be poison in the general election.
The demand for “conscience” exemptions from Obamacare for Catholic hospitals, schools and charities (churches were already exempt) also looked good for the Republicans initially. Conservatives thought that they had a chance to revive the “culture wars” — the wedge-issue appeals to faith and family that have worked so well in the past. For more than a week, Republicans made Obama look like the guy who ordered Joan of Arc burned at the stake.
Their problem is that they never know when to stop. Recall the case of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman in a persistent vegetative state whose plight led conservative lawmakers to champion federal legislation in 2005 to keep her alive. The measure passed, but public opinion polls afterward showed the law was widely unpopular and a clear case of congressional overreach.
This time conservatives stuck with the argument that the president was abusing religious freedom even when that attack was no longer plausible. By decreeing that insurance companies, not Catholic institutions, will pay for contraceptives in employee health-care plans (as allowed under the Affordable Care Act), the president successfully shifted the subject back to birth control, where he’s on solid political footing.
Obama’s like a quarterback who calls a bad play and seems trapped in the pocket, then scrambles for big yardage.
Put Into Context
The bad play resulted from poor political planning inside the White House, which failed to line up supporters to defend its decision. But it’s a little more defensible when you know the context. For months, the pressure seemed to come from the left. The White House learned that 28 states (including Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts) already require that health plans under their jurisdiction cover contraceptives. These rules had survived court challenges on religious freedom grounds. In fact, women’s groups were threatening lawsuits if Obamacare didn’t also require such coverage, and some government lawyers argued that the new law provided no authority for any exemptions for institutions receiving federal money.
Obama’s team debated the issue and, contrary to published reports, the discussion didn’t break down cleanly along gender lines, with women on one side and Catholic men on the other. When the rule was made public on Jan. 20, White House press secretary Jay Carney faced not a single question about it. Then the regional and religious press embraced the story, and within a week even liberal Catholic columnists like E.J. Dionne and Mark Shields were up in arms.
But the firestorm may prove to be a political blessing. If the president had started on Jan. 20 with the compromise he eventually arrived at on Feb. 10, it would have been a one-day story for health-care policy wonks. Birth control would never have surfaced as a political issue.
Instead contraception is now the elephant in the bedroom — the issue that no one in the Republican establishment wants to talk about because they know it’s a disaster for them.
The Republicans may end up with a nominee, Rick Santorum, who has warned of “the dangers of contraception in this country.” He said: “It’s not OK because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
This from a candidate who recently said of the president: “He thinks he knows better how to run your lives.”
Imagine what Obama would do with that in a debate.
Instead of running away from Santorum, many Republicans are running toward him — once again, failing to get the memo on when to stop. Senator Scott Brown co-sponsored a bill this week with Senator Roy Blunt that would let any employer with a “moral conviction” (a term left undefined in the legislation) deny access to any health service, including contraception, they personally oppose. This weapon is aimed at Obamacare, but it will probably boomerang on Brown, who is locked in a tight re- election campaign in Massachusetts against Elizabeth Warren.
With all the major candidates this year enjoying seemingly happy marriages, it didn’t seem as if sex would figure much in this campaign. Wrong. The independent women who will help determine the election want the government — and their bosses – – out of their private lives.
The culture wars are over, and the Republicans lost.
By: Jonathan Alter, Bloomberg News, February 19, 2012
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