I have blogged a few times about the increasingly rightward drift of the US Republican Party. Even I was surprised by this poll, by the Daily Kos and Research 2000 of 2000 self identified Republicans – showing how far to the ideological fringes the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt had moved.
Some of the key findings of the poll (with my italics) are:
- 39% say that Barack Obama should be impeached. Correct me if I’m wrong but the US Constitution says that impeachment should be a punishment for high crimes and misdemeanours. Seemingly, this sub-set of GOP supporters believe that Obama should be impeached for having the temerity to disagree with them and win an election. Frightening.
- 42% believe that Obama was born outside of the United States. The conspiracy theory, with some fairly offensive undertones, that Obama wasn’t born in the US has a shocking amount of credibility with GOP supporters. Is that any surprise when the likes of Lou Dobbs, formerly of CNN, gave this absurd idea such airtime?
- 63% believe that Obama is a Socialist. That is plain daft – although the likes of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannitty seem to parrot this ridiculous line on a nightly basis. Anybody who thinks that Obama is a socialist clearly doesn’t have the faintest idea about political philosophy or Obama’s platform.
- 21% believe that Acorn ‘stole’ the last election, with another 55% ‘not sure’. Another absurd conspiracy theory given a silly amount of airtime by Fox News. For Glenn Beck, Acorn is almost an obsession.
- 53% believe that Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama. I find it hard to understand how anybody could hold this view.
- 23% believe that their state should secede from the USA, with a further 19% being not sure. Speechless.
- 55% believe that openly gay men should not be allowed to serve in the military and 77% believe that openly gay men should not be allowed to teach in ‘public’ schools. 77% believe that creationism should be taught in schools. 31% believe that contraception should be outlawed and 76% consider abortion to be ‘murder’. It is hard to understand how anybody with broadly socially liberal views could sympathise with a Party in which these views are so broadly held.
Despite recent electoral victories (largely due to the lingering level of unemployment), the Republican Party urgently needs to re-engage with the centre ground if it is to have any hope in 2012. It needs to consider that the conspiracy theories and extreme social conservatism repeatedly parroted by Beck, Hannitty et al might motivate the base but they will not win elections.
On a side point, the Bill O’Reilly interview of Jon Stewart is a must watch. I particularly like the lines that, “they [Fox News and the GOP right] have taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao” and “you [Bill O’Reilly] are the voice of sanity at Fox News…that’s like being the thinnest kid at fat camp.”
Related posts:
David, you really don’t pay that much attention to US politics do you? If the Republican Party really matched your lazy Guardianista caricature, how come it has just managed to win Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts? The biggest cause for voter concern in left-leaning Massachusetts seems to have been the Democrats’ hideously expensive healthcare plan. Of course in this country the “progessive centre” (i.e. people like you) is always telling us that social justice requires us to spend ever more money that we haven’t got on the left’s pet projects. So I guess that means the average Massachusetts voter must now be a swivel-eyed rightwing bigot…
Michael – thanks, as ever, for your comment. I blogged about the results in Mass. here:
http://www.platform10.org/2010/01/obama-needs-to-regroup-and-take-the-fight-to-an-increasingly-hysterical-gop/
David, thanks for referring me to this but doesn’t it miss the point? There is not a shred of evidence that the new Republican Senator for Masschusetts is a latter-day Pat Buchanan. The key point is that the voters in a left-leaning state have distinctly mixed feelings about Congress’ mad dash to mortgage the future of the next three generations of Americans; and have therefore cast their vote for a centre-right Republican. Yet it seems from your previous post that the only “politically correct” response to the deeds and utterances of The One and his mates on The Hill is uncritical adulation. Bush undoubtedly bears his share of the blame for the economic mess but so do the Democrats who in many ways created the lax regulatory environment which led to the disaster of Subprime. Obama and Co do not come to this debate with clean hands.
Pingback: Platform 10 » Blog Archive » A British ‘Tea Party’ Movement Is The Last Thing British Politics Needs
Pingback: Fisking David Skelton, Modern liberal Conservative, on Tea Party movement « Autonomous Mind
Pingback: Platform 10 » Blog Archive » The Mid Term Elections May Not Be Cause For Republican celebration In The Long Term