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.”

The result in Massachusetts was a bad blow for the Democrats.   A previously solidly blue state turned into a relatively easy GOP win can only be described as a poor result for Obama, almost a year to the day since the inauguration.  Obama needs to come out fighting after this setback and the previous setbacks in Virginia and New Jersey.  For too much of the past year, the Obama team have allowed an increasingly hysterical Republican right to set the idea and to use the language that frames the debate.  The Obama team need to change this before the mid terms.

Drew Westen, the author of the excellent ‘Political Brain’ makes an excellent point in the Huffington Post today.  He says that:

“It is a truly remarkable feat, in just one year’s time, to turn the fear and anger voters felt in 2006 and 2008 at a Republican Party that had destroyed the economy, redistributed massive amounts of wealth from the middle class to the richest of the rich and the biggest of big businesses, and waged a trillion-dollar war in the wrong country, into populist rage at whatever Democrat voters can cast their ballot against.”

On the economy, despite having inherited the biggest economic mess of any US President since FDR, Obama is rapidly being blamed for a perceived failure to rapidly turn round rising unemployment.  And lets be clear, it is worries about jobs that have driven people to vote GOP in the past few months.  He is being blamed for a perceived cosiness with Wall Street, as opposed to Main Street.  As Westen says, Obama has not successfully painted the recession as Bush’s recession in the same way as FDR managed to term the depression as ‘Hoover’s depression’.

Take healthcare.  The US is in dire need of healthcare reform.  30 million Americans are uninsured.  Reform was a fundamental plank of Obama’s election victory.  Despite this, all of the language around healthcare has been dictated by the Republican right.  Phrases like ‘death panels’ and ‘socialised healthcare’ are designed to scare.  Given that only a few months ago, a large majority of Americans were in favour of a public option, never mind the watered down option that emerged from the Senate, it is astonishing that the Democrats have managed to have the issue turned against them.

In the past twelve months, the Republicans have spared no piece of rhetorical exaggeration as they denounced Obama.  From Palin through to cheerleaders on Fox, such as Beck and Hannitty, the right in American politics has grown hysterical and utterly attack minded.  After years of the GOP governing for a small minority of Americans, the Republicans have been thoroughly populist in their opposition.  At the same time, Obama and the Democrats haven’t fought back.  They have abandoned the populism that made them such a powerful force in the last electoral cycle.  They have allowed the Republicans to frame the debate and shift the debate increasingly rightwards.

Obama needs to take the fight back to an increasingly narrow and increasingly right wing GOP.    He needs to rediscover the populism and the passion that fuelled his campaign.  The Republicans have deserted the centre and that will probably do for them in 2012.  But Obama needs to take back control of the agenda.  And this has to start with the State of the Union address.