Is this what they mean by "Tea Party"?

From the Department of Inescapable Conclusions comes this: the Tea Party movement is basically racist. That little gem is pointedly NOT included in the New York Times’ analysis of their own poll on the TPers — the paper’s focus is instead on the more “surprising” (to Upper East Side liberals anyway) finding that the people who identify themselves with the movement are educated. Can’t wait to see Fox have a field day with that one….

The new poll  comes hot on the heels of a Gallup Poll released last week that also looked at Tea Party supporters (different from people active in the movement as defined by the Times) and how it’s supporters stack up ideologically and demographically with the rest of America. Both polls give a similar demographic snapshot but the Times poll went far deeper into what TPers actually think and believe. The result is strong support for the argument that while the TP movement is ostensibly driven by anger and fear over the economy and government, the elephant in the room is race. The President is a black guy. That’s the problem.

The Times poll has lots of interesting data sprinkled throughout its 110 questions (who actually agrees to sit through all those questions?) including much that is predictable: TPers are better educated, whiter, older, richer, more Republican and vastly more politically conservative than the average American. There are also some telling surprises like the fact that the economic downturn seems to have effected the TPers less than the average American even though Tea Party members are far angrier about t

Let’s start with question 52.

Favor whites                  Favor blacks                   Treat equally                   Don’t know

U.S.                              2                                   11                                   83                                  5

Tea Party                     1                                   25                                   65                                  9

Joker or Whiteface?

It was inescapable from the very start of Barack Obama’s campaign waaaaay back in January 2007 that race and racism would play a big part in whatever came to pass. And of course it did and it has and it still is and it always will. Now the New York Times — or to be fair one of her columnists — has finally said what is pretty apparent: An awful lot of the screaming incoherent rage ostensibly directed at Obama’s actions is actually just plain racism.

Maureen Dowd put it this way on Sunday:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

Nothing new here if you’re a regular follower of even the slightly-left-of-center blogosphere but for the Doyenne of the Paper of Record it’s a mighty leap.

It’s not a leap Obama nor his inner circle want to make, though, lest the President get drawn into the elemental American battle. It’s been raging for 300 hundred years — from the Founders through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Brown v. Board, OJ Simpson, to the first African-American president. America has never worked through it’s race-tainted birth and probably never will unless and until we’re all so intermixed that to be American means to be “Made of Many Parts.”

Obama has done his best to act as if we are post-racial but he, and everyone else, knows better. As a black man, though, he can’t actually engage in this battle directly without becoming exactly what his conservative critics so desire — another Jesse Jackson. Turning Obama into a black guy who happens to be President (as opposed to what he is: the President who happens to be a black guy) would be a major accomplishment for the Beck-Limbaugh Axis of Anger. And so they will continue to work very hard on that goal knowing they have fertile soil in which to till their seeds of rage.

In the meantime let’s face the facts: When a bunch of angry, white, post-65-year-old people scream and yell all summer about the government taking over health care, it cannot really be about the government taking over health care. Why? Because the screamers all have government health care. It’s called Medicare and every American over 65 gets it (not that Maria Bartiromo would know this). So when these folks rage with such force that they risk stroke and heart attack they do so knowing full well that should such a health calamity befall them, you and I  will pick up the tab for their hospitalization and care. Must be nice.

And when fringe groups organize Tea Parties to protest taxes and bailouts that then reappear months later as personal hate-fests aimed at one man, it is clearly not about taxes and bailouts which got relatively scant attention at Saturday’s big 9/12 rally in Washington. The rally, which was respectfully covered by the Washington Post and The Hill has become yet another paper tiger for conservatives like Matt Welch (of the conservative opinion mag Reason) writing in today’s New York Post:

How do you marginalize a significant protest against a politician or policy you support? Lowball the numbers, then dismiss participants as deranged and possibly dangerous kooks. In the case of Saturday’s massive 9/12 protest in Washington, done and done.

“Small protest,” popular lefty blogger Josh Marshall reported from his armchair, as an overflow crowd (at least 100,000, by my rough, unscientific estimate) filled the 1.5 miles between the south White House and the US Capitol, spilling out all over the National Mall and even down the street to Union Station.

Welch goes on to quote the head of a DC-based think tank and, of course, Dowd. When he frames the argument that way (using a liberal blogger, a think-tanker, and a liberal op-ed columnist as the only evidence of media bias) he’s able to make a convincing case that the protest had nothing to do with race and everything to do with the mainstream media keeping the facts from the American people. Well done sir!

Of course we can thank Representative Addison Graves Wilson Sr. (oh, sorry, that’s Joe to his constituents) of “You Lie!” fame for at least some of this belated recognition of racism as the root. The Republican Congressman from the great state of South Carolina was a folk hero at the march on Saturday for allegedly speaking truth to power. There were more than a few “Joe for President” signs. But as Dowd put it better than I can:

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president.

Joe Wilson is a racist. And so are many of the people that have attended rallies and town halls who are incapable of explaining what it is they are opposed to other than “him”. “Socialism” doesn’t count — especially for Medicare recipients and anyone who lives in the West where life exists in most places only because the Federal government built dams to provide cheap water and cheap power. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbauch are racists of convenience: Spouting thinly-veiled racism earns them huge paychecks (Limbaugh = $38 million/year minimum, Beck = $18 million/year).

Case in point: Beck’s recent regurgitation of a video showing young black men in military camo pants and blue t-shirts doing some sort of drill. Watch it all here. Beck first spent a couple of weeks wondering what these young men were up to back in October (during the last month of the campaign natch) and never quite was able to discover (despite plenty of very quick posts to the web explaining what the video was) that it was a high-school drill team practice. If only they’d been dressed in leotards he would have understood! In fact Beck learned very quickly what the video was and he certainly knows now but he still uses it to conjure up the specter of a secret army of black men ready to help the black president get his way — and give us all health care….

And then there’s that Obama as The Joker poster. Is it an affirmative action success story that a black man is playing the Joker? Or is it a not-very-subtle racist reminder of the not-so-distant past? We report, you decide.

Everyone knows there’s deep-seated racism in America and it’s not just among white people. Latinos, Asians, Blacks, Caribbean-Americans, Indians. There’s racism in every group and in every one of us. Sometimes there’s a lot,  sometimes very little. And that’s what Obama tried to be open about in his groundbreaking speech on race during the campaign. His grandma was a little bit racist and so is he. His point was that racism is alive and well and will never go away unless we acknowledge it, talk about it, and keep it uncovered.

Unfortunately some people have taken that to mean wearing racism on one’s sleeve is a good thing.

Florida's (Allegedly) Gay Gov

So Florida Governor Charlie Crist is going to run for Senate. That should be good news for the GOP since the seat he’s running for is being vacated by another Republican (the hapless Mel Martinez) and Crist is very popular in the Sunshine State. The announcement, expected Tuesday, has gotten plenty of coverage but almost all of it avoided the (pink) elephant in the room: Crist is gay gay gay.

The rumors and reports have been well documented for years but a new documentary out this month called “Outrage” outs closeted public officials who the filmmaker believes have had anti-gay voting records. In the film we hear from men who say they had sex with Crist and the others. In reviewing the movie newspapers across the country named names. Including Crist.

Now what? Will Crist’s very conservative Republican primary opponent try and make it an issue? Will Crist finally drop the beard and come out? Can a gay Republican win? What will be his position on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and same-sex marriage? What about DOMA?

This should be very interesting.

Catholic Hypocrisy

Next up the countdown to the Notre Dame nightmare (pro-choice Obama speaking at graduation this coming weekend) is on with tons of opinions but nary a mention of the essential hypocrisy that Get Real pointed out two weeks ago when I argued that critics are correct — and totally hypocritical (I’ll just quote myself here and save time):

The Catholic Church has a very strong position about the “culture of life” and has indicated in no uncertain terms that the Church and it’s ancillary parts (of which Notre Dame certainly seems to be) should not honor opponents of that position.

But the “culture of life” is not only a code phrase for abortion or embryonic stem cell research or even assisted suicide. The Catholic Church also opposes the death penalty. Indeed the Conference of Catholic Bishops has a whole campaign to battle capital punishment. So why is no one talking about the honorary degree Notre Dame is handing out to the Chief Justice of the Indiana Supreme Court?

Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard has repeatedly upheld the use of capital punishment in Indiana during his 29 years on the bench including a case in 2005 in which he wrote the majority opinion that a mentally ill man could be put to death despite a state law that prohibited executing the mentally “retarded.”

So where’s the outrage? Death-penalty-advocate Justice Shepard should no more be honored by a Catholic University than should abortion-rights-proponent Barack Obama. Hypocrisy should have no place in this debate. Principals are principals. No?

I ask again — why isn’t anyone writing about this? It’s always easier to set “for” and “against” guests up against one another and let them argue but shouldn’t this be part of that debate?

Douthat, Not It

Finally the latest attempt by the New York Times to find a rational, intelligent, thoughtful conservative to co-man its Op-Ed page with the stellar David Brooks is proving to be only slightly more successful than the last (Bill Kristol who has become as much of an embarrassment to conservatism as did George W. Bush). Wunderkind he’s-in-his-twenties-so-he-must-be-relevant Ross Douthat pens a column in Tuesday’s papers that is half true and logically hollow.

Douthat argues that same-sex marriage will eventually happen because partisans who fight for a freedom eventually win. He then shifts gears to say that, using this same paradigm, abortion opponents may also someday, eventually, be victorious.

The pro-life movement is arguably more comfortable with the language of rights and liberties than its opponents. Abortion foes are defending a right to life grounded in the Declaration of Independence, after all, whereas pro-choicers are defending more nebulous rights (privacy, autonomy, etc.) supposedly grounded in “penumbras” and “emanations” from the Constitution.

Huh? Aren’t pro-choicers defending the rights and liberties of pregnant women? Anyway that logical lapse isn’t the worst thing about his column….

This helps explain why Americans under 35, while more sympathetic to gay marriage than their parents, also tend to be slightly more anti-abortion. The Obama era may be pushing the country leftward on some fronts, but recent polling suggests that America’s slim pro-choice majority is even slimmer than usual these days.

Neat if it were true. But oops! It’s not. Douthat links to an article from 2003 noting how some young people were — at that time — less unequivocally pro-choice than their parents, speculating that having grown up in a world where abortion was available, these kids didn’t know what was at risk. And then he sites a recent Pew Poll that does show the “pro-choice majority” to be slimmer than in some previous polls.

But if Ross has learned nothing in his 29 years on Planet Earth he should have picked up this before the Times bestowed upon him a coveted columnist gig: One poll don’t prove nothin’.

As Get Real pointed out May 7, abortion rights are not less popular now than they have been at other times since Roe v. Wade (here I go quoting myself again):

In poll after poll the abortion issue has changed very little since Roe v. Wade made it legal. For instance when Gallup asked about abortion in 1975, the results were not much different from when the pollsters asked the same questions in 1980 (when Reagan was elected), 1990 (when Bush was President), 2000 (when Clinton was ending his term), and 2008.

                    Always Legal             Sometimes Legal          Never Legal

1975                     21                                 54                             22
1980                     25                                 53                             18
1990                     31                                 53                             12
2000                     28                                 51                             19
2008                     28                                 54                             17

Source: Gallup Poll

Damn those pesky facts!

Whether you agree with Times’ columnists or not you should at least expect a reasoning logical argument. This is just sloppy pablum. It cannot be that hard to find a conservative with a brain. Sometimes I wonder if the Times chooses these doofuses on purpose — to make their liberal writers shine in contrast.

So, Brooks! It’s up to you. School this kid.

Bill O'Reilly

OK so it’s not the most surprising headline and many people probably believe it could be a daily column but this is a special episode of “Bill O’Reilly is Allergic to Facts.” Today’s episode: Newspaper circulation.

O’Reilly’s syndicated column is essentially a hearty har-har-har over the troubles at the New York Times which is, of course, a favorite topic among the legions of Americans who hate the “paper of record.” There’s certainly plenty to write about on that score but Bill takes the super lazy way out insists the paper’s problems are because it’s “the nation’s largest left-wing newspaper.”

The New York Times is most definitely a committed left-wing concern that is openly contemptuous of the conservative, traditional point-of-view. That is the primary reason the paper may soon dissolve.

O’Reilly supports his argument by noting that recent newspaper closings have all been at similarly “lefty” publications.

Over the past few months, newspapers in Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Denver have either folded or filed for bankruptcy. With the exception of The Rocky Mountain News, all the papers were committed left-wing enterprises. The truth is that most Americans are traditional-minded folks; they believe their country is noble, they want respectful discourse. Fanaticism of any kind is not the American way.

Neither is making sh*t up and that’s what BillO’s up to today. First off when did the Chicago Tribune become a “committed left-wing enterprise”? When they backed George W Bush over Al Gore in 2000 or when they backed George W Bush over John Kerry in 2004? Supporting Obama in 2008 was as much of a surprise as the fact that no major Texas newspaper failed to endorse their home-state guy in 2000.

Then, even if you accept that those other closed papers were super liberal, is that really the reason they folded? After all the survivors in Denver and Seattle are certainly no more conservative than their fallen brethren. The Denver Post endorsed Gore in 2000 while the Rocky Mountain News went with Bush. And both supported Bush over Kerry in 2004. Commies indeed!

The truth (Bill loves that word — too bad he doesn’t practice what he so pompously preaches) is that newspapers across the country are in dire straights and it has nothing to do with their editorial pages. Look at what’s happened to the circulation at the top 10 “conservative” papers from 2007 to 2008 (new figures are out on Monday) [see below for update]:

WSJ                                                  0.0%
NY Post                                           -6.3%
Chicago Trib                                   -7.8%
Dallas Morning News                     -9.3%
Boston Herald                                -9.9%
San Diego Union Tribune               -3.0%
Tampa Tribune                               -2.4%
AZ Republic                                     -5.5%
Indy Star                                          -3.3%
Columbus Dispatch                        -2.9%

And the three most prominent “lefty pinko rags”

New York Times                              -3.6%
Washington Post                             -1.9%
Newsday                                           -2.6%

Other than the Wall Street Journal which, along with America’s other national newspaper USA Today held circulation steady, every major paper left and right suffered circulation declines. If readers are abandoning the NY Times at a rate of 3.6 percent because of it’s leftward leanings then we (and Bill) have to conclude that readers are abandoning the NY Post at a rate of 6.3 percent because of it’s rightward leanings. The only logical conclusion? Right-wing rags are in bigger trouble than liberal ones.

C’mon Bill. you can do better than that!

[UPDATE] Now that the new numbers are out the news is even worse for the newspaper business and further demonstrates how far off base Bill is. The “liberal lions” are losing readers far more slowly than the biggest conservative newspapers with the exception of the Wall St. Journal. Indeed the right’s most prized paper, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post lost more readers than almost any other paper in America. Here’s the same list as above showing the most recent circulation figures which were released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations:

WSJ                                               +0.1%
NY Post                                         -20.6%
Chicago Trib                                 -7.4%
Dallas Morning News                   -9.9%
Boston Herald                              -13.6%
San Diego Union Tribune             -9.5%
Tampa Tribune                             -11.4%
AZ Republic                                  -5.7%
Indy Star                                       -9.0%
Columbus Dispatch                     -2.0%

And the three most prominent “lefty pinko rags”

New York Times                           -3.6%
Washington Post                          -1.1%
Newsday                                        -3.0%

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York)

From the moment she was appointed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has been discounted. The papers — especially the New York Post but others as well — have consistently called into question her election prospects in 2010. But this morning’s New York Times has a piece that inadvertently makes the case that Gillibrand is on her way to winning in 2010 as the next Chuck Schumer.

The Times notes that many of Hillary Clinton’s inner and not-so-inner circle of advisers, fundraisers, and hangers-on have gone to work for Senator Gillibrand. The paper also takes the conventional wisdom route on her prospects:

Ms. Gillibrand, who was twice elected to Congress from a mostly white and rural district stretching from Hudson to the Adirondacks, still faces significant obstacles as she seeks to be elected in her own right. She is not well known downstate, where Democratic primaries are lost and won. In a recent Marist College poll, only 18 percent of Democrats rated Ms. Gillibrand as doing an excellent or good job, while more than half were unsure. And she must quell suspicions among some black and Latino leaders over positions she has taken on gun rights, immigration and other issues.

All true but also historically nonsensical. Hillary, like Gillibrand, had some major obstacles when she began her quest for the Senate in 1999 (or was it her quest for the White House…). Her poll numbers were pretty lousy considering she was the First Lady (43%-43% in the Marist Poll of April 1999 against Rudy Giuliani after her “listening tour”) and she was doing poorly with the very constituency she would need to win (suburban voters, especially women, favored Giuliani by double digits in a June 1999 Quinnipiac Poll). Note that both of those polls were closer to election day than Kirsten Gillibrand is right now and her poll numbers are arguably much better.

The latest Marist Poll on Gillibrand (March 3) shows her beating two hypothetical opponents Peter King and George Pataki (Really?!? Pataki? That seems pretty unlikely). And that’s with only 18% of voters giving her an excellent or good rating (the equation often called an “approval rating”). The key is to look a little father right on the chart to the “unsure” category where 50% of voters reside. Gillibrand is basically unknown and for a candidate with strong fundraising and a strong bench of political operatives that’s more of an opportunity than a problem.

Clinton had the uphill battle of convincing New Yorkers who had an opinion about her to change it. Political operatives will tell you that’s one of the trickier things to do in campaigns especially when your opponent is well-funded. Remember Giuliani and his replacement on the Republican line Rick Lazio raised and spent twice as much money as Hillary did by election day.

In contrast Gillibrand has the much easier task of selling herself to undecided, uninformed voters. Mike Bloomberg will tell you that’s a winnable position with the right message and enough money to sell it. So will Chuck Schumer.

In June 1998 — just three months before the Democratic primary between Geraldine Ferraro, Mark Green, and Chuck Schumer, Schumer who was running in third place with 59% of voters having “No Opinion” on him according to a poll at the time. Three months — and a lot of advertising later — Schumer beat the other two on his way to famously unseating Republican incumbent Al D’Amato (the putzhead election).

Which brings us to the other speed bump Gillibrand faces according to the local pundits is a primary. Democrats, we are told, don’t like her positions on guns and Latinos in particular don’t like her immigration record. That’s true at this moment but primary election day (if there is one) is almost 18 months away. The Carolyns (McCarthy and Maloney) have no track records of running big-time campaigns and have shown relatively little ability to raise the tens of millions that will be needed to win in 2010 and then run again in 2012. Neither is another Ferraro.

So while Gillibrand may be seen as Governor Paterson’s choice and be predicted to suffer for it, she was actually Senator Chuck Schumer’s choice and as we have argued repeatedly here, that makes her the odds-on favorite to have a free and clear run in 2010. Schumer is clearly now the leader of the state party and one of the two or three most powerful members of the Senate. If he wants Gillibrand to be the Democratic candidate for New York’s other Senate seat she will have all the help Schumer’s imprimatur can deliver. And if anybody knows what it takes to win a Senate seat in New York, it’s Chuck.

Socialism Personified (for those who remember)

Sunday’s NY Times had a Week in Review front-pager on how conservatives have decided on “socialism” as their primary rhetorical weapon against Barack Obama and the Democrats. The piece had plenty of examples and a nice bit asking an actual socialist in Congress (Vermont’s junior Senator Bernie Sanders) what he thinks of it all. But it was left to the editor laying out the pages to point out what this really represents.

In the next column over from the article’s Page 3 jump is another piece entitled “Ailing GOP Risks Losing a Generation.” The two stories are hardly unrelated.

As Get Real and plenty of others has pointed out for some time now, the GOP is stuck using a playbook that simply doesn’t work any more. Conservatives still think that by attracting enough white men to their side their ideas and candidates will triumph. But as the Times’ other article demonstrates, that dog don’t hunt no more.

Young people have been fleeing the Republican Party and it’s ideas at an accelerating pace since the end of the Reagan era in 1988. Voters under 30 hardly decide elections — in 1996 they made up 17% of the electorate and last November they consisted of 18%. But voters who were under 30 in 1992 when the rate of young GOP abandonment began to accelerate more rapidly are now in the more important 30-45 age group which accounted for more than 30% of the vote last year. It doesn’t take a math major to figure out that time is NOT on the side of conservatives if present trends continue.

Which brings us back to socialism. That’s a word that had hefty meaning for much of the last century as countries from Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Soviet Union shared the term with more benign nations like Sweden. But what does socialism mean to somebody who is 25 years old — or 45 for that matter?

If you are 25 you only remember living under two Presidents (Clinton and Bush) and probably have only the vaguest notion of when the Berlin Wall fell or what the Soviet Union was. Even those twenty years older never really felt the fear of creeping socialism that our parents knew. By the mid-80s socialism may still have been an effective word for many voters but for those of us voting in our first or second elections it was as dated a term as “davenport” (that’s what my grandma always called the couch).

In fact for many people now under 45 the closest brush with socialism any of us has had might have been a trip to Stockholm, Paris, or Berlin where European socialism seemed to provide good public transport, free health care, a pretty good standard of living, and fine quality of life.

By going into their wayback machine for inspiration conservatives and their Republican friends end up looking like doddering old folks — like our beloved relatives we see at holidays and find amusing for their outdated words and quirky relations with the modern world (“I turned on my AOL machine to write you.”)

Putting younger, darker faces on the product (Jindal, Steele) won’t convince a generation of jaded, sophisticated consumers to buy the Republican brand, especially when those new faces are using the same ancient words as their elders.

The bottom line is socialism isn’t really a dirty word for the vast majority of voters under 45. Indeed it’s not even a word we’ve heard all the much during our lives except in history class. And so as we have been saying here at Get Real repeatedly in reference to Limbaugh and Jindal and the GOP in general: Keep it up if you want to help President Obama because you’re doing him a lot more good than the members of his own party.