Are we really supposed to buy this horseshit?
A new focus-group of Republican base voters by the Democracy Corps (D), the consulting and polling outfit headed up by James Carville and Stan Greenberg, presents a picture of the GOP base as being motivated by a fundamentally different worldview than folks in the middle or on the Dem side -- and they see the country as being under a dire threat. . .One thing that the firm makes clear, though, is that this is not about racism, but about ideology: "Instead of focusing on these intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters' beliefs - but they need to get over it. Conducted on the heels of Joe Wilson's incendiary comments at the president's joint session address, we gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion - but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost beside the point."
So Carville got a bunch of white, southern Republicans together, started asking them questions and told them that their answers would be written down? And they didn't immediately slip on their Klan robes and burn crosses on the conference table? Amazing!
Because everyone knows that no person with racist attitudes ever holds them in check in a public setting. And we can be absolutely sure that none of the people brought in for the focus group had any incentive whatsoever to cast themselves in a good light. Let's all just uncritically accept it as gospel when people say to an interviewer that they aren't racist.
Apparently, since whites protested interracial marriage by calling it 'socialist,' their opposition was in no way racist, merely ideological. And Dr. Martin Luther King, since he was accused of being a socialist, was the subject of ideological opposition from whites, not racism.
Let's rewrite all the textbooks, because this puts the entire civil rights movement of the 1960s in a whole new light, now that we're just going to let white Republicans tell us whether or not they're racist.
I'm sure they all have piles and piles of black friends, and comparing Obama to a raccoon, dressing him up as an African shaman, calling an escaped gorilla one of Michelle Obama's ancestors and circulating an endless cycle of emailed 'jokes' about watermelons in the White House garden are all random, innocent coincidence.
To the good people at TPM and Balloon Juice, among others: if your leg is the only thing getting wet, it ain't rain.
