New Poll of Anti-Obama Voters Misses the Point

Cajun Jim Carville should know better.

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.

SNIP

The analysis argues that Obama's unpopularity among conservative Republicans is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from liberal Democratic ire against George W. Bush -- that the GOP is more heavily conservative than the Democrats are heavily liberal, and that the hatred of Obama is more intense than Dem hatred of Bush was. All of this adds up to a powerful set of emotions that the Republican Party as a whole cannot ignore.

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."

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

What did they do, ask people who were foaming at the mouth with irrational, baseless rage at a centrist president who makes Eisenhower sound like Dennis Kucinich: "Oh, by the way, are you a racist?"

Did they even bother to ask their focus group - or themselves - why a bunch of old, white repugs in Georgia might hate a black man so intensely?

They sure as hell didn't read this trenchant analysis in The Nation by Gary Younge, Obama and the Decline of White America.

Add to this the fact that numerically, white Americans will be a minority by 2045, and you have the basis for the panic that has been unleashed. Obama's election did not create these anxieties. (Were he more radical in his policies, he might actually alleviate some of them.) It has simply provided a focus for them and, conversely, proved that there is a vast constituency--particularly among the young--who do not share them.

The country these right-wingers keep saying they "want back" is a white one in which their exclusive entitlement to the exercise of power, locally and globally, goes unchallenged. The fact that that country isn't coming back is what makes their voices so shrill and their actions so extreme. Demographically, economically and geopolitically, white America is in decline.

In the absence of any meaningful analysis of class, race or internationalism, white Americans are understandably disoriented. Never having considered the unearned privilege of being white and American, all they can see are things being taken away from them. Never having considered solidarity with blacks and Latinos, they see them not as potential allies but as perpetual enemies. Obama's election showed that these appeals to fear can be defeated; events since then indicate that they can still be destructive.

Read the whole thing.

Any analysis of opposition to President Obama that fails to take into account the enormous role played by racism is worse than worthless; it's downright dangerous.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic.