Get Energy Smart! NOW!

Blogging for a sustainable energy future.

Get Energy Smart!  NOW! header image 2

Today’s GOP: Pale, Male, Stale, and addicted to the Tall Tale

November 7th, 2012 · 1 Comment

Today’s core GOP (accurately called the Grand Obstructionist Party) can be easily summarized as:

  • Pale
  • Male
  • Stale, and
  • Addicted to the Tall Tale.

The first three are quite well understood and are a key part of the chattering class analysis about the reasons for Republican Party failures yesterday and their inevitable failures in elections to come. With a political base that is significantly older white males , the Republican Party is leveraging and relying on a demographic that is a dwindling part of the overall population. This is not a path toward electoral success. As Markos put it today:

George W. Bush won 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004. John McCain won 31 percent of it. Mitt Romney won 21 percent. The trend is unmistakable.

Thirteen percent of the vote was African American, 10 percent was Latino, 3 percent was Asian. In 2008, it was 13 African American, 9 percent Latino, 2 percent Asian. Whites went from 74 to 72 percent of the vote. They’ll be under 70 percent in 2016.

Pollsters assumed that non-whites would stay home last night. They didn’t. But they’re still not voting at their percentages of the overall population. Democrats need to keep registering those voters and getting them politically engaged. It’s already exceedingly difficult for Republicans to win the White House without non-white, heavily male vote. It will be virtually impossible.

The fourth, “addicted to the tall tale,” is as critical a description of the core Republican base:

  • Sufferers of anti-science syndrome, with denial of climate science and promotion of “creationism” (and denigration of the Theory of Evolution) as examples were the Republican base (and GOP elected officials) are at odds with the general population
  • Absorbing of out-right lies and deceit about political adversaries. (President Obama as socialist, Muslim, born in Kenya … and equivalents can be described for almost every Democratic politician out there.)
  • And …

“Reality-based politics” is something at odds with a significant share of the Republican Party base. And, perhaps just as inevitably as the other descriptors, this is something that will make it harder and harder for Republicans to win elections in the coming years.

How many non-Tea-Hadists were captured by asserting that Obama wasn’t born in the nation?

With all the disastrous weather of 2012 (heat records broken, drought, wildfires, Derecho, Hurricane Sandy), how many fewer Americans were sympathetic to the Global Warming denial of the Republican Party machine? And, as climate disruption ever-more seriously impacts our lives, how many will be in the future?

The Republican base’s addiction to tall tales doesn’t just make it a laughingstock, it will increasingly reduce the odds of Republicans winning elections — if we work to make it clear to voting Americans how Republicans live in a fantasy-land that, if allowed to influence actual policy, fosters creating nightmares in the real world.

And, until it changes, the Republican Party’s strategy of reliance on the pale, male, stale and leverage of the tall tale will increasingly fail in the American electoral system.

Tags: politics

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Steve Bloom // Nov 8, 2012 at 10:00 pm

    Well, *Southern* is the most important of all, so add “Rebel.” Every time I think about that world-historic ironic realignment, I shake my head in amazement.