Political Profiling: Pundits in Southland

I’ve lived down here in Lousyana for about 16 years now.  I never expected to have a southern address.   NEVER.  I remember watching dinner time news as a kid.  Two things stood out to me.  The endless Vietnam War news and body counts were very disturbing.  Watching angry white southerners fight desegregation with words and fire hoses was the other horrifying story. Who would want to live in a place like that?  Today’s South is a complex place.  There are a lot of folks down here that would prefer to live in the remote past. This political season appears to be bringing out the ones that want to erase modernity.  They want to wrap their prejudices up in religion and the American Flag.  As we wrap up the Southern Primary season this week with the Louisiana primary on Saturday, I’d just like to remind you that hateful rubes live everywhere. You probably won’t get that message by reading or watching the news.

The pundits and press have been chasing the Republican candidates around my neck of the woods and have come face-to-face with that brand of Southerner.   A lot of  economically and culturally insecure rednecks have not failed to disappoint them.  You look around for a stereotype and you can surely find one.  Here’s a little bit from a Santorum shindig up the road in Baton Rouge.  My daughter lives about 2 miles from the location. This pastor is a living, breathing stereotype of the Southern Baptist preacher with the exception he’s changed just enough to bless a Roman Catholic Yankee.  About 40 years ago, that would’ve been unheard of.  Such is progress in some parts of our country.

Just in case you can’t stomach the whole thing, here’s the synopsis from Right Wing Watch.

Greenwell Springs Baptist Church pastor Dennis Terry introduced presidential candidate Rick Santorum and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins tonight in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with a rousing speech railing against liberals and non-Christians and condemning abortion rights, “sexual perversion,” same-sex marriage and secular government. Terry said that America “was founded as a Christian nation” and those that disagree with him should “get out! We don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Mohammad, we don’t worship Allah!” Terry, who has a long history of attacks against the gay community, went on to criticize marriage equality for gays and lesbians, and said that the economy can only recover when we “put God back” in government.

We’re not the only ones that got this treatment.  Santorum managed to whip out his man-on-dog wackiness in Illinois too. However, the punditry isn’t describing the audience in quite the same way.

But, here is an interesting conversation that’s come up during their trek down here.  Should the media apologize for showing exactly how stupid voters are?  Of course, you know exactly where the examples come from.

We arrived at this current round of stupidity-skepticism because of where the Republican primary ended up. Last week’s big contests were in Alabama, Mississippi, and Hawaii. The candidates, for unselfish reasons, opted to skip the last state and campaign in the Deep South. Pollsters and reporters, dutifully covering the race, discovered voters who believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that he was born in some foreign terrorist hotbed.

Nobody should have been surprised. Mississippi’s primary voters, some of the most conservative in the lower 48, are also some of the poorest. That wasn’t new. Sixty-three years ago, in Southern Politics in State and Nation, V.O. Key observed that “every other southern state finds some reason to fall back on the soul-satisfying exclamation, ‘Thank God for Mississippi.’ ” Public Policy Polling didn’t goose its results. It pointed out that most Mississippi Republicans believed untrue things that confirmed their suspicions about Barack Obama.

I trekked to Mississippi and Alabama last weekend for a few stories about the primaries. The only way I could have avoided hearing some confirmation biases was by locking myself in a leftover sensory depravation chamber from the Altered States set. While they were waiting for Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum or Jeff Foxworthy to start talking, I asked why they thought Barack Obama had won in 2008. Sometimes a voter would go on a tangent and talk about the president’s unfamiliarity with John 3:16; sometimes they’d riff on how Mormonism wasn’t really Christianity. Some of what they said wound up in a slide show. The rest of it informed how I read Tuesday’s election results—Mitt Romney, who’d outspent everyone in both states, coming in third place.

Voters aren’t saints. When primaries get to certain parts of the country, they get disturbing, fast. In 2008, anybody with a digital camera could interview white Democrats who feared Barack Obama for the wrong reasons. One of the videos that went viral pitted a shocked reporter from the Real News against West Virginians who would have none of his logic.

“Why do you think he’s Muslim?” asked the reporter in one scene. “He wasn’t raised Muslim.”

“I don’t agree with that,” shrugged his subject.

That’s a report by David Weigel and Slate. Part of his piece was aimed at a Bill Maher program from last week. You can go watch a video and be appalled at some folks from Mississippi if you can take Maher’s smarmy, patronizing assholiness. Part of Weigals’ bit was inspired by this Politico article which doesn’t focus on the dumb Southerner sterotype but the dumb voters in general.

“The first lesson you learn as a pollster is that people are stupid,” said Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm. “I tell a client trying to make sense of numbers on a poll that are inherently contradictory that at least once a week.”

Jensen, a Democrat, pointed to surveys showing that voters embraced individual elements of the Affordable Care Act, while rejecting the overall law, as an example of the political schizophrenia or simple ignorance that pollsters and politicians must contend with.

“We’re seeing that kind of thing more and more. I think it’s a function of increased political polarization and voters just digging in their heels and refusing to consider the opposing facts once they’ve formed an opinion about something,” said Jensen, who has generated eye-catching data showing many GOP primary voters still question the president’s religion and nationality. “I also think voters are showing a tendency to turn issues that should be factual or non-factual into opinions. If you show a Tennessee birther Obama’s birth certificate, they’re just going to say ‘well in my opinion he’s not a real American.’ It’s not about the birth certificate; it’s about expressing hatred for Obama in any form they can.”

But irrationality on policy issues transcends party lines and cuts across groups that feel differently about the president. Taken all together, the issue polling compiled so far in the 2012 cycle presents a sharp corrective to the candidates’ description of the race as a great debate placing two starkly different philosophies of government before an informed electorate.

In reality, the contest has been more like a game of Marco Polo, as a hapless gang of Republican candidates and a damaged, frantic incumbent try to connect with a historically fickle and frustrated electorate.

And “fickle” is a nice way of describing the voters of 2012, who appear to be wandering, confused and Forrest Gump-like through the experience of a presidential campaign. It isn’t just unclear which party’s vision they’d rather embrace; it’s entirely questionable whether the great mass of voters has even the most basic grasp of the details – or for that matter, the most elementary factual components – of the national political debate.

I’ve written a lot about the telling and embracing of outright lies this primary season.  It’s party of a bigger, very human picture.  People like to have their beliefs reinforced.  It makes them feel better in a chaotic world.  It’s why history is full of successful confidence men and games. None of that history is limited to the modern U.S. south.  But, some times you wouldn’t know that when reading stuff that comes out of Washington DC or New York City.  I’ve lived other places.  I found rubes, bigots and idiots wherever I have lived.  I’ve also found some genuinely loving and intelligent beings.  The one thing that I have noticed that’s different about Southerners is that they are straightforward when it comes to expressing things.  Head up to Michelle Bachmann’s Minnesota and you are going to find some of those same kinds of hateful attitudes.  I guarantee it.  I lived there too.  You can read between their lines and find the same ick factor.  For some reason, the Beltway and Manhattan set prefer to come down here and dredge up the Deliverance Set.  I’m not sure if it’s just because it’s easier to find them down here or because that’s what they start looking for and find it.  I guess voters aren’t the only ones that can be real stupid.  Just remember, the worst of the culture warriors this election came from Minnesota and Pennsylvania.   (Newt’s from Pennsylvanian too.)