By John Brummett
New national polling information released by political scientists at the University of Arkansas reveals interesting and perhaps mildly counterintuitive findings about the tea party.
This survey, conducted under the joint aegis of the UA’s Blair Center and Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, shows that devotees of the tea party are better-educated than the rest of the population as well as possessed of higher incomes.
That is the perhaps mildly counterintuitive part, if, like me, you factored a higher yahoo quotient than is apparently so.
What is merely interesting, meaning not surprising, is that a greater percentage of tea party people believe in the inerrancy of the Bible than is the case with the rest of the population, including regular Republicans.
Also interesting is that tea party people are less supportive than the general population, again including regular Republicans, of the supposed ideals of equal opportunity and equal rights for all, specifically minorities.
Tea party people are significantly less supportive of gay rights and significantly more hostile to illegal immigration than garden-variety Republicans.
But what I find most interesting on this subject is not anything contained in this data compiled from more than 3,000 survey calls nationwide last November. Instead, it is in the candid analysis provided me by Dr. Angie Maxwell, assistant professor of political science at the UA.
She said the poll suggests that the common denominator in the tea party’s emergence is President Obama.
“He represents a world they can’t function in,” she said.
First things first, to get it out of the way: Maxwell is not saying that all tea partiers are racists and that their movement is based on a racial bigotry toward this historic president.
She is saying the tea party arises from much more than that — from, as she describes, a coincidence of varying cultural and economic fears all falling under the general heading of a dreaded new world. People with these fears have come to “put all of them,” to “project them,” on Obama, she said, often without basis in fact or fairness.
For example:
If you fear a changing America in which white people become a minority because of the black population as combined with other new ethnic groups and with the Hispanic influx, then Obama, being of mixed race and with a foreign father, personifies that fear for you.
If you fear a changing America in which traditionally conservative Christian church values are being eroded by new forms of spiritual thinking and by cultural changes such as the growing acceptance of homosexuality, then Obama, with a Muslim parent and a former pastor who once screamed “God damn America,” personifies that fear for you.
If your relatively high household income is drawn from the medical profession, from doctoring or as a drug rep, perhaps, and if you fear that health care reform will transform America into something more like a European country and lower your standard of living, then Obama personifies that fear for you. You don’t call it Pelosicare or Reidcare. You call it Obamacare.
Maxwell compared this to the way the Whigs sprang to prominence for a couple of decades solely from resentment of Andrew Jackson.
If she is right, then the Republicans have a short-term window and long-term problem.
The tea party is vital to Republicans at the moment, representing maybe a tenth of the electorate. Republican victories in the next elections will hinge on appeasing this far-right bloc.
But if the glue that holds the tea party together is fear of Obama, then the tea party goes away after Obama goes away.
That would leave the Republicans burdened with a deadly combination — a weak reality, meaning a sort of nondescriptly soft conservatism, and a reputation for a harder conservatism that would have caused an alienation from the more pragmatic, and usually decisive, center.
For immediate purposes though, the tea party lives, and garden-variety Republicans must oblige it, so long as Obama is its bogeyman-in-chief.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
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