Why doesn’t left understand right?

Published 8:56 pm Monday, November 18, 2013

By Staff Reports

 

It’s always enlightening to see your opponents struggle to understand you. And really, there’s a big deficit in Washington in the left’s understanding of the right. But sometimes the left’s efforts to comprehend and explain the right falls short.

Richard Cohen, of the Washington Post, got himself into trouble last week in such an effort. Writing gleefully about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “Tea-Party problem,” Cohen tried to explain why Republicans would never nominate a moderate conservative for president.

“The day after Chris Christie, the cuddly moderate conservative, won a landslide reelection as the Republican governor of Democratic New Jersey, I took the Internet Express out to Iowa, surveying its various newspapers, blogs and such to see how he might do in the GOP caucuses, won last time by Rick Santorum, neither cuddly nor moderate,” Cohen wrote. “Superstorm Sandy put Christie on the map. The winter snows of Iowa could bury him.”

Cohen’s decision to survey Iowa blogs in 2013 in hopes of gauging the 2014 caucuses is puzzling. Iowa is a terrible indicator of future electoral success — but the GOP knows that, as does the Democratic Party. Ronald Reagan never won Iowa (except when he was unopposed), and Bill Clinton got only one-quarter of “Uncommitted” votes in 1992.

Nor is Iowa a real measure of how Christie might fare with social conservatives, which is Cohen’s mis-read of the Tea Party movement.



Tea Party activists are far more concerned about big government and big deficits than they are about social issues, such as same-sex marriage and abortion. Sure, there’s some overlap. But Iowa Republicans, according to a Des Moines Register poll, are looking for “a candidate focused on civil liberties and a small government rooted in the U.S. Constitution.”

But that’s not what got Cohen in trouble. It’s this paragraph:

“Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the Tea Party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde,” Cohen wrote. “People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children… This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.”

That shows a shocking ignorance about conservatives. Who are these people with “conventional views”? Does he mean conventional GOP views? Maybe, though he didn’t say so. But even so, his claim is demonstrably false.

Interracial marriage is not an issue for most Americans, including Republicans. Despite what a discredited Public Policy Polling survey claims, 87 percent of Americans support interracial marriage. No legitimate recent survey has broken that down by political party.

And who, exactly, is repressing “a gag reflex”?

Certainly not Iowans — who remain stubbornly unconcerned about who is mayor in New York City.

Cohen’s column merely shows how disconnected Washington elites are with the rest of America.

It’s a political “here there be dragons.”