It’s the culture war stupid

It’s the culture war stupid

by digby

I’ve been skeptical that Rick Perry tanked because of his immigration stance from the beginning and I think this bears that out:

Remember how Republican pundits declared that Newt Gingrich had inflicted major damage to his campaign because he dared to embrace what both Michele Bachmann and Romney described as “amnesty” during CNN’s November 22 Republican primary debate?
Well, ABC and Washington Post asked Iowa Republicans which candidate they thought would do the best job handling immigration issues. Their answer?

Regardless of who you may support, which of the Republican candidates do you trust most to handle immigration?
Gingrich: 27
Perry: 18
Paul: 13
Romney: 8
Bachmann: 7
Santorum: 3
Huntsman: 3

They just didn’t like Perry and I’m guessing it’s because if you close your eyes when he’s talking you hear George W. Bush. After 8 years of listening to someone over and over again you develop a subliminal reaction to the sound of his voice and I don’t think that reaction is a pleasant one.

be that as it may, it does raise the question of why these Hard (Tea) Partying primary voters are so willing to overlook Newtie’s immigration stance when they said they hated Perry’s. There’s not that much difference between them. So what gives?

I think Ben Adler gets it right in this piece in which he reports that the GOP establishment is getting desperate and looking for ways they might boost Huntsman:

Look at Will’s argument for Huntsman, and you see a crucial fallacious assumption: that Republican primary voters care about policy. Will writes:

[Huntsman] endorses Paul Ryan’s budget and entitlement reforms. (Gingrich denounced Ryan’s Medicare reform as “right-wing social engineering.”) Huntsman would privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Gingrich’s benefactor). Huntsman would end double taxation on investment by eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends. (Romney would eliminate them only for people earning less than $200,000, who currently pay just 9.3 percent of them.) Huntsman’s thorough opposition to corporate welfare includes farm subsidies. (Romney has justified them as national security measures—food security, somehow threatened. Gingrich says opponents of ethanol subsidies are “big-city” people hostile to farmers.)… Between Ron Paul’s isolationism and the faintly variant bellicosities of the other six candidates stands Huntsman’s conservative foreign policy, skeptically nuanced about America’s need or ability to control many distant developments.

Does a Republican primary voter in Iowa favor eliminating subsidies for corn? Does a typical middle-class, home-owning Republican support privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Support for the free market is a rhetorical position for rank-and-file conservatives, not a principle strong enough to withstand any conflict with their own self-interest. (For an example, read Joe Klein’s description in Time of Romney contending on the campaign trail with Iowa Republicans who don’t want their ethanol subsidies to expire.)

For many Republicans, nominal fiscal conservatism is really about the culture war rather than economic policy. When I interviewed attendees at Newt Gingrich’s Staten Island Tea Party town hall meeting on Saturday, the grievances articulated were not inefficient programs like farm subsidies. It was an inchoate anger that some vaguely defined band of derelicts refuses to work and demands handouts. Sometimes the malefactors are hippies occupying Wall Street. Sometimes they are illegal immigrants. But they are never farmers.

This is what Newt has that Romney and Huntsman are missing: culture war cred.This is what they crave:

(Notice Frank Luntz’s delirious genuflecting …)

That’s what the base wants. They want their worldview validated. And their worldview is not concerned with “fiscal responsibility” or deficit reduction or shared sacrifice. It’s concerned with stopping liberals (and their various constituency groups) from achieving mainstream credibility and real political power. All else flows from that.

Think about some of the things the audiences have cheered for in these debates so far: executions, the uninsured being forced to “take responsibility” for their decisions, the collapsed moral system of the left (they are dirty and smelly too.) (And they booed an active duty gay soldier.) These are all hot button culture war issues. This is what really motivates them.

Newtie’s the only professional culture warrior in the race who is credible as a presidential contender. He helped them rediscover their true calling in these debates. Huntsman and Romney might as well be speaking in Swahili. Newt’s telling them exactly what they want to hear.

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