The natural fallout of standing for very little
by digby
So this Pew Poll has all the conservatives running around crowing about how much smarter they are than those dumb Democrats:
If you read the accompanying breakdown you will see that there are lots of reasons for this, mostly a matter of age demographics. Young people don’t know the politicians and older people are more misinformed about certain issues. But at first glance, I had to laugh. Why don’t Democrats know that the Republicans are more conservative? Well maybe it’s because the Democrats keep pushing conservative policies. Certainly from the rhetoric you’d think that being a conservative is something both parties aspire to. Nobody wants to be a liberal, God knows. And even those who call themselves progressives most often say it under their breath, as if it’s a slightly shameful designation.
And on some of those issues, I think Pew was wrong to say that one party or the other was clearly in favor. For instance, Democratic leaders have been crowing to anyone who’ll listen about their grand success at deficit reduction, a proxy for reducing the size of government. You can’t blame Democrats for thinking that’s a big Democratic issue. There are plenty of Democrats who support things like drilling in ANWAR and restricting abortion rights. It’s certainly true that Republicans are required to support those things while many Democrats take the other side. But it’s not all that clear cut that the party takes the liberal position.
As I said, the analysis of those numbers shows that these results can be accounted for by demographic differences. But it’s not as if the Democratic leadership has been out there drawing sharp differences. You can’t blame their voters for being confused about what the party stands for.
It will be interesting to see how the Republicans deal with the phenomenon on their side as their right wing rebels against the erroneous notion being pimped by a bunch of grifters and charlatans that the GOP is much too liberal. Should be fun.