When you’ve been away from blogging, and from regular access to political news, for more or less a month, as I have, there’s a lot of stuff to catch up on. But I have to say, the thing I missed that amazes me the most, while confirming some of my own uncharitable fears about conservatives, was last week’s PPP poll showing that a majority of self-identified Republicans think the struggling and marginal grassroots organization ACORN stole the 2008 election for Barack Obama.
Matt Compton, Adam Serwer and Eric Kleefield all offered some thoughts on this poll, and Jason Zengerle compared it to the Democratic belief that Bush stole the 2000 elections. (Ed. note: I wrote about the poll here.) But I somehow don’t think most progressives are fully grasping the centrality of ACORN to the conservative world-view these days.
I’ve written about this several times over the last thirteen months, but bear with me: ACORN has assumed an all-purpose demonic role for Republicans. They were, in the lurid view of Fox News enthusiasts (embraced on at least one occasion by the McCain-Palin ticket) the cause of the mortgage crisis and the financial meltdown, thanks to the alleged help they provided to shiftless people to obtain mortgages they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay. They then demanded bailouts for their clients. And because a whole lotta socialism was necessary to keep them afloat, they stole the election for their close ally Barack Obama. Coincidentally, of course, and irrelevant to the narrative of ACORN running the country, was the fact that the group is one of the most visibly minority-oriented organizations in national public life.
The fact that there is virtually no empirical evidence for any of these contentions about ACORN (particularly the election-stealing stuff, which is an absolute hallucination by any standard) hasn’t much mattered; the group was far, far too convenient a scapegoat for everything that displeased conservatives since September of 2008.
But in talking about this so many times, it never really occurred to me that a majority of Republicans bought into the ACORN Derangement Syndrome, with only a quarter of them rejecting the idea that this group stole the 2008 elections. Analogizing this to the Democratic reaction to Florida 2008 is ludicrous; Gore did win the popular vote, Florida was incredibly disputed, and the Supreme Court did shut down the recount to get Bush across the finish line. There is not a shred of evidence that Obama didn’t legitimately and decisively win the election, and no significant Republican spokesman doubted it at the time. It took a full year of conservative shrieking about ACORN to instill this crazy theory into the consciousness of rank-and-file Republicans, nicely validating their hatred of Obama and their bizarre claims that he’s some sort of totalitarian revolutionary determined to destroy the Constitution.
It’s a case history in viral demagoguery of the most toxic sort, and reputable Republicans should be even more upset about it than I am.
This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.
