"Birther" as metaphor…

…for everything that’s wrong with the Republican Party, that is.

New research out from DailyKos (a liberal site with a respected polling operation) shows that 58% of Republicans either aren’t sure President Obama was born in the U.S. or don’t think he was.

That compares with 77% of Americans overall who see Obama’s birth as a dead issue. That’s a pretty massive disconnect.

When you look at the details, the GOP rank-and-file looks even more out of touch: The lion’s share of “flat-earth-birthers” live in the South and a bunch of them are older, age 60+.

The problem here is pretty simple: Big confident political movements have to know how to control their fringes.

But with this rural, Southern white tail wagging the GOP dog, progress toward some kind of revival is difficult to imagine.

These numbers prompted Glenn Thrush, with Politico, to ask, “When do we start a serious dialog about the Birther movement being a proxy for racism that is unacceptable to articulate in more direct terms?”

When you roll the birther-nonsense into the larger PR nightmare that is Glenn Beck (“This guy [Obama] I believe is a racist.” and Rush Limbaugh, it’s bleak.

This is tough because if there’s one thing Democrats need right now it’s a strong, responsible opposition party — one that can challenge the Obama agenda on its merits, not on bizarro stuff.