{"id":935,"date":"2009-07-31T09:03:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-31T13:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/07\/31\/birther-as-metaphor\/"},"modified":"2009-07-31T09:03:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-31T13:03:00","slug":"birther-as-metaphor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/07\/31\/birther-as-metaphor\/","title":{"rendered":"&quot;Birther&quot; as metaphor&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;for everything that&#8217;s wrong with the Republican Party, that is.<\/p>\n<p>New research out from DailyKos (a liberal site with a respected polling operation) shows that 58% of Republicans either aren&#8217;t sure President Obama was born in the U.S. or don&#8217;t think he was.<\/p>\n<p>That compares with 77% of Americans overall who see Obama&#8217;s birth as a dead issue.  That&#8217;s a pretty massive disconnect.<\/p>\n<p>When you look at the details, the GOP rank-and-file looks even more out of touch:  The lion&#8217;s share of &#8220;flat-earth-birthers&#8221; live in the South and a bunch of them are older, age 60+.<\/p>\n<p>The problem here is pretty simple:  Big confident political movements have to know how to control their fringes.<\/p>\n<p>But with this rural, Southern white tail wagging the GOP dog, progress toward some kind of revival is difficult to imagine.<\/p>\n<p>These numbers prompted Glenn Thrush, with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.politico.com\/blogs\/glennthrush\/\">Politico<\/a>, to ask, &#8220;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?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>When you roll the birther-nonsense into the larger PR nightmare that is Glenn Beck (&#8220;This guy [Obama] I believe is a racist.&#8221; and Rush Limbaugh, it&#8217;s bleak.<\/p>\n<p>This is tough because if there&#8217;s one thing Democrats need right now it&#8217;s a strong, responsible opposition party &#8212; one that can challenge the Obama agenda on its merits, not on bizarro stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;for everything that&#8217;s wrong with the Republican Party, that is. New research out from DailyKos [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}