The Natural Repellent of the New Republican

Joe Klein attended a focus froup in Florida during the Republican CNN/YouTube dabate, and gives ups a snapshot of the Republican soul:

In the next segment--the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee's college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants--I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, "After all, these are children of God," the dials plummeted. And that happened time and again through the evening: Any time any candidate proposed doing anything nice for anyone poor, the dials plummeted (30s). These Republicans were hard.

But there was worse to come: When John McCain started talking about torture--specifically, about waterboarding--the dials plummeted again. Lower even than for the illegal Children of God. Down to the low 20s, which, given the natural averaging of a focus group, is about as low as you can go. Afterwards, Luntz asked the group why they seemed to be in favor of torture. "I don't have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11," said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer. The group applauded, appallingly.

This is why there is such a divide in this country. It is not because the Republicans are too conservative and Democrats are too liberal. The Democrats are actually very centrist, historically. The only leftward stand they take is on health care and even those proposals are fairly moderate, including both private and public insurances. You might even call the top-tier Democrats, Eisenhower Republicans.

The divide in this country is because the Republicans have gone so far to the right that they are off the reservation. A good portion of these guys are legitimately crazy. If I heard someone applaud torture I wouldn't allow them around my kids.

Here's Klein's parting shot:

They seemed nice, concerned, relatively well informed and entirely intolerant citizens. This level of anger--the topic of my column below--seems likely to be exploited disgracefully by the Republican candidate in the general election campaign, especially if it's Romney. I hope the nativists lose, as they almost always have in American history. But I'm worried that they may not.

Yea, they seem nice until you hear them talk, and then you just put your hands up and slowly back out of the room.