The Unbearable Whiteness of Being...a Birther
As has been documented in detail, the anti-Obama birther movement is strongest in precisely those states where Republicans poll best and, ironically, health care is worst. But despite experiencing serial embarrassments akin to learning the sun does not rise in the West, a new Pew Research Center poll shows Republican want more - and not less - media coverage of their collective descent into delusion. Of course, that would involve deeper discussion of the racial flat-eartherism of the almost exclusively white Obama birth certificate crowd.
As ThinkProgress noted, the deniers of Obama's Hawaiian birth are essentially still fighting the 2008 campaign by other means:
"A plurality, 39 percent, of self-identified Republicans" believe that there has been "too little" coverage of "allegations that President Obama was not born in the United States"
Michael Dimock, an associate director at the Pew Research Center, told the Washington Independent's Dave Weigel that Pew's finding "goes back to what we tracked last year, when we consistently found that 10 or 11 percent of Americans believed that he was Muslim." "There is a core group of Americans who have never been comfortable with Barack Obama. A story like this sort of resonates with these folks. Oh! Maybe he isn't one of us," said Dimock.
And that "core group of Americans" is Republican, Southern - and white.
In the staggering DaliyKos/Research 2000 poll released last week, a stunning 58% of Republicans did not believe (28%) or were unsure (30%) that President Barack Obama was in fact born in the United States. (Nationally, only 11% of Americans denied Obama's natural citizenship, with another 12% in doubt.) To be sure, this is a Southern pathology, a region home to 69% of all birthers and the only part of the country to increase its Republican presidential vote in 2008. Even in Virginia, a state carried by Obama last year, just 32% of Republicans believe the President was born in this country.
As Markos noted, Dave Weigel at the Washington Independent dug deeper into the DK/R2000 numbers for those states where the old times there are not forgotten. Here are the Southern birthers in black and white, or more aptly, just white:
So what proportion of Southern whites doubt that Obama is an American citizen? While[Del] Ali [of Research 2000] did not release the racial breakdowns for the the South, and cautioned that the margin of error in the smaller sample of 720 people would be larger than the national margin of error (2 percent), the percent of white Southern voters may be higher than 70 percent. More than 30 percent of the people polled in the South were non-white, and very few of them told pollsters that they had questions about Obama's citizenship. In order for white voters to drive the South's "don't know" number to 30 percent and it's "born outside the United States" number to 23 percent, as many as three-quarters of Southern whites told pollsters that they didn't know where Obama was born.
Which may explain some of the shocking signs and behavior of furious tea baggers trying to disrupt and derail Democratic health care events. Meanwhile, at a town hall meeting in Missouri, Republican Rep. Todd Akin joked with his constituents using language they'd be sure to understand:
Different people from Washington, DC have come back to their districts and had town hall meetings, and they almost got lynched. (APPLAUSE)
I assume you're not approving lynchings, because we don't want to do that. (LAUGHTER)
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