I See Crazy People, At Least 14% of the Time

From Billmon, comes this little factoid hidden in the latest Gallup poll:

Gallup

That's right, 14% of Americans think the Republicans are too liberal. That's one in seven. This explains a lot of things...

More like this

...liberally re-interpretations of the Constitution...

...liberally granting authority for the executive branch...

...liberally allowing the deficit to balloon...

...liberally giving away government contracts to croneys...

...liberally modifing the truth....

Yeah, they sound pretty liberal to me.

This gives me the creeps. Last night I was watching the Internet archive of last year's Frontline report on Hurricane Katrina -- the one in which a former Homeland Security official insisted to an interviewer that it would be "Orwellian" for the federal government to require standards for local disaster-response planning.

Maybe we should take a poll here. Is that stance (a.) too liberal, (b.) too conservative, or (c.) just plain nuts?

Once again we see that damned 38% of people that think the Republicans can do no wrong. They seem to vote as a block in all polls.

I guess were I to answer the poll, I wouldn't say "too liberal" or "too conservative" for the Republican Party. Given my (admittedly limited) understanding of the term "conservative," the Reps don't really do that kind of thing any more. Sure, they do reactionary social policy, but there's no conservative fiscal policy at all in there anywhere, there's no conservative foreign policy....

They're nuts, nowadays, but I don't know if the nuts vector points anywhere along the liberal/conservative axis.

The notion of "liberal/conservative" as the one way of describing politics is way too simple for reality anyway. Me : I'm strongly pro-gay-marriage, strongly anti-torture, strongly anti-elimiation-of-habeus-corpus, and vaguely anti-gun-control. What does that make me?

-Rob

There has been a solid core of about 20-25% of really hard right wingers since Richard Nixon quit, and that amount of the populice still beleived he was innocent.

Everytime there is a clear issue this hold up. There may be the same for the left, but I have not found it so easy to measure.

By Hank Hibbard (not verified) on 26 Oct 2006 #permalink

Odd: 38% link the Republicans are just right and 14% think they are too liberal. Where are these 52% of people on the Democratic chart? Only 41% think the Democrats are too liberal. So some people must think the Republicans and the Democrats are both just right? Or that the Republicans are too liberal and the Democrats are not?

onymouse:
I think that this represents those that state that there really isn't a "dimes worth of distance" between them. Actually it would be interesting to see this broken out three ways:
How democrats responded, how republicans responded and how "others" responded.