Low Blow

Charles Blow has another column where he makes serious accusations without much evidence. Here's how he starts:

Racist. Tea Party.

Are those separate concepts or a single one? Depends on whom you ask.

According to an article accompanying a Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Wednesday: “About 61 percent of tea party opponents say racism has a lot to do with the movement, a view held by just 7 percent of tea party supporters.”

Even if you believe these numbers, so what? All they say are those who hate the Tea Party call them names. We already knew that.

I checked the source, by the way. According to the poll Blow quotes, less than 30% of Americans see the Tea Party as racist. So the mainstream position is they're not.

But that doesn't matter to Blow, who's ready to believe:

This gulf of perception has left Tea Party organizers struggling to scrub the stain of racism from its image, but those efforts may fly in the face of the facts.

I was curious to see these facts. He finally gets around to them:

....widely cited polling, like the multistate University of Washington survey released last month, has found that large swaths among those who show strong support for the Tea Party also hold the most extreme views on a range of racial issues. The fringe theory is a farce.

[....] Tea Party organizers may want to run away from the facts, but they’re not that fast, and the American people are not that slow.

Once again, I checked his source to see what these "most extreme views" are.

The poll shows "True Believers" of the Tea Party are more likely than "True Skeptics" to believe things like black Americans can work their way up without special favors, that if blacks tried harder they could do as well as whites, and that immigration should be decreased. They were less likely to believe things like homosexuals should legally adopt. Sounds like your basic, run-of-the-mill conservative/liberal split to me. I should add that a majority of the time, these "most extreme views" of the True Believers were closer to the answers of the "Middle Of The Road" respondents than the True Skeptics were.

Then there are their views on race and ethnicity. True Believers were less likely than True Skeptics to find Blacks and Latinos hardworking, intelligent and trustworthy. But True Believers seem to have a rougher view of human nature in general, since they also believe, by and large, that Asians and Whites are less hardworking, intelligent and trustworthy. (I might add that the numbers aren't so wide apart that you don't see a fair amount of crossover in beliefs on both sides.)

And once again, the "extreme" views of the True Believers are, generally speaking, closer to the beliefs of the "Middle Of The Road" faction.

Blow may not like the views of True Believers, but the polls show that far from being extreme, they're, in fact, mainstream. He, and The New York Times, should be embarrassed at such blatant mischaracterization.