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DEEP THOUGHTS FROM JIM DEMINT. [UPDATED.]
This is a novel response to the concern that the GOP has become an exclusively southern party:
DeMint says he isn’t worried. He denied that the GOP has become a southern party, attributing Republican losses in the northeast to some northern voters who have left the region and moved south hoping to avoid labor unions and “forced unionization.” He said Americans will eventually come back into the Republican fold because of growing alarm about the size of government and President Obama’s fiscal policies.
Huh. I am interested in your theories, Mr. DeMint, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. I'd also like to remind the general audience that Jim DeMint is a United States Senator who serves on the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, the Committee on Foreign Relations, and the Joint Economic Committee. He is, in other words, a supposedly serious person doing serious work. And yet he appears to think that the United States has recently experienced a massive migration phenomenon as Northerners moved south to escape "forced unionization." Not only is this false on the merits, but it's not even the sort of intuitively true thing that later turns out to be false. It's just nonsense.
Update: Turns out Jim DeMint isn't quite that crazy. CNN's Political Ticker blog unfairly paraphrased the quote. Kevin Drum has the actual transcript, and DeMint is saying something more along the lines of heavy union density is pushing Pennsylvania in a more liberal direction, which is a fairly banal argument.
COMMENTS (10)
Do you think he is knowingly spewing bullshit or do you think he is deluded enough to believe his bullshit?
Posted by: myrtle parker | April 29, 2009 12:41 PM
Actually I give DeMint half credit. What is the % of auto plants built in right-to-work states since, say, 1978, versus the % built in union-heavy states? Maybe that's what he's thinking about.
Posted by: Nicholas Beaudrot | April 29, 2009 12:45 PM
Well just flip his logic and you get a perfect rebuttal: "Or maybe it's because people are fleeing the south looking for high-paying union jobs in the Northeast. Didja ever think about that?"
Is it true? Did I look up any statistics? Does it even make sense?
Who cares. Bullshitting rulz.
Posted by: mkd | April 29, 2009 1:23 PM
@Nicholas Beaudrot: I wouldn't give DeMint any credit for that. If that's what he's thinking of, then it isn't the workers who feared unions, but the factory owners, and they did so precisely because they knew that their interests were sometimes opposed to the workers' - a fact that DeMint ought to know, and therefore can be inferred to be deliberately obfuscating.
Posted by: chris | April 29, 2009 1:25 PM
Probably just another example of Colbert Syndrome, where conservatives diehards look at pretty much any situation (including situations where comedians are on screen brutally parodying you) and conclude that everything is magically agreeing with you.
Posted by: Hairy Reed | April 29, 2009 1:46 PM
Minty Jim can be assured that those yankee scum will have taken over every state in Dixie before they bother with the shithole (excluding Charleston) that is South Carolina.
Hat-tip, though, to the commenter at Yglesias who noted that "forced unionization" of South Carolina was the sort of thing the GOP was responsible for, and yet is something Minty J can't quite get over.
Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | April 29, 2009 2:35 PM
Senator DeMint is simply carrying on the great tradition of South Carolina which (as it prepared to secede from the Union in 1860) was described as "too small for a republic and too big for an insane asylum". A description that still has considerable merit 149 years later.
Posted by: Patrick Hines | April 29, 2009 3:08 PM
Shorter Demint: We are not a southern party, our voters just happen to be congregating in the south.
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