Saturday, April 24, 2010

The Tea Partiers: Older, richer and more resentful.

I can't even feign surprise at this.

A comprehensive poll conducted for the New York Times and CBS News and released late Monday CBS News/New York Times essentially found what anyone watching a couple minutes of news footage of a rally would intuit: the 18 percent of the nation that identifies with the Tea Party movement tends to be white, male, older than 45 and Republican. And also hypocritical: despite their anti-spending rhetoric, Tea Party supporters told pollsters that two of the federal government’s most money-consuming programs, Social Security and Medicare, are worth the cost to taxpayers (maybe not a surprise, given the Tea Partiers’ average age).
The poll also found that they are wealthier and better-educated than the public as a whole, despite Fox's attempts to portray them as ordinary Joe's standing up for their rights. They are rich people who are annoyed that Obama is doing too much for the poor. On what planet do the rich take to the streets demanding that the government stop aiding the poor?

Selfishness on that scale is simply breathtaking.
25 percent of the movement’s supporters think that the administration favors blacks over whites (compared with 11 percent of the general public). This point is reinforced by a study released last week by the University of Washington, which discovered that people who think that “the U.S. government has done too much to support blacks” were 36 percent more likely to support the Tea Party than those who didn’t think so. Among whites who approve of the Tea Party, only 35 percent said they believe blacks are hard-working, only 45 percent believe blacks are intelligent, and just 41 percent believe that they’re trustworthy.
And I keep detecting a hint of racism in all of this? Silly old me....

Click here for full article.

No comments: