Washington Post columnist and former CNN host Kathleen Parker, who emerged on the national scene in 2008 as a critic of Sarah Palin, has a new column arguing that the Republican Party has become “Palinized.” By that, Parker means that a “tide of know-nothingness…has become de rigueur among the anti-elite, anti-intellectual Republican base,” and, among the party’s presidential candidates, “the least informed earns the loudest applause.”
The latest example of this trend, Parker argues, is the ascendance of Herman Cain. Under criticism for uninformed answers to questions on a variety of foreign-policy issues, Parker writes that Cain is “banking on the hope that GOP contempt for smarty-pants, gotcha journalists will outweigh concerns that he may be out of his league.”
It’s not clear when Parker wrote her column, but a glance at the RealClearPolitics average of polls shows a clear trend: Cain, now third in the GOP race, is going down. And, just anecdotally, discussions with a number of political insiders and regular voters around the country in recent days suggest the reason for Cain’s decline is precisely his difficulty in answering basic questions about U.S. policy. That decline is not the result, or certainly not fully the result, of sexual harassment allegations against Cain, which many in the Republican base view as insufficiently substantiated. In fact, to the degree that some in the GOP believe Cain is being treated unfairly, the harassment issue might actually contribute to some of his continued support. But in any event, Cain is trending downward.
It’s not an anomaly. So far, there have been three Republican candidates who rose and fell quickly in the polls: Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Cain. Each rose because voters liked some combination of his or her message, experience, and personal appeal. But each fell mostly for one reason: Republican voters became concerned about whether they knew enough to be president.
Because the GOP base is conservative, and because the candidates each presented a strong conservative message, it’s hardly a surprise that each received a friendly response early in the game. But once each candidate’s performance in debates or on the stump raised questions about whether he or she had a base of knowledge broad and deep enough to serve as president, Republican supporters began to peel away. Bachmann now ranks sixth in the RealClearPolitics poll standings, while Perry is fourth.
The candidate who has consistently stayed near the top of Republican polls is Mitt Romney. There are no questions about whether he knows enough to be president. The candidate who is rising at the moment, as Parker points out, is Newt Gingrich, about whom the same is true. And the candidate who has stayed around the middle tier of the race is Ron Paul, who, for whatever problems exist in some of his policy positions, has not faced questions about his knowledge of the issues. At the bottom tier of the race, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman have also not faced such questions.
Somehow Parker styles all of this — informed candidates rising, uninformed candidates falling — as a “tide of know-nothingness” engulfing the Republican party. If that were really the case, wouldn’t it be the other way around?
