I’m not sure how I missed this when it came out:
“The demographics race we’re losing badly,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
It ran in the WaPo. It’s a gaffe in Kinsley’s sense: the inadvertent statement of something true. The Republican Party is the party of angry white guys (and their angry wives): not just angry in general, but angry at people who aren’t white (plus atheists, of course). And they are losing the demographic race, both because there are more non-whites and because under-30 whites are, on average, much less racially angry.
Imagine if Dick Durbin had said something equally tin-eared; the whole country would have heard about it. But Kevin Drum is right (as usual): the Red team simply has a better, and more shameless, echo chamber. Yes, every party has to accept the defects that go along with its virtues, and liberals simply don’t get as much of a charge out of agreeing with one another as conservatives do. But that doesn’t make it any less of a disadvantage at this moment of the campaign season.
[Cross-posted at The Reality-based Community]
