Forgive Me, Father, For We Have Blogged

Focus groups interviewed by Democracy Corps, founded by Clinton ex-staffers James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, show that the mainstream media err in assuming that conservative Republicans are motivated by something so prosaic as racial bias:

[T]hese conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years.

And yet reading the data, Andrew Sullivan insists that these conservative voters think Obama's rise "has something to do with black community organizations and Jewish money." Sullivan calls it "the return of Coughlinism," a reference to the anti-Semitic radio preacher, Fr. Charles Coughlin. Interesting that Carville and Greenberg minimize racism as a factor:

[T]he press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters’ beliefs – but they need to get over it.

Only to have Sullivan drag bigotry back in, and with an incendiary reference to Fr. Coughlin, just because one Republican with an active imagination mentioned ACORN and George Soros. That overreaching aside, I think Sullivan is right that the harshness of the conservatives' critique risks driving fiscally conservative but less paranoid independents into the Democrats' camp. I also agree that if the angriest, most frightened voters continue to dominate the party, Gov. Palin will be the 2012 nominee. The hope for a saner GOP: That she really loses big.