Another poll proves teabaggers are racists

A Mighty Pale Tea

By Charles M. BlowThis Tea Party wanted to project a mainstream image of a group that is anything but. A New York Times/CBS News poll released on Wednesday found that only 1 percent of Tea Party supporters are black and only 1 percent are Hispanic. It’s almost all white.

And even when compared to other whites, their views are extreme and marginal. For instance, white Tea Party supporters are twice as likely as white independents and eight times as likely as white Democrats to believe that Barack Obama was born in another country.The Tea Party:  Populism of the privileged

By E.J. Dionne Jr.The poll asked: "In recent years, do you think too much has been made of the problems facing black people, too little has been made, or is it about right?" Twenty-eight percent of all Americans--and just 19 percent of those who are not Tea Party loyalists--answered "too much." But among Tea Party supporters, the figure is 52 percent, almost three times the proportion of the rest of the country. A quarter of Tea Partiers say that the Obama administration's policies favor blacks over whites, compared with only 11 percent in the country as a whole.

So race is part of this picture, as is a tendency of Tea Party enthusiasts to side with the better-off against the poor. This puts them at odds with most Americans. The poll found that while only 38 percent of all Americans said that "providing government benefits to poor people encourages them to remain poor," 73 percent of Tea Party partisans believed this.Comment:  If it isn't obvious, "poor" is a classic code word for "minority." When a teabagger thinks of a welfare recipient, he doesn't picture a poor white farmer receiving government subsidies for his crops. He pictures a welfare "queen": a single black woman with an armful of babies living high on the hog via food stamps and child-support checks.

For more on the subject, see Poll Proves Teabaggers Are Racists and Klansmen, Militias, and Teabaggers.