The Republican Party Needs to Get a Grip

By Ana Marie Cox, Guardian UK

25 September 11

Never mind the candidates, can you believe what GOP debate audiences are telling us? The Republican party needs to get a grip: cheering executions and booing a gay soldier in prime time are not good for the brand.

robably the best thing that can be said about the audiences for the GOP presidential debates is that they are not representative of either the Republican party or the country as a whole. For one thing, debate audiences have an active interest in politics, a passion the overwhelming majority of Americans lack. But that indifference towards the political process also translates into an amiable ambivalence regarding the government's role in our lives: "live and let live" could be our national motto, right behind "super size me", in terms of how often we apply any piece of wisdom to our daily lives.

By contrast - and it is a stark one - Republican debate audiences have thus far shown themselves to be in favor of both government cruelty and personal vengeance.

Thus bloodlust was explicit when a vocal contingent hooted its approval for Rick Perry's bloody tenure as the killingest governor in American history, as well as when a slightly less rabid crowd indicated that sometimes sick people should just be left to die. Yet neither of these distasteful examples of a casual and deadly application of conservative political philosophy was quite as surprising - and as antithetical to a precious GOP myth - as Thursday night's petulant dismissal of a gay soldier whose only offense was honesty.

Obviously, such behavior goes against the "support the troops" jingoism Republicans have traditionally worked in parallel to their enthusiasm for military spending. But at the moment, its hypocrisy isn't quite as galling as the mere fact that it happened.

During the general election, the non-partisan commission on presidential debates oversees the process and it discourages audience participation. So, primary debates have always been more raucous. But in recent memory, they have not been so belligerently so.

What the hell is happening out there? Polls show that Republican voters aren't that excited about their candidates. Then is the exuberance that would be applied to an individual campaign spilling out into indiscriminate exclamations over policy? If so, how come we can't get more vocalising on behalf of the party's less ugly philosophies: three cheers for reducing the corporate income tax! When I say "state," you say "rights!"

Those ideas have their supporters, of course. Fanatical ones (looking at you, Ron Paul). It may just be that issues that can be personalised (there's the soldier, there's the dead prisoner, there's the sick man) draw out more visceral responses.

But what should concern the GOP is how their audiences' reactions distort platforms and campaigns. A 2007 study showed that cheering influenced positively - and measurably - a viewing audience's perception of a candidate's performance. If the campaigns proceed and profit from these unruly, even uncivilised outbreaks, the party will get pulled further and further from the core of its appeal to moderates, which used to be that Republicans are the people who will let you be.

The news outlets that organise these debates have no interest at all in keeping the GOP from embarrassing itself. Indeed, they're willing to lead the way.