{"id":12110,"date":"2011-11-21T20:40:40","date_gmt":"2011-11-22T01:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=12110"},"modified":"2011-11-21T20:41:07","modified_gmt":"2011-11-22T01:41:07","slug":"gop-voters-smarter-than-kathleen-parker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/12110\/gop-voters-smarter-than-kathleen-parker\/","title":{"rendered":"GOP Voters Smarter than Kathleen Parker"},"content":{"rendered":"

Washington Post<\/em> columnist and failed CNN host Kathleen Parker caused a stir this weekend with a piece claiming that the alleged \u2018know-nothingness\u2019 of Sarah Palin is infecting Republican primary voters<\/a>.\u00a0 The evidence, as Byron York of the Washington Examiner<\/em> points out<\/a>, points the opposite way.<\/p>\n

So far, there have been three Republican candidates who rose and fell quickly in the polls: Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Cain.\u00a0 Each rose because voters liked some combination of his or her message, experience, and personal appeal.\u00a0 But each fell mostly for one reason: Republican voters became concerned about whether they knew enough to be president.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Bachmann now ranks sixth in the RealClearPolitics poll standings, while Perry is fourth.<\/p>\n

The candidate who has consistently stayed near the top of Republican polls is Mitt Romney.\u00a0 There are no questions about whether he knows enough to be president.\u00a0\u00a0 The candidate who is rising at the moment, as Parker points out, is Newt Gingrich, about whom the same is true.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 At the bottom tier of the race, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman have also not faced such questions.<\/p>\n

Somehow Parker styles all of this — informed candidates rising, uninformed candidates falling — as a “tide of know-nothingness” engulfing the Republican party.\u00a0 If that were really the case, wouldn’t it be the other way around?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As J. Robert Smith of the American Thinker<\/em> reasons<\/a>, Parker\u2019s position on Palin and the GOP is less about sound analysis, and a heckuva lot to do with her tack to the left as she\u2019s ascended the media ladder from National Review<\/em> to the Washington Post<\/em>.\u00a0 Parker might want to stop by the offices of George Will and Charles Krauthammer to hear how her fellow Post<\/em> columnists kept their principles and<\/em> their audience.\u00a0 After all, conservatives don\u2019t need another David Frum telling them how out-of-touch they are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington Post columnist and failed CNN host Kathleen Parker caused a stir this weekend with a piece claiming that the alleged \u2018know-nothingness\u2019 of Sarah Palin is infecting Republican primary voters.\u00a0 The evidence, as Byron York of the Washington Examiner points out, points the opposite way. So far, there have been three Republican candidates who rose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[841,928,3206,3205,1784,365],"class_list":["post-12110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-2012-elections","tag-conservative","tag-david-frum","tag-kathleen-parker","tag-republican","tag-sarah-palin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12110"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12117,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12110\/revisions\/12117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}