The inviolability of the law of unintended consequences has been demonstrated again. Says The Hill 2010 Midterm Election poll, as paraphrased by "Opinionator": "Likely voters in battleground districts see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than they do over the GOP ... 44 percent of likely voters say the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements, whereas 37 percent say it’s the Republican Party that is more dominated by extremists."
True, the results are marginally skewed, since "likely voters" in this election cycle trend to the center-right, which would then skew temperamentally with the above plurality. Yet The Law holds: Notwithstanding months of ribald ridicule of the Tea Party/GOP's roster of nakedly unbalanced candidates for high office, vast swaths of the electorate are not only unrepelled by them, they appear more aligned than ever.
The right is having a proverbial field day with this phenomenon. What doesn't kill them only makes them stronger; assault them sarcastically and they only grow in numbers. In the Times' "Opinionator," conservative blogger JammieWearingFool happily captures the depressing reality: "Despite 18 months of the media calling tea partiers frothing rabble and angry extremists, a new poll shows precisely the opposite.... [C]lear-thinking people have tuned out the lamestream media and their mantra about how crazy tea partiers are. They think they can constantly harp on Angle and O’Donnell yet they overlook the surge nationwide from independents toward the GOP."
Putting aside what the blogger exotically regards as "clear thinking," he does in fact comprehend the right's growing numbers as a jujitsu-maneuver outcome.
And that, gentle reader, returns me to what is by now my rather tiresome complaints about MSNBC's programming, especially its evening lineup of Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.
Yesterday I bemoaned their "untrammeled hysteria" over what promises to be an imaginary wholesale collapse of responsible government at the hands of maybe -- maybe -- 33 + 8 Tea Partiers, out of 535; and, as a subtext, their pound-pound-pound programming of "Be Afraid! We're Doomed!" almost certainly depresses greater turnout.
Yet, you'll be unsurprised to learn, I've another complaint: The Schultz-Olbermann-Maddow fire brigade is contributing to the backlash -- and it's not hard to see how.
Imagine you're an informed, unabashed liberal and you're discussing politics with an independent fence-sitter who happens to let slip some mild sympathy for your ideological opponents' ideas. Naturally you promptly correct his errant thinking but in the process you also imply -- nay, pointedly note -- that he's a wretched idiot for even thinking such a thing. Now I ask you, as a student of human emotions, What will his reaction likely be? You got it: He'll entrench, he'll dig in his offended heels and now insist that he's right, rather than just wonder.
And that -- the precipitating former -- is what Schultz-Olbermann-Maddow have been accomplishing for months. They giggle, they scoff, they ridicule and belittle the right, and throughout, they merely inflame and augment the center-right's creeping certainty.
The prescription: Stick to journalism, stop offending and state the facts with some dignified solemnity. Let Reason -- not ridicule -- prevail.