According to the Hotline On Call blog, Rep. Adam Putnam, a candidate for Republican conference chair in the House, cited a lack of turnout among “white rednecks who go to church on Sunday” as one of the factors contributing to the party’s midterm losses:
“White rednecks” who “didn’t show up to vote for us” partly cost GOPers their cong. majorities, Rep. Adam Putnam (R-FL) told fellow Republicans today. And Putnam, seeking the post of GOP conference chair, chided ex-Chair J.C. Watts (R-OK) for ruining the conference’s ability to serve its members.
Three Republicans in the room independently confirmed to the Hotline the substance and context of Putnam’s remarks. But Putnam’s chief of staff insists that the remarks were taken out of context.
Examining the 2006 midterms, Putnam blamed the GOP defeat on “the independent vote, the women vote, the suburban vote.” He said that “heck, even the white rednecks who go to church on Sunday didn’t come out to vote for us.”
The “context” that Putnam’s chief of staff cited as a defense is laughable:
Putnam’s chief of staff, John Hambel, said his boss has used the word “redneck” only in the context of sharing polling data from last week’s elections. Hambel said Putnam was listing off different constituencies and ended with saying: “Heck, we even had rednecks who go to church who didn’t come out to vote.”
Is “redneck” part of the polling data?
Meanwhile, Tapped’s Ezra Klein had the same reaction I did — if a Democrat had said this, all hell would have broken loose:
Imagine if Nancy Pelosi uttered the same remark, then compare that imaginary firestorm with the one likely to result from Putnam’s comments. It’s all well and good to argue that Democrats carry seeds of elite condescension towards low-income whites. What’s foolish is to think the GOP’s powerbrokers aren’t precisely as disconnected, though with a heapin’ helpin’ of opportunism and exploitation thrown in for good measure.
The reason for the double standard is that the imaginary Pelosi remark would have reinforced the stereotype of Democrats as elitists who condescend toward poor whites and religious people, whereas the Putnam remark does not reinforce any such stereotype of Republicans. But after the revelations in David Kuo’s book Tempting Faith