The Republican plan to refund $100 to taxpayers to compensate for higher gas taxes doesn’t seem to be very popular:

Aides for several Republican senators reported a surge of calls and e-mail messages from constituents ridiculing the rebate as a paltry and transparent effort to pander to voters before the midterm elections in November.

“The conservatives think it is socialist bunk, and the liberals think it is conservative trickery,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, pointing out that the criticism was coming from across the ideological spectrum.

Angry constituents have asked, “Do you think we are prostitutes? Do you think you can buy us?” said another Republican senator’s aide, who was granted anonymity to openly discuss the feedback because the senator had supported the plan.

Conservative talk radio hosts have been particularly vocal. “What kind of insult is this?” Rush Limbaugh asked on his radio program on Friday. “Instead of buying us off and treating us like we’re a bunch of whores, just solve the problem.” In commentary on Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume called the idea “silly.”

This reaction highlights a fundamental misunderstanding: most voters aren’t narrowly self-interested in the sense that people tend to assume. My guess is that the public would prefer that politicians deal with the problem rather than get a $100 election-year pander. And libertarian conservatives have to be revolted at this kind of bread and circuses governance.

Update 5/1 10:31 AM: In comments, Tof offers a different interpretation that I considered but didn’t post — people may just be insulted by the size of the rebate. There’s a model in economics called the ultimatum game in which one person gets to propose a division of a fixed amount of money to a second person, who can either take it, in which case they both get their proposed shares, or refuse, leaving both players with nothing. The second person “should” take whatever is offered since otherwise they will get zero, but experiments all over the world show that people who receive low offers frequently refuse them because they are perceived as unfair. The reaction to the $100 rebate may be analogous.