Not Every Conservative Is A Boorish Slob Like Chris Christie And Rob Ford But...

Can you guess which political party these 2 are leaders of?

Conservatives report that they weigh more than liberals report weighing. That isn't just because more liberals are starving and poor or because conservatives are selfish, greedy bastards who inevitably all turn into Chris Christie and Rob Ford. No, according to the scholarly study by John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford, Predisposed, liberals picked arugula as their choice of salad green more than twice as often as conservatives. In a subchapter of their book, "Meatloaf Conservatives and White Wine Liberals," they try to explain that there's more to conservatism and liberalism than mere politics.

One of the issues dividing the 2008 Republican and Democratic U.S. presidential candidates was their differing perspectives on aromatic, peppery tasting salad greens. The big veggie controversy was rooted in a comment made by Democratic nominee Barack Obama during his primary campaign in Iowa. In making a point about farmers not seeing more income in their pocket despite price increases in grocery stores he said, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and seen what they charge for arugula?” This comment came back to haunt him as his opponent in the general election, Republican John McCain, used it to highlight the clear choice that voters faced. One candidate was a wine-sippin’, Ivy League-educated liberal with a taste for fancy, over-priced, French-sounding lettuce. The other candidate was an all-American guy who preferred regular food like red meat and gravy (McCain professed not to be a big veggie man).

This may all sound like caricature. Food snobs who lean left when passing on their policy opinions, not just their recipes. Meat and potatoes conservatives who have a taste for, wouldn’t you know, meat and potatoes. There is something vaguely Monty Python-esque in the notion of the two candidates for the most powerful executive office on the planet appealing to voters on the basis of their favorite foods. Still, McCain was onto something. Political differences are not just aired around the dinner table; they have a strong relationship to what we like to see on the dinner table.

…Conservatives like beef and liberals are more likely to be vegetarians. Conservatives also report weighing more, which is not surprising given that they don’t exactly seem to be eating lightly. The difference is also supported by mounds of anecdotal evidence… McCain was far from the first to highlight that actual and aspiring White House occupants are distinguished by food. President George H. Bush famously didn’t like his broccoli. His son, George W. Bush liked plain pretzels to snack on when he was president and choked on one while watching TV at the White House in 2002. Rather than highlighting processed, high carb, sodium-laden snack foods like pretzels, the Obamas went organic and started their own kitchen garden in back of the White House.

This all seems to support a general pattern: when it comes to food, liberals are more likely to seek out the new, the novel, and the exotic while conservatives are more likely to stick with the tried and true. Since the evidence was a bit unsystematic, however, we wanted to test this very proposition in a study of our own. We took a random sample of about 350 adults residing near a particular city in the Midwestern United States and gave them a lengthy survey asking all sorts of questions including a battery of items on their tastes and preferences. One of the questions was: “Given a choice between a favorite meal and a new and exotic dish you’ve never tried before, which would you choose?” The response options were in the form of a 5-point scale where 1=definitely choose the favorite dish and 5=definitely choose the new dish. Self-identified conservatives averaged a 2.5 on this scale, liberals averaged about 3.0. That may not seem like a lot, but the difference was statistically significant. In other words, it supports the general pattern and provides systemic evidence that more informal surveys as well as frequently repeated anecdotes are based on a real relationship.

If non-political differences between liberals and conservatives were limited to food, they might amount to nothing more than an amusing piece of trivia. Yet what is really interesting is that this general pattern seems to extend well beyond food preferences. We asked our survey spondents other questions about their likes and dislikes. What did they find funny? What sort of fiction do they like to read? What sort of art to they like to look at? How into new music are they? Sure enough, on the majority of these items (11 of 18) we found statistically significant differences between liberals and conservatives (the others simply did not inspire much difference one way or the other). In other words, the mean responses of liberals consistently favored the new experience, the abstract, the non-conforming. Conservatives just as consistently favored tradition experiences that were closer to reality and predictable patterns. Conservatives, for example, preferred their poems to rhyme and fiction that ended with a clear resolution. Liberals were more likely to write fiction and paint, or attend a music concert. There was even a suggestion that these differences extended to the types of humor found funniest.

We are far from the first social scientists to observe liberal-conservative differences on a broad range of non-political preferences. There have been a number of studies published in academic journals examining political orientations and humor preferences. Several of these have been done by psychologist Glenn Wilson, who finds that jokes that “failed to provide resolution of incongruous elements” are less likely to hit the conservative funny bone. Wilson found this to be true in the U.K. in 1969; we found a similar pattern in the U.S. in 2010 so apparently the distinction is stable across at least some cultural contexts. Another study by Wilson from decades ago mirrors our findings on art preferences-- abstract, complex art is less appreciated by conservatives. Other research confirms that conservatives are less likely to be involved in artistic activities and there is at least one study besides ours reporting a systematic liberal-conservative divide on poetry preferences.

One of the most fascinating recent studies suggesting that liberals and conservatives differ on much more than politics was done by Dana Carney of Columbia University and several colleagues. With permission, they systematically inventoried the contents of bedrooms and office spaces of roughly 150 people. They found that tastes and preferences not only correlated with political orientation, but were manifested in their personal environments. For example, conservatives were more likely to have items associated with organization and neatness-- laundry baskets, postage stamps, event calendars while liberals were more likely to have art supplies, stationary and a broad variety of music CDs. Their wide-ranging study concluded that political orientation seems to reflect everything from behavioral patterns to travel choices to the way we, “decorate our walls, clean our bodies and our homes, and…choose to spend our free time.” Other studies show particular leisure pursuits (NASCAR vs. soccer) and career paths are more attractive to liberals than conservatives and vice versa. Academics, for example, are well known to be a left-leaning lot.

And it is not just social scientists and websites that have picked up on the fact that liberals and conservatives differ in their tastes and preferences for much beyond politics. The Republican National Committee hired market research firms to analyze partisan consumption patterns so they could better target political messages. Among their findings: a partisan divide is clearly evident in car ownership. At the high end, Republicans tend to favor Porsches (nearly 60 percent of Porsche owners identify as Republicans), while Democrats favor Volvos. At the lower end, Republicans tend to like American-made cars; Democrats, Hyundais. Republicans tend to show more loyalty to a particular car brand while Democrats shop around more. In other words, Republicans seem to favor established, traditional automobile manufacturers and stick with them. Democrats have weaker brand loyalty and are more willing to check out alternatives.

The Center for Responsive Politics looked at the stock investments of members of Congress and found a clear divide on investment patterns. Republicans tend to favor industrial and resource extraction stocks (think BP and Exxon); Democrats high tech stocks. In other words, Democrats favor the stocks of companies dependent upon creativity and new thinking while Republicans tend to favor companies that deal in something tangible. True, party identification is not synonymous with ideology, but unless many liberal Republicans are buying Porsches and conservative Democratic members of Congress are loading up their portfolios with BP these findings also fit with the general story.

So it is not just preferences for food that differentiate conservatives and liberals; it is a large set of preferences regarding the experiences that bring pain or pleasure, satisfaction or frustration, interest or boredom. These sorts of differences should not be exaggerated (think probabilistically). Some arugula-loving novelists who like going to rock concerts in their Hyundais lean politically to the right just as some burger-eating, Porsche-driving, poetry-rhyming, Jeff Foxworthy-loving ranchers are lefties. The general patterns, though, are consistent and persistent enough to suggest that people’s tastes and preferences connect to differences in the way they experience and judge the world and to differences in their political orientations.

Yesterday on Twitter, John McCain recommended an OpEd by a former Republican colleague of his, ex-Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Impact of shutdown lingers. Like McCain, Gregg blames extremists (and fools) in the GOP for a government shutdown that damaged the Republican brand. Interest rate increases alone cost the taxpayers around $400 million for Ted Cruz's folly.

In addition, these self proclaimed defenders of conservatism managed to cost a bunch of jobs by slowing the economy.

Standard & Poor’s estimates the hit to the economy to have been around $24 billion. This also translates into lost tax revenues for the government.

Those tax revenues would have paid for obligations which the government has incurred. Now, without those revenues, these obligations will have to be paid for by more borrowing.

Once more, the debt burden has been increased by the actions of those who claim their goal is to reduce our inexcusably large debt. To put it mildly, it is difficult to see how the average taxpayer was a winner as a result of this exercise.

The political consequences of these games must also be considered. For Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint and his acolytes in the Senate, the results were all good.

Their PACs raised a great deal of money. They were the center of attention from the press, especially the liberal media which loved them for their own reasons.

But what about the other 44 senators and 200 or so House members left to defend a policy which had no game-plan for governance and was, at base, only a media and fundraising effort?

It will be tough for them when they go home and try to explain why they represent a party that put America through this incoherent course of action, which was totally counterproductive for anyone who actually wants to rein in the spending of the federal government.

The Wall Street Journal, in a rather aggressive choice of language, described the folks who believed in the purposes of these few attention-gatherers as “rubes.”

…The result is that a few grab center-stage and make the rest of the company irrelevant.

In this case, those few took the Republican Party down a dead-end alley, leaving a lot of people shaking their heads and wondering why they should look to that motley crew for help in straightening out our dysfunctional government.

In the end, these folks did not reduce spending, rather they increased it; they did not kill ObamaCare, rather they gave it political cover during its botched roll-out; and they dramatically lessened their party’s chances of taking back the Senate and keeping the House.

All in all, hardly such a great plan.

Now a lobbyist, Gregg was a 3-term senator, Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and before that a governor. Does he eat arugula? I'm not certain but I do know that far right wing fanatics like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III call him a RINO.