John Wayne Still Bad News For the Democratic Party

Richard Cohen says:

The latest poll is not good for the Democrats. I am not talking here of the one showing George Bush's approval rating inching up nor the one showing immense if dangerously ignorant support for domestic spying. I'm talking about the recently released Harris Poll showing John Wayne one of the most popular movie stars of 2005. The one thing he and the Democratic Party have in common is that they are both dead.

Wayne was the quintessential anti-Democrat. Never mind if he was a Republican, which he was. What matters most is that everything he stood for -- from support for the Vietnam War to antipathy to the '60s' and '70s' counterculture -- was in consonance with GOP positions. More important, though, his iconic man-on-horseback image has been adopted by virtually the entire Republican Party. As a boy, Newt Gingrich tried to walk like Wayne. Now the entire GOP does.

No word yet on whether the Harris Poll contains any replies from members of the American Sociological Association.