27. June 2005 · Comments Off on Hank Hill A Liberal? · Categories: General

This from OpinionJournal’s Best of the Web:

That Boy Ain’t Right, I Tell You What
You’ve heard of “South Park Conservatives,” those who lean to the right and enjoy the exuberantly obscene, and politically incorrect, Comedy Central series. (Buy the book here.) Matt Bai of the New York Times magazine is hoping there’s a counterpart, “King of the Hill Democrats.”

Bai interviews Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina, who is “is so obsessed with the show that he instructs his pollster to separate the state’s voters into those who watch ‘King of the Hill’ and those who don’t so he can find out whether his arguments on social and economic issues are making sense to the sitcom’s fans.” Easley has a whole theory of main character Hank Hill’s political philosophy:

Easley told me that Hank would never support a budget like the one North Carolina’s Senate recently passed, which would drop some 65,000 mostly elderly citizens from the Medicaid rolls; Hank, after all, has pitched in to support his own father, a brutish war veteran, and he would never condone a community’s walking away from its ailing parents. Similarly, Hank may be a lover of the environment–he was furious when kids trashed the local campground–but he resents self-righteous environmentalists like the ones who forced Arlen to install those annoying low-flow toilets. Voters like Hank, if they had heard about it on the evening news, would have supported Easley’s ”Clean Smokestacks” law, which forced North Carolina’s coal-powered electric plants to burn cleaner, but only because industry was a partner in the final bill, rather than its target.

We’re pretty sure South Park conservatives don’t sit around trying to figure out what Eric Cartman’s position would be on tort reform or the Central American Free Trade Agreement. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrats take cartoons far too seriously.

As Hank Hill has praised both Ann Richards and George W. Bush, one must question what his political affiliation is.

Personally, I think Hank is a conservative learning to exist in an increasingly liberal world.

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