Posted by Ryan S. Jackson

In the Pavlovian world of the ultra-conservative primary voter, the man who will waterboard the children of illegal immigrants is king. Time’s Joe Klein goes into the depths of a Republican focus group for the last debate, wherein people were armed only with dials to show their displeasure for compassion:

In the next segment—the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee’s college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants—I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, “After all, these are children of God,” the dials plummeted. And that happened time and again through the evening: Any time any candidate proposed doing anything nice for anyone poor, the dials plummeted (30s). These Republicans were hard.

But there was worse to come: When John McCain started talking about torture—specifically, about waterboarding—the dials plummeted again. Lower even than for the illegal Children of God. Down to the low 20s, which, given the natural averaging of a focus group, is about as low as you can go. Afterwards, Luntz asked the group why they seemed to be in favor of torture. “I don’t have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11,” said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer. The group applauded, appallingly.

The winner in the hearts of these angry, angry people? That would be Romney, who of the 30 people in focus group, left with the approval of 14.