I spent an hour last night goggling Arlo Guthrie and "Obama", "Democrats" and so on.
1) He is no friend of Democrats. Try and find any positive statement he has made about any Democrat. Can't find a single statement he has made about the President, putting down the birthers, etc, even though he has a community discussion site arlo.net that has active political discussions.
2) The "good people in the Republican Party" is, IMO, a ruse. If you are going to be a progressive Republican and make it a better "opposition party" then you would actually have to stand up and say something when it did something that you disagreed with.
3) Yes he is a Libertarian Republican but it is interesting that he doesn't join the Libertarian Party in hopes of a utopian society but joins the Republican Party during the heart of the Iraqi war. (Shades of Phil Henrie?)
4) He has effusive praise for Ron Paul. Not just a cool guy on foreign policy but something to the effect that RP is the only candidate around who would have signed the constitution, real fervent affection type stuff.
5) He does political rants. He uses RW formulas like being against "big government". He is against the Democratic Party's agenda of universal health care and modest wealth 'redistribution'.
Here is an example of one of his long rants. Frankly it shows a rather incoherent mind. He consistently rails against big government. He is critical of the Republican Party for supporting big government (!) but wonders why the Republican Party doesn't build the infrastructure for flying cars:
http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2009/07/26/hey-arlo-the-times-they-are-a-changin/
What’s up with rebuilding infrastructure? The best way to insure we’ll have a 20th century transportation system in the 21st century is to rebuild the existing infrastructure. I thought by now we’d be flying around in personal (automobile-size) vehicles. There’s no reason we can’t be building vehicles that use magnetic fields for flight and navigation… okay maybe I’m getting ahead of things. The point is that it seems easier to get to the freaking moon than it does to get from coast to coast. Who’s thinking about that stuff? Constantly widening roads and bridges that devour the land with all the intersecting attributes of the same chains of crappola shops and fast (nutritionally worthless genetically modified and just plain bad) food restaurants can’t be the next best hope for our nation’s infrastructure. That, to me, should be a Republican concern.
6) Now the interesting thing about that link is that it is in a RW column. AG actually joins the column not to make a major clarification but to clarify that he is "not anti union". He doesn't bother to make any other clarifications to the conservatives that are celebrating his joining their ranks.
I am certainly not anti-union. That would be, to me, anti-American. I am for the right to join in with others when it seems to have mutual benefit, and equally for the right to do things individually. I am against bullying by anyone or any group. Also, I have been a Ron Paul supporter, but not a follower of anyone. I believe his economic principles have a value to the current discussion of the economic crises. I remain a ‘we’re all in the same boat’ kind of guy – which Pete Seeger and others like my father have always been. I was just singing with Pete the other day doing his song ‘Turn, Turn, Turn.” There’s times to let sleeping dogs alone, and times to wake them up.” I’m for being free to do either and taking responsibility for the choices we make – free to learn from our own experience, as individuals and as a nation.
6) When I listen to the clip that you posted I am struck by how he goes out of his way to affirm his support of ALL individuals. My reading of that is that following his strong support of Paul some of his friends educated him on how Paul is both homophobic and racist. While Arlo Guthrie may be a Republican 90% of his supporters are Democrats and it strikes me that he goes out of his way to say nothing about Democrats, or the President simply not to antagonize them. As for the fact that his children support Obama, so do Nixon's and Reagan's.
7) I still love his music and his dad but there is one thing that really bothers me about Arlo's joining the Republican Party, it's his deceptive way of explaining it:
I became a registered Republican about five or six years ago because to have a successful democracy you have to have at least two parties, and one of them was failing miserably. We had enough good Democrats. We needed a few more good Republicans. We needed a loyal opposition.
The fact is that according to his time line he joins the Republican Party at the height of its party and when it is engaging in the invasion of Iraq, not when Democrats are in power.
There is a more charitable explanation for this.
He is a guy whose whole life and livelihood is based in part on his father's legacy. Yes he has his own breakout as a youth, but after a few years half of his act is playing his father's songs and half from his early years. Unlike Simon or Dylan there is no big second or third act.
Woody Guthrie was passionate about helping the poor, and the suffering as a cause but on the other hand he fathered 9 children and was not a good father, having very little contact at all with his first three children:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/07/11/DI2006071100333.html
Ed Cray: In an interview with me as I was writing "Ramblin' Man," Arlo told me he never had an adult conversation with his father -- a statement I find terribly revealing and poignant. My guess is that Arlo followed the mythic Woody rather than the real man into performing. About the only thing I think Arlo learned from his father was the adoption of a stage persona. Arlo, born in Brooklyn, given speech lessons by an Englishwoman to eradicate the accent, bar mitzvahed on the Lower East Side, somehow acquired an Oklahoma drawl! At home, I am told by a daughter, he speaks unaccented English with good grammar.
So perhaps Woody has a somewhat jaded view of his father tempered with sympathy for the Huntington's that contributed to his psychiatric problems that made home life difficult.
In the quote above Arlo states
There’s times to let sleeping dogs alone, and times to wake them up.” I’m for being free to do either and taking responsibility for the choices we make . So the most charitable way of understanding Guthrie's Republican affiliation is to understand it as stand against the "Ramblin Man" part of his father's legacy and his standing up for personal responsibility and being a good husband and father, which by all accounts he is.
That's the interpretation I choose to live with. Like a lot of enlightened Republican parents who make a stand for personal responsibility they end up raising great Democratic Children.
BTW I found this great website about Woody run by Arlo's sister.
http://www.woodyguthrie.org/biography/biography1.htm#
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