I suppose it depends on where the town is located. In this case, Marionville is located in southwest Missouri, in the Ozarks. (Just looked it up.)
Don't know what party - if any - this Clevenger affiliates with, and there is no mention of it in the article.
Can a FReeper with local knowledge please help us out on this?
First, for my Jewish FReeper conservative online friends, please accept my sincere regrets that this kind of horrible act was committed by a resident of the rural and conservative part of my state. Most of us in rural Missouri are nothing like this man.
There aren't a lot of Jewish people in rural Missouri, which is actually a benefit because most conservatives around here never run into liberal Jewish people and tend to have a positive opinion of Jewish people and of Israel. This is the Bible Belt, and Branson is nearby, and you're **MUCH** more likely around here to hear patriotic Americans, especially evangelical Christians, making comments supporting Israel than to hear Klansmen spouting anti-Jewish nonsense. I can honestly say I haven't heard even one nasty anti-Jewish comment here in more than a dozen years, the Orthodox Jewish chaplain at Fort Leonard Wood gets thanked for his service when he goes off post, and the most prominent Jewish resident of my area is a hard-right Republican conservative business owner who detests liberals with a passion greater than my own. We did have some Klan recruitment efforts last year in an adjacent county, but none of the bigotry was directed against Jewish people, and as far as I know the Klan recruitment efforts were utterly unsuccessful.
While it's true that I live in Southwest Missouri and I know this area pretty well, Marionville is more than an hour away from where I live and I know nothing about this mayor. I would have to make some phone calls to get specifics about his town, but what I do know indicates it's a typical small rural town in the Ozarks.
What I do know is he needs to publicly apologize and then resign as mayor. His anti-Jewish comments, if they have been reported correctly, are **WAY** out of line.
Oliviaforever's comment that most small-town mayors are Democrats might very well have been true in rural southwest Missouri a generation or two ago — the Ozarks shared the sociopolitical dynamics of the rest of the rural South, dominated by conservative Democrats — but it most emphatically is **NOT** true today. In this man's county, not a single one of more than a dozen elected county officials are Democrats; it's an overwhelmingly Republican county.
I know nothing about this man's politics; Missouri has no party registration system and Missouri city officials almost always are elected on nonpartisan ballots, so they don't need to formally declare a party affiliation. He could be an active Democrat, though it's not likely considering the political leanings of his county. However, as Impy and other Freepers have pointed out, some Democrats do run for nonpartisan municipal offices because they know they can't get elected if they have to identify as Democrats.
If this guy is active in Republican politics, I hope the Lawrence County Republican Central Committee publicly attacks him and demands he resign from any position he may hold in local Republican politics. We don't need anti-Jewish bigotry in the Republican Party.
It's unlikely, but if this guy is active in Democratic politics, let's find it out and force the Democrats to disown him. Give them some of their own medicine for a change.