07-07-2009
The Destruction of Palin’s Non-Existent National Prospects
Over at TalkingPointsMemo, Josh Marshall has devoted some ink over the weekend to the insane speculations of various pundits on whether Sarah Palin’s big move will hurt or couterintuitively help her national prospects. But with all due respect to Josh, whether Palin is now finished in national politics is really the wrong question. The better question is whether she ever had a prospect of a beginning in national politics.Palin defenders will defend her poor performances and clear lack of any policy knowledge by saying that “elites” “sneered” at Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and those two former Governors went on to become two-term Presidents. Let’s set aside the fact that the depth of Palin’s knowledge and views make Reagan and George W. Bush look like college professors. Let’s set aside the fact that Palin appears incapable of stringing together a sentence with a subject and a verb rather than an incoherent string of malaprop right-wing slogans, and that if only compared to her, George W. Bush would go down in history as the Demosthenes of his time.
What you can’t set aside is the fact that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both had an exceptional capacity to unite their entire parties around them, not just the factions that produced them. Sarah Palin, if you’ll recall, can’t unite her Wasilla aerobics class, the Palin campaign alumni, Alaska Republicans, or anyone else that’s ever come into intimate contact with her or her family, which time has demonstrated is a pretty important component to winning a major party nomination, if not just any tough election. This became evident for all to see during the campaign, and certainly after. The fact that it hasn’t already been incorporated as retained knowledge by the political media establishment says something about their inability to report even the most obvious things.
That doesn’t mean Palin isn’t a fascinating individual and a sort of Rosetta stone of the conservative movement’s ‘id’ (which, let’s face, is all that’s left now). Many important Republicans (McCarthy, Nixon, Bush, Cheney) are better understood by their simmering resentments against people who they believe think they’re better than they are. But only Sarah Palin is so consumed by her grudges and feuds that she had to quit her job to devote more time to them.
Posted by genblue in General | RSS 2.0
