Sarah Palin, Fauxpulism, and Right-Wing Identity Politics
(Image: Tacoma Urbanist, Flickr)
Sarah Palin is back — and, seemingly, everywhere, as she launches a book tour (and, perhaps, a run at the White House in 2012).
In a Republican Party hoping to rebound in 2010 on the strength of a newly energized and ideologically aroused conservative grassroots, Palin’s influence is now unparalleled. Through her Facebook page, she was the one who pushed the rumor of “death panels” into the national healthcare debate, prompting the White House to issue a series of defensive responses. Unfazed by its absurdity, she repeated the charge in her recent speech in Wisconsin. In a special congressional election in New York’s 23rd congressional district, Palin’s endorsement of Doug Hoffman, an unknown far-right third-party candidate, helped force a popular moderate Republican politician, Dede Scozzafava, from the race. In the end, Palin’s ideological purge in upstate New York led to an improbable Democratic victory, the first in that GOP-heavy district in more than 100 years.
Though the ideological purge may have backfired, Palin’s participation in it magnified her influence in the party. In a telling sign of this, Congressman Mark Kirk, a pro-choice Republican from the posh suburban North Shore of Chicago, running for the Senate in Illinois, issued an anxious call for Palin’s support while she campaigned for Hoffman. According to a Kirk campaign memo, the candidate was terrified that Palin would be asked about his candidacy during her scheduled appearance on the Chicago-based Oprah Winfrey Show later this month — the kick-off for her book tour — and would not react enthusiastically. With $2.3 million in campaign cash and no viable primary challengers, Kirk was still desperate to avoid Palin-backed attacks from his right flank, however hypothetical they might be.
“She’s gangbusters!” a leading conservative radio host exclaimed to me. “There is nobody in the Republican Party who can raise money like her or top her name recognition.”
In contemporary politics, money + brand recognition = power –period. For a Republican party scrambling to maintain its ever-shrinking base, that makes Sarah Palin its most influential personality. And with the Democratic Party and the White House being seen, rightly or wrongly, as the party of Goldman Sachs, an avowed fauxpulist like Palin (she’s ‘one of us!’) driving the tone and tenor of conservative politics in an age of economic instability is not something to airily discount.
The Birth of the “Death Panels”
Those noxious lies about “death panels” being part of Democrats’ health care reform legislation proposals — where do they come from?
On Palin, Noonan Is the Antidote to Douthat
Eyal Press, at The Nation:
I like Ross Douthat, as I’ve said here before, but earlier this week he wrote a justly panned column in which he claimed, absurdly, that Sarah Palin had been done in by media elites who “mocked and misrepresented” her because she didn’t graduate from Columbia or Harvard. Douthat’s editorial was infused with the very thing he was objecting to – classism, the condescending assumption that a woman without an Ivy League pedigree shouldn’t be criticized by uppity reporters for appearing utterly clueless about, say, foreign policy, the economy, the Supreme Court etc.
The best rejoinder to Douthat’s column has come from a fellow conservative, Peggy Noonan, who, in today’s Wall Street Journal, points out that the elites who supposedly revile Palin actually created her (see William Kristol), and that she failed because she couldn’t articulate her positions or convince anybody she was qualified to be on the national ticket of any party. Noonan also corrects the unexamined assumption at the core of Douthat’s column:
She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they’re working class “tropes.” Because, you know, that’s what they teach in “Ways of the Working Class” at Yale and Dartmouth.
This paragraph made me laugh out loud:
In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. “I’m not wired that way,” “I’m not a quitter,” “I’m standing up for our values.” I’m, I’m, I’m.
Although it’s true, she praised the same qualities in George W. Bush.
Plus, she’s way off-base on why the media is obsessed with Palin:
Saying Palin gets coverage because the political press hates the GOP is like saying Amy Winehouse gets coverage because the tabloids hate music, or the Gosselins get coverage because the entertainment press hates reality TV. There’s a much simpler explanation: The media covers train wrecks because people enjoy watching train wrecks. (See Jackson, Michael, later years of.)
Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Polls show that a lot of people (us smirky sophisticates) loathe Palin but can’t turn away when she’s in front of a camera — while a lot of other people (the folks in her base) deeply admire her. So, for the press, covering Palin is win-win. Everybody watches.
So true.
Sarah Palin to Resign as Governor
The announcement came as a huge surprise to just about everyone — the expectation was that Gov. Palin would announce her decision not to run for reelection in 2010 (presumably so she could prepare to be a candidate in the 2012 presidential election) — not that she planned to step down from her job as governor effective almost immediately:
No Diploma? No Problem!
Turns out you need a high school diploma to work as an electrical apprentice on Alaska’s North Slope. And Levi Johnston doesn’t have one. So he quit his job. But only after a local radio talk show host wondered aloud how Johnston could have gotten into an apprenticeship program when he has not graduated from high school:
Levi Johnston, the boyfriend of Gov. Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol, has quit his North Slope oil field job over questions about his eligibility to work in an electrical apprenticeship program, Johnston’s father said Monday.
Johnston, 18, began working this fall in the Milne Point oil field with ASRC Energy Services Inc., a major Slope contractor.
In a Sunday newspaper column, Anchorage radio talk show host Dan Fagan questioned how Johnston could take part in ASRC’s apprenticeship program without a high school diploma.
Fagan said he understood federal regulations require all members of apprenticeship programs to have a diploma. He also questioned whether the governor might have had a hand in getting Johnston into the program.
Palin adamantly denied that Monday.
Well, Bristol did say she had a very supportive family.
Can You Say, Mixed Message?
Sarah Palin would like you to know that Bristol and Levi are not high school dropouts. They are “working their butts off” to finish high school and to earn money to support just-born Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston (emphasis mine):
Colin Powell Calls Out Sarah Palin and the GOP Over “Small Town Values”
I’m sure by now you’re all overwhelmed with nostalgia for the 2008 presidential campaign (you betcha!) I mean, it’s been, what, just over a month since the election, right? So, to help satisfy your endless electioneering jones, check out this clip of Colin Powell, in an interview with Fareed Zakaria that will air on CNN this Sunday, goin’ all South Bronx on Gov. Palin and the GOPizzle:
Partial transcript:
Gov. Palin, to some extent, pushed the party more to the right, and I think she had something of a polarizing effect when she talked about how small town values are good. Well, most of us don’t live in small towns. And I was raised in the South Bronx, and there’s nothing wrong with my value system from the South Bronx.
And when they came to Virginia and said the southern part of Virginia is good and the northern part of Virginia is bad. The only problem with that is there are more votes in the northern part of Virginia than there are in the southern part of Virginia, so that doesn’t work.
Apparently small town value systems apparently don’t take into account demographics and simple mathematics. (Hint: there are a lot of eligible voters–many of them *eek* not white–in the Bronx. And in Arlington. To say nothing of Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Cleveland…)
Pshh. Wevs.
Who needs complicated statistics and a viable long-term political strategy when you have fresh moose-burgers and a collective annual oil stipend (which, btw, is so not socialism) to cling to, along with guns, religion and marginalizing resentment?
h/t Think Progress
Incredible Deniability
I just saw, on Countdown, the un-fuzzed up video of Sarah Palin animatedly chattering to reporters while turkeys are being fed into a killing machine behind her. It’s definitely graphic. You can see the turkeys struggling as the killing guy puts them headfirst into the machine.
Can You Say, Mixed Message? (Updated With Video)
I saw this on Rachel Maddow last night (where the video was sanitized so it wouldn’t be quite so gruesome to watch), but now it’s all over blogtopia: Gov. Sarah Palin went to a local turkey slaughtering house, picked one turkey to “pardon,” and then stood in front of the place answering a reporter’s questions for about three minutes… while turkeys were being slaughtered in clear view of the television audience over her shoulder. When asked whether she wanted that scene as a backdrop, she replied, “No worries.”
ed: I decided to throw in the video. My wife showed it to me last night and my one thought was, ‘Oblivious.’
-K
Cashing In
The photo caption here says it all: “One McCain-Palin ad tried to paint Barack Obama as a celebrity, but it’s Palin who’s on the verge of a celeb-sized book deal.”
Dick Cavett on Sarah Palin
That rapier wit has lost none of its edge:
Sarah Palin Cannot Move On
She thinks she should, though — but she isn’t, and she doesn’t even know it:
What Do Britney Spears and Sarah Palin Have In Common?
Besides gender? They are both famous for being famous. Seems Gov. Palin is about to pimp out her status as the most historically and politically illiterate vice-presidential candidate of all time for big bucks:
SARAH Palin won’t be vice president, but she won the hearts of talent scouts and literary agents who are scrambling to sign her to multimillion-dollar contracts.
CAA, ICM, William Morris, Paradigm and other agencies “smell books, talk shows and commentary for Fox and CNN” as possibilities for the Alaska governor, West Coast PR man Hal Lifson told us.
Eagleburger Recants His Anti-Palin Remarks
The McCain people must have whipped him good and proper, because he went on Fox this morning and groveled in the most abject fashion imaginable.
OMIGAWDZ!@ THEYZ INFRINGING ON TEH CONSTITUTIONZ!@#!!one!!
You know, Sarah Palin…
ABC News’ Steven Portnoy reports: In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by “attacks” from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.
Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama’s associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate’s free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.
…is dumb. She’s just so incredibly, beyond the pale fucking stupid.
Captain Picard became so exhausted with all the face palming she’s induced every time she opens her trap, he’s ordered Riker to relieve him.
Sweet pancake flippin Jesus, somebody shut this lady up before she stupifies us all.
If Wishes Were Horses, McCain Would Have Picked Abe Lincoln for VP
James Joyner reacts to the numerous recent stories that Sarah Palin is becoming more of a liability to McCain’s candidacy by the day — or maybe the hour:
Robert Kagan on Bribing Sunni Fighters: It Worked, Didn’t It?
Spiegel Online interviews Robert Kagan in its current issue. The conversation turns to “the surge” in Iraq (emphasis mine):
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