The Democratic and Republican political parties are quite similar in that they carefully shape their message to appeal to blocs of voters, trying to encompass as many segments as they can to cobble together a majority, while both remain staunchly pro-oligarchy. This strategy required them to pay at least lip-service to the needs of the non-oligarchic population.
But Sarah Palin has taken the Republicans in a different direction and the current party has been largely shaped by her. On an objective scale, she is nothing. A half-term governor who ran as vice-president and lost would normally have been consigned to obscurity. But she sensed the zeitgeist of an influential segment within the party (the social and economic conservative evangelicals) and she loudly and aggressively gave them a voice, the first time they really had one at the highest levels of politics.
In return, the suckers gave her their love (and money) and the party an energy and focus that it did not have with its earlier generation of leaders. This group does not care if someone is young and inexperienced as long as they adopt a rigid ideological stance and an outspoken, confrontational style. Bucking the old-guard leadership of their own party in the phony ‘maverick’ style that McCain and Palin patented is also seen as a plus.
You can see the result. All six of the current crop of Republican candidates (Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Rick Santorum) are the children of Palin, They are on the far right wing of American politics, which is the space that the Republican Party currently occupies, and they all echo her confrontationist rhetoric.
While some of them have tentatively made largely symbolic noises in the direction of broadening the party’s appeal (Rubio with his immigration reform proposals, Jindal with his call for the party to stop being ‘stupid’, Paul with his occasional libertarian stances, and Ryan stating that he now supports gay adoptions), none of them have taken any stand on economic and social polices that could provoke real hostility from the extremist base that the party now caters to, and all have been careful to court them.
Cruz is the one who seems to be the most eager to take on Palin’s mantle of bucking his own party’s leadership, while Ryan’s chances may actually be hurt by being part of the party leadership. Despite the latter’s infatuation with Ayn Rand and his extreme views on economic policies, he may actually be seen by the party base as too moderate, if you can believe it, due to his efforts to be seen as a budget and numbers wonk. For reasons I outlined earlier, I think that Rand Paul has the potential to break away from the pack.
I think the Palin-based approach is going to be a loser at the national level but it is undoubtedly a winner at the party level. How the Republican candidate bridges that divide is going to be tricky. Mitt Romney tried to do it by running as an ‘extreme conservative’ in the primaries and then trying to soften his position in the general election but that did not work, partly because he could not quite shake being viewed as a phony by all sides. This group of six has unquestionably extreme conservative bona fides but may not make even that minimal effort to appeal to a broader audience, since in the climate that has been created any hint of that would now be seen as a betrayal.
I wonder if party insiders have realized that McCain’s legacy is to have draped the Palin albatross around the party’s neck.
McCain was originally a moderate (in Republican terms). He wasn’t conservative enough for the Religious Right and his fear, shared by the GOP leadership, was that James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and other evangelical leaders wouldn’t endorse McCain and their followers wouldn’t bother to vote. So Palin, whose evangelical credentials were solid, was chosen to be the VP candidate. The problem was that Palin was obviously a light-weight and, while appealing to the Religious Right, was not appealing to the independent voters who decide presidential elections.
Palin still appeals to the people who liked her in 2008. She’s still a turnoff to people who didn’t like her then. Which poses a real problem to the GOP leadership. Palin’s imitators, people like Cruz, Santorum and Rubio, are not appealing to many American voters. Their hardline social platform is too extreme for most independents. Most Americans are not concerned about insurance paying for contraception or whether gays should get married. These are not pushbutton items for moderates like they are for evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics. The Religious Right’s social agenda isn’t particularly appealing to the GOP leadership either since their main interests are economic. But the GOP leadership cannot push the Religious Right away because they’re too many of the people who vote for fiscal conservatives.
I believe most Republican insiders know exactly what the problem is. They just don’t know what to do about it.
Soooo … another decade or so of raving lunatics, who spend their energy alternately fighting symbolic/ imaginary foes by talking loudly and waving their arms and trying to decipher the messages God paints on the inside of their skulls, being in a position of being able to block all progress. The situation reminds me of that Star Trek episode where the Enterprise is about to crash into a planet and they can’t stop the crash because a crazy guy singing Irish folk songs has taken over all the controls and locked himself in the engine room.
As a nation we are in dire straits and desperately need to maneuver our way out of this social/economic/international situation. But we can’t because the GOP has locked all the levers of power. At one point in time if we just handed them huge piles of money so they could pay off their contributors they would let the sane people have a turn at the controls but, starting with Gingrich, they have increasingly shifted to simply obstructing every move. Evidently the US electing a Democrat, and a black one at that, means that the nation must be punished. Presumably after a righteously suitable dose of GOP imposed icy creek standing and flagellating with birch branches, and just a bit more for good measure, and yet again another trillion dollars of concessions to wealthy people extracted from the bleeding noses of the poor and middle class, they will let the business of a newly humbled and chastened nation to be undertaken. But only if we all agree to do exactly what they want for ever and ever. And put a cherry on top.
Another decade of suck.
Your thought process is “EXTREMELY” skewed. To begin with there is nothing extreme about Conservatism. The very word means to be Traditional, long term, acceptable thinking. This idea that Sarah Palin is OUT-THERE on some RIGHT-wing is also absurd. When she was Governor of Alaska she had a Approval Rating as high as 93%, was at 88% when McCain picked her, and she never went below 80% the entire time she was Governor. At a time the nearest Governor in the country was at 54%, Palin was and may still remain the most popular high ranking politician, while serving in office, than any this Century. Maybe we can add the last Century as well. She accomplished this by getting both sides of the political aisle to vote for her legislation.
She accomplished getting legislation passed that for 30 years or more, no other Governor in her position was able to accomplish. Reason being: She refused to take bribes by the Big Oil Companies and instead challenged them to stop sitting on their Oil leases. She put her State of permanent sound financial footing for decades to come, even though with oil being 85% of their revenue, the oil production in the State was the lowest it had been in decades. She and her small Team of ‘Magnificent Seven’ also passed legislation that would greatly improve the economic well-being of the nation as well, but our GREEN President sought to prevent her pipeline from being built. Probably no more single reason to replace Obama with Sarah Palin.
Palin’s popularity may appear to come from a ‘Red State’, but Alaska has 80% of it’s population registered as Independence, and not to a major Party. No other state has as many Independents as Alaska. So this idea that Palin draws her political strength from RIGHT-wing Conservatives is just dumb. It also shows that you have no understanding of who she is. Palin’s problem is that our National Media is EXTREME Far-LEFT, and is in fact 95% Democrats. No Republican is ever going to get a fair shake in having her story told, or her political message be heard, by such An warped sense of what is Moderate. Gay Marriage is not a Moderate view. Abortion at demand (Planned Parenthood) is not a Moderate view. Obamacare is not a Moderate view. Open borders is not a Moderate view. Registering handguns is not a moderate view. A godless, secular society is not a moderate view. These are all Liberal, urban, mostly northeast and west coast viewpoints. Yet these are heavily supported by the people who impart our National News.
President Obama was mostly elected because of him being the first African American (and the financial collapse) President, and I believe that was a good thing for this nation. However, the American people were never informed of who Barack Obama truly was as a person, or his seriously LEFTist Progressive political intentions. The National Media continued to keep the majority of Americans LOW-Information Voters in 2012, so Obama was reelected.
It is hard to believe that anyone who has Governed with 90%+ citizens approving of their decision making can within a matter of months somehow be considered to have ‘dangerous ideas’, but you like the National Media push this Narrative about Sarah Palin. You state her financial ideas for this country (and that of the TEA Party) are dangerous, but yet you don’t seemed to concerned that Obama has put this country on the verge of financial collapse with his reckless spending (with nothing to show for it by the way). It is Obama ‘s spending that has put every Entitlement program into the future at great risk. His unemployment numbers can only be compared to those of the Great Depression in the last one hundred years. He has the slowest five year period of any President, that goes back to prior to the Great Depression. You would have to go back to Hoover to find an economy that has grown so slowly, and Hoover didn’t have a Bernanke pumping FREE money into the economy. This isn’t happening by accident. Obama needs to have a crawling economy to build his Welfare State, so he can redistribute the wealth of this nation as quick as possible.
So you write here that Sarah Palin is some political freak that is leading her Party off the political edge, but clearly you haven’t been paying attention to the fact that other than Obama (celebrity) the American people are voting Republican. Palin is leading the country back to common sense. Listen to her, study her past, and maybe you will learn that Conservatism is not what the EXTREMISTS in the National Media portray it to be. As Palin has written, those in the Northeast are doing well, because of their Cronyism. By the way, I’m not an Evangelical, I’m just an average American who actually knows politics.
To say a Governor who was the most popular Governor in the country was a lightweight is ridiculous. She was in fact the only one of the four candidates to actually have accomplished significant legislation, that she and she alone was responsible for. The other three simply made a living of being a bunch of blowhards. Your problem is you believe what the National Media tells you. In addition, Palin did bring in Independents, only the Financial collapse took place following the ten days that McCain/Palin were actually ahead in the polls. McCain was 8 points down in the Gallup poll before he picked Palin. She put him up by 4 points in the Gallup poll within the week, then came the take down of Lehman Brothers and the public shakedown of TARP. Both campaigns knew that with Bush being President McCain/Palin couldn’t win. In fact Obama ran more against Bush than he did the Republican Ticket. Go watch re-watch the debates. Palin still pulled in Independents to account for a 4 point loss,against a voting public wishing for a first African American President.
Your confusing Moderates with Independents, they are not the same. Majority American believe in the Social issues that Conservatives believe in. Obama won re-election, because the voters didn’t blame him for the economy. They still blamed Bush. That is because our National Media are Democrats. AND let me talk about Republican leadership: Republicans only make up 30% of the voting block on the political RIGHT. Conservatives account for 70%, so who gives a Rat’s butt what the Republicans think. Palin can win the nomination of the Republican Party, without one registered Republican voting for her.
Try the decade of the 80’s and 90’s. Reaganomics not only saved this country, but made it the mot prosperous nation in the history of mankind. Not since the Founding Father’s has a President allowed the Free Market to determine the nations financial structure. Record revenues poured in to the Federal Gov’t while more Americans got to keep about one third more of their earnings to use as they see fit. Clinton attempted to move away, but the American public voted in the first Republican Congress in forty years. This meant that Clinton would simply ride Reagan’s coattails.
Palin would repeat the greatest nation’s greatest years.
Uhm, wow; the Palin-bots have arrived. The half-term governor Palin set records before she fled her job in disgrace for bankrupting her town when she was mayor, then plunging the taxpayers into paying for her many, many ethics charges as she charged the tax-payers for her to live in her own home, flew her children around on airplanes for private travel, installed a tanning booth in her home, and generally acted like Imelda Marcos on a shoe-buying orgy. We locals had buttons saying “Where’s Sarah” because she was almost never actually at the job she was paid to be doing. She also made the taxpayers foot the bill for the vendettas she pursued for private matters, such as trying to fire the trooper who dared divorce her sister and actually firing the librarian who wouldn’t pull books off the shelves that Palin personally had a snit about.
When inflicted on the Lower 48, Palin quickly proved she was incapable of handling even softball interviews about what things she read or to discuss Supreme Court decisions with which she claimed to disagree. She had no idea what a Vice President’s job was even though she was running for the job. She was so simple-minded that she thought the Queen of England was the leader of the armed forces. Her ego was so easily stroked that she fell for a radio DJ stunt without catching on to their many “tells” that this was a prank call.
While on the campaign trail, she had a team of experts trying to teach her basic facts about the USA, and she still couldn’t manage. Her entire family ran rampant through department stores, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of donor’s money in things like silk boxer shorts, gucci pacifiers, and designer handbags for the 7-year-old. Another team of makeup and wardrobe experts had to get her ready for public appearances.
Finally, her husband is under scrutiny for running a brothel servicing clients including the Secret Service men who were also guilty of using prostitutes in Colombia.
Since fleeing the job of governor, Palin has become increasingly shrill and irrelevant as she runs around starring in failed reality shows, shrieking about irrelevancies, and generally acting like a fame-whore.
The entire USA--and the world--are very, very lucky that voters overwhelmingly rejected her as VP in 2008.
Sarah Palin is no political freak; she’s a know-nothing, simple-minded, narcissistic bully freak.
Mano: How did you manage to get the president of the Sarah Palin Fan Club to show up and comment here? Have you been trolling at some venue for blockheads like NRO Online or WorldNutsDaily? Did you send out a special half-wit Bat Signal? Or is DMac8889 just a sockpuppet you created to give us readers some laughs? That’s gotta be it, right? You can’t really pack that much extra-gooey stupid into one live person not named Glenn Beck or Louie Gohmert.
Regardless, thanks for the yuks. Reaganomics “saved this country”!!! Comedy gold.
I was a little puzzled too since the response was so quick! And actually, I thought that I was somewhat complimentary about her ability to drive the party in a different direction.
I somehow recall a decline in the value of wages beginning under Reagan, along with an explosion in homelessness, and we had a huge influx of prisoners owing to the escalation of the war on drugs.
Taxes are actually lower under Obama than under Reagan, yet Obama’s ‘low taxes’ stance hasn’t led us to an economic boom. You might want to check some facts. Tax rates were higher under Eisenhower, and our economy was booming then far more than under Reagan.
On entitlement programs, nations with higher marginal tax rates and more social programs make the US look like a dirt poor third world shit-hole.
On moderate views, handgun registry, national health care, public schools, and extensive government regulation of business are all takes as matter of fact stances that even conservatives wouldn’t protest in most industrialized nations. Only in the US do ‘conservative’ ideas get a serious hearing; in most other nations, the positions would be laughed at.
Also, there’s really no statistics that makes the US look very good compared to most other industrialized nations. The whole country is just a tax haven for rich people. Whether health, education, infant mortality, we look more 3rd than 1st world.
You have a skewed way of looking at reality. If you don’t know truth by now, you never will.
Reagan Tax Cuts weren’t fully implemented until after he left office. Since the day Reagan took office, this country has never experienced the 25 year economic boom, that followed his administration, at any time in its history. The wealth of the nation’s citizens was much more spread out under Reagan (and the next 25 years) than under Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s growth was due to a country rebuilding from an almost exclusive State run economy.
A backhanded disclaimer will get you know where. You see it as the wrong direction, because your confusing Obama’s personal likability among the LOW-Information Voters that reelected them, as Americans are leaning toward being Liberal. You closed minded friends who know the Tina Fey version of Sarah Palin, may need to be informed, and I’m happy to do that, because in te long run, she bring a better America to us all.
lorn, Cynicism can lead to mental illness when reality reminds you that you don’t know what your talking about. Palin didn’t go to court and win against the Big Three Oil companies to “Pay Off” Alaskan voters. Everything Palin did she did through a legislature that voted for her ideas. The Big Three Oil Companies were sitting on their leases for 30 years. Every time a politician came along to get them to drill on those leases, they OC lined the pockets of Executive Branch or legislators. Palin came in and immediately passed ethics legislation so the corrupt Gov’t officials couldn’t line their pockets anymore. The Palin immediately put the squeeze on the oil companies, and the judge force them to drill those leases. Where the production of the Alaskan pipeline was going down rather quickly, Palin forced them to open new areas of drilling. She also put ACES (unfortunately just partially overturned by the new Governor), set a gradual Tax system for the BIG Three OC that put Alaska on a financial footing for decades to come. It also gave great incentives for new start up companies to get in the game and compete against the Big Three. With Palin gone, it appears the Big Three are back lining pockets again, Palin is the first politician in that OIL controlled state that stood up the BIG Three OC. Washington can’t get anything done, because they are so busy trying to please their donors. Obama trying to please the Greenies is a perfect example. Palin’s Integrity is unmatch in the political world. That is why people support her. She has fought the political machines, not used them to try to destroy their opponent..