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She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It
SARAH PALIN and Al Sharpton don’t ordinarily have much in common, but they achieved a rare harmonic convergence at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. When Sharpton told the singer’s children it was their daddy’s adversaries, not their daddy, who were “strange,”
he was channeling the pugnacious argument the Alaska governor had made
the week before. There was nothing strange about her decision to quit
in midterm, Palin told America. What’s strange — or “insane,” in her lingo — are the critics who dare question her erratic behavior on the national stage.
Sharpton’s
bashing of Jackson’s naysayers received the biggest ovation of the
entire show. Palin’s combative resignation soliloquy, though much
mocked by prognosticators of all political persuasions, has an equally
vociferous and more powerful constituency. In the aftermath of her
decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P.
actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll.
No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for
president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the
Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to
ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.
That’s
why Palin won’t go gently into the good night, much as some Republicans
in Washington might wish. She is not just the party’s biggest star and
most charismatic television performer; she is its only star and charismatic performer. Most important, she stands for a
genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame
with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the
21st century and leaves it behind. Palin gives this movement a major
party brand and political plausibility that its open-throated media
auxiliary, exemplified by Glenn Beck, cannot. She loves the spotlight,
can raise millions of dollars and has no discernible reason to go
fishing now except for self-promotional photo ops.
The essence of
Palinism is emotional, not ideological. Yes, she is of the religious
right, even if she winks literally and figuratively at her own
daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage. But
family-values politics, now more devalued than the dollar by the
philandering of ostentatiously Christian Republican politicians, can
only take her so far. The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant
surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like
abortion and gay civil rights.
That resentment is in part about race, of course. When Palin referred to Alaska as “a microcosm of America” during the 2008 campaign, it was in
defiance of the statistical reality that her state’s tiny black and
Hispanic populations are unrepresentative of her nation. She stood for
the “real America,” she insisted, and the identity of the unreal America didn’t have to be stated explicitly for audiences to catch her drift. Her convention speech’s signature line was a deftly coded putdown of her presumably shiftless
big-cityopponent: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a
community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”
(Funny how this wisdom has been forgotten by her supporters now that
she has abandoned her own actual responsibilities in public office.)
The
latest flashpoint for this kind of animus is the near-certain elevation
to the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation
hearings arrive this week. Prominent Palinists were fast to demean
Sotomayor as a dim-witted affirmative-action baby. Fred Barnes of The
Weekly Standard, the Palinist hymnal, labeled Sotomayor “not the smartest” and suggested that Princeton awards academic honors on a curve. Karl Rove said,
“I’m not really certain how intellectually strong she would be.” Those
maligning the long and accomplished careerof an Ivy League-educated
judge do believe in affirmative-action — but only for white people like
Palin, whom they boosted for vice president despite her minimal
achievements and knowledge of policy, the written word or even
geography.
The politics of resentment are impervious to facts.
Palinists regard their star as an icon of working-class America even
though the Palins’ combined reported income ($211,000) puts them in the top 3.6 percent of American households. They see her as a champion of conservative fiscal principles even though she said yes to the Bridge to Nowhere and presided over a state that ranksNo.1 in federal pork.
Nowhere
is the power of resentment to trump reason more flagrantly illustrated
than in the incessant complaint by Palin and her troops that she is
victimized by a double standard in the “mainstream media.” In truth,
the commentators at ABC, NBC and CNN — often the same ones who judged
Michelle Obama a drag on her husband — all tried to outdo each other in
praise for Palin when she emerged at the Republican convention 10
months ago. Even now, the so-called mainstream media can grade Palin on
a curve: at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week, Palin’s self-proclaimed
representation of the “real America” was accepted as a given, as if white rural America actually still was the nation’s baseline.
The
Palinists’ bogus beefs about double standards reached farcical
proportions at Fox News on the sleepy pre-Fourth Friday afternoon when
word of her abdication hit the East. The fill-in anchor demanded that
his token Democratic stooge name another female politician who had
suffered such “disgraceful attacks” as Palin. When the obvious answer
arrived — Hillary Clinton — the Fox host angrily protested that Clinton
had never been attacked in “a sexual way” or “about her children.”
Americans
have short memories, but it’s hardly ancient history that conservative
magazines portrayed Hillary Clinton as both a dominatrix cracking a
whip and a broomstick-riding witch. Or that Rush Limbaugh held up a
picture of Chelsea Clinton on television to identify the “White House
dog.” Or that Palin’s running mate, John McCain, told a sexual jokeThe Wall Street Journal editorial page last week. You’d never guess that The Journal had published six innuendo-laden books on real and imagined Clinton scandals,
or that the Clintons had been a leading target of both Letterman and
Leno monologues, not to mention many liberal editorial pages (including
that of The Times), for much of a decade. linking Hillary and Chelsea and Janet Reno. Yet the same conservative
commentariat that vilified both Clintons 24/7 now whines that Palin is
receiving “the kind of mauling” that the media “always reserve for
conservative Republicans.” So said
Those Republicans who
have not drunk the Palin Kool-Aid are apocalyptic for good reason. She
could well be their last presidential candidate standing. Such would-be
competitors as Mark Sanford, John Ensign and Newt Gingrich are too
carnally compromised for the un-Clinton party. Mike Huckabee is
Palin-lite. Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal — really? That leaves the
charisma-challenged Mitt Romney, precisely the kind of card-carrying
Ivy League elitist Palinists loathe, no matter how hard he tries to
cosmetically alter his history as a socially liberal fat-cat banker.
Palin would crush him like a bug. She has the Teflon-coated stature
among Republicans that Romney can only fantasize about.
Were
Palin actually to secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a
fiasco for the G.O.P. akin to Goldwater 1964, as the most relentless
conservative Palin critic, David Frum, has predicted.
Or would it? No one thought Richard Nixon — a far less personable
commodity than Palin — would come back either after his sour-grapes
“last press conference” of 1962. But Democratic divisions and failures
gave him his opportunity in 1968. With unemployment approaching 10
percent and a seemingly bottomless war in Afghanistan, you never know,
as Palin likes to say, what doors might open.
It’s more likely
that she will never get anywhere near the White House, and not just
because of her own limitations. The Palinist “real America” is
demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents
is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that
Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists”
crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s
curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.
Its voice can
be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark
Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week.
“Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before
this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL
HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American
revolution, promising “there will be blood.”
These are the cries
of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the
well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps
being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their
jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the
White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on
ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P.
that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to
them or to her.
For a week now, critics in both parties have had
a blast railing at Palin. It’s good sport. But just as the media
muttering about those unseemly “controversies” rallied the fans of the
King of Pop, so are Palin’s political obituaries likely to jump-start
her lucrative afterlife.