Sarah Palin and the libertarian Republicans

Though Sarah Palin has a considerable following among some libertarians, you would be hard pressed to know it if your only libertarian source is Reason Online. The website takes a generally snarky tone with her, even when bestowing its own brand of backhanded praise on the former governor of Alaska, as we see in this piece by Greg Beato:

Palin has always positioned herself as a Drudge-like figure—an unorthodox interloper, devoid of the proper pedigree and old-boy connections, but nonetheless ready to shake things up. Until now, however, this pose was about as convincing as a veggie burger. The self-proclaimed hockey mom who supposedly entered the world of politics via the PTA was a career politician who’d won her first election at the age of 28, when her eldest son was just 3. The self-proclaimed antidote to entrenched career politicians had spent 13 of the last 16 years as an elected official and the other three as a director of a nonprofit organization whose function was raising money to elect Republican women in Alaska.

That so many people found such obvious facts so easy to overlook shows just how great a demand there is for the kind of magical populist Palin claimed to be. On July 3, she took a giant leap toward making her actions match her rhetoric. She really is a maverick now, exploring territory few of her fellow politicians are likely to follow. "The problem that Sarah Palin has with her resignation is the credibility that she can do more as a nongovernor than as a governor," exclaimed former Clinton adviser Lanny Davis on Fox News. "That simply makes no sense."

[...]

More than any other politician of her stature, Palin embodies the Internet’s insurgent, user-oriented spirit. Her resignation announcement—poorly timed, awkwardly staged, emphatically meandering—was a pitch-perfect masterpiece of YouTube verité. Her constant stream of Twitter tweets mixes potshots at Obama with snapshots of her kids. She may have once aspired to be an old-fashioned sportscaster, but now she has the soul of a blogger.

How Palin will ultimately capitalize on her populist appeal is a matter of great speculation, but one thing is clear: Whether she plans to run for president or star in a documentary about the pressing need to save the oil industry, Palin’s abrupt departure was a stroke of genius, the most sensible move she could have made. Spending 18 more months governing a state with fewer residents than Columbus, Ohio, was the political equivalent of releasing a straight-to-DVD movie. Now she can devote her full attention to all the things that enthrall her fans: cherishing her freedoms at rallies and photo ops, hunting media elites from airplanes, defending God’s energy plan from wasteful Washington meddlers, and maybe even competing in the next season of Dancing With the Stars. Jonah Goldberg and Maureen Dowd may not get it, but surely Paris Hilton understands.

Beato must represent the San Francisco wing of the libertarian movement, so steeped in snark is his attitude towards Palin. But we've seen the same from Texan Ron Paul, in a Politico interview:

As for soon-to-be departing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Paul dismisses her supporters as "more establishment, conventional Country-Club type of Republicans.”

That's strange. Aside from Fred Malek, we can think of very few "Country-Club" Republicans among Sarah Palin's supporters. Obviously, the congressman hasn't read much written by Peggy Noonan, David Frum or Kathleen Parker, all national columnists who represent the country club wing of the GOP. They can't stand Sarah Palin, and each one of them feels the need to attack her every other column or so.

As for Sarah Palin, she has had only complimentary things to say about Rep. Paul:

In this interview, Palin calls controversial Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul "cool." "He's a good guy," she added. "He's so independent. He's independent of the party machine. I'm like, 'Right on, so am I.'"

Palin in fact seems to take Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment seriously, as we've never heard her speak ill of another Republican, aside from the corrupt ones she had to battle up in Alaska, and most of those either went to jail or had to pay stiff fines. 

Obviously, Sarah Palin will never be a favorite with social libertarians, but she nevertheless has won the admiration of those libertarians for whom fiscal restraint, state's rights and a smaller and less intrusive federal government are of more importance than social issues. Among libertarian and libertarian-leaning conservative bloggers, she has friends at Libertarians for Sarah Palin, Libertarian Republican, The Republican Liberty Caucus, Classical Values and Nolan Chart, among others. 

The Democrats, by their arrogance and their overreaching, are presenting Republicans with a prime opportunity to to fight their way back in the 2010 and 2012 elections, if they can manage to get themselves out of the circular firing squad formation from which they have been shooting at each other's feet in recent years. What the GOP needs is a leader who will reunite the political coalition that Ronald Reagan built and made so successful in the 1980s. Libertarian Republicans were an essential element of that amalgamation. The big-spending Republicans of the Bush years have nearly destroyed that coalition, but should she choose to contend for leadership in the GOP, we believe Sarah Palin is best positioned to put the pieces back together.  

- JP