Sarah Palin: Retail Politics The Walton Way

At American Thinker, J. Robert Smith says Sarah Palin's Going Rogue book tour is retail politics practiced the Walton Way. The late Sam Walton had such a good read on the way the retail business should be done that he became an American success story, so successful in fact that the University of Arkansas renamed its College of Business Administration after him. Smith sees the parallel between the cities which the former governor's book tour will not be visiting and how Mr. Sam got Wal-mart off the ground:

Walton, who could have run and won political campaigns, built Walmart into the behemoth it is today by opening his discount stores in small towns in the heartland, towns that the eight-hundred pound gorilla K-Mart ignored.

Walton conquered the discount retail category from the heartland out. He didn't so much as clobber K-Mart as steal a march on it. Palin may just prove that a heartland strategy does more than sell blenders and books. It's the foundation for winning a national election.

Make no mistake, right now, heartlanders (and heartlanders in spirit) are feeling awfully ignored by Washington politicians. The president and Congress are intent on ramming through a health care reform measure that an ever-increasing majority of Americans oppose. They're spending as if using someone else's credit card (in fact, the people's); they play Americans for dupes by calling an old-fashioned pork barrel bill an economic stimulus; and, for toppers, President Obama is playing Hamlet about Afghanistan, thus putting brave soldiers there at greater risk every day.

What Palin will bring to places like Noblesville, Ind., Washington, Pennsylvania, and Fort Bragg, N.C, is her brand of popular conservatism: upbeat, optimistic and certain. It really is an offshoot of the Reagan brand. And the Reagan brand has its roots deep in the American character.

Smith reminds his reader that 40 percent of voters identify as conservative, while only half that many, 20 percent, as liberal. And many of the 40 percent in the middle share at least some values and positions with the 40 percent who are conservative. Independents, who voted for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008, are now abandoning the Dems in droves.

But the Democrats aren't only losing support from independents. They are increasingly seeing culturally conservative, hawkish, and populist Southern and Border state whites break away from the Democrat coalition. Analyst Sean Trende calls this group of voters the Jacksonians:

So, Palin's heartland strategy means consolidating her base among voters from Kentucky north to Michigan, from central Pennsylvania clear over to the Rocky Mountains. The Deep South is largely in conservative hands now.

And just as with Walmart's strategy of building its retailing muscle from the heartland out, Palin's next move should be into the nation's suburbs. Starting with her vice presidential nomination and afterward, the mainstream media and liberal pundits and bloggers have done an expert job of slicing and dicing Palin's reputation. Voter perceptions of Palin in affluent suburbs are more caricature than reality. In many eyes, she's a mix of good-looking airhead and gun-toting, social issues radical.

Palin can explode those perceptions by engaging suburbanites on a retail basis, something that small-minded and controlling McCain campaign operatives barred her from doing last year.

The former Alaska governor is, by appearances and reports, a warm and engaging personality who talks a common sense language that resonates with most Americans. The key for her is to connect her conservative principles with suburbanites' concerns.

This she can do by showing suburbanites how her Reagan brand of common sense conservatism can provide practical solutions to the problems those suburbanites are facing. They worry about what their kids are being taught in government schools, how they will stretch their family budgets, how they will keep their jobs or find new ones if they have already lost them, and how tax increases and runaway federal spending hurts them and mortgages their children's future.

Smith points out that there already is shared ground that suburbanites and Sarah Palin stand on. It's up to Sarah Palin to make this key demographic understand that. She will have to battle a dark army of leftists all the way to the suburbs, and she will have to continue to take her message right through the liberals' captive "mainstream" media, but she has already shown that she can do that. They have thrown everything that they could wrap their fists around at her, and yet she's still standing. All she need so is show the suburbanites, the Jacksonians, that she understands their problems and shares their vision of how to solve them.

- JP