Anti-Palin media bias is fundamental

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An AFP story on Sarah Palin's comments about the oil spill, Obama and the president's ties to oil giant BP begins with these words:

"Right wing darling Sarah Palin..."

Notice that even though Barack Obama was named the most liberal Senator of 2007 by the non-partisan National Journal, we can't recall a single lamestream media story which had the words "left-wing Senator Barack Obama" or "liberal President Barack Obama" in the lede. Though both of Obama's parents were radical leftists, his mentor Frank Davis was a Marxist, most of his friends are hard leftists and he was endorsed by the socialist New Party when he ran for the Illinois State Senate, the media worked overtime to portray him as a centrist because it fit the left's agenda, i.e., to get him elected president so he could staff his administration with radical leftists and fundamentally transform the United States of America. The media only uses the word "liberal" when it tries to restore the appellation to respectability. That's why it dubbed the late Sen. Ted Kennedy "the liberal lion."

Even though Sarah Palin is widely perceived as a conservative, there are some on the fringes of the conservative movement, angered over her endorsements of John McCain and Carly Fiorina, who don't think Gov. Palin is all that much of a right-winger. But the lamestream media, which has become diminished to the point of simply echoing the talking points of leftist blogs and the DNC, never misses an opportunity to place her on the political spectrum somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun.

In a 2008 article, USA Today reported that Sarah Palin governed Alaska "from the center":

"She has governed from the center," says Rebecca Braun, author of Alaska Budget Report, a non-partisan political newsletter. "She has in some small ways supported her religious views — for example, proposing money to continue the office of faith-based and community initiatives — but she has actually been conspicuously absent on social issues. She came in with a big oil and gas agenda, which really required Democratic allies to get through."

John Bitney, who was Palin's issues adviser during the 2006 campaign and later worked as her legislative liaison before she fired him, says, "She's a very devout Christian. That's a part of her core. But we never put those issues forward in the campaign. She takes the positions she takes because that's who she is, but when she came into office, that wasn't her agenda."

OnTheIssues.org, a non-partisan group which endeavors to place candidates on a Nolan chart based on stated positions, votes and responses to a questionnaire, labels Sarah Palin "a Populist-Leaning Conservative."

Others say that while the former governor of Alaska certainly has a populist appeal, when it comes to governing, she has been more libertarian-leaning than populist-leaning. David Harsanyi made "The Libertarian Case for Sarah Palin" the better part of two years ago:

"In contrast to any national candidate in recent memory, Palin is the one that exudes the economic and cultural sensibilities of a genuine Western-style libertarian."

If Sarah Palin is indeed a libertarian-leaning conservative, why then the popular perception that she is a hard-core right-winger? Eric Dondero at Libertarian Republican explains:

During the 2008 Vice-Presidential campaign, Palin was identified as a libertarian Republican for the first few days after her selection, but then the media template quickly shifted to her being a member of the religious right.

[...]

Some have questioned Palin's libertarian credentials over the years. Purist libertarians, most assuredly those from the antiwar faction of the libertarian movement, have been particularly vitriolic in attacking Palin as "not really a libertarian" due to her pro-national security, pro-military stance.

This despite her extensive background as a movement libertarian.

Even so, her passionate support for Rand Paul's candidacy, and her most recent comments praising libertarians as published by The Hill, may now finally silence even the most hardened Palin critics in the movement.

But public perceptions of politicians are not shaped from within the libertarian movement. It is the media which plays the dominant role in defining politicians, and a public perception of Sarah Palin as a libertarian Republican has run counter to the left's agenda and therefore the media narrative. But that may be about to change.

The long-running truce between the left and libertarians appears to have finally been broken with the recent leftist attacks on Rand Paul. Libertarians were never a real threat to the left's agenda until Dr. Paul scored his landslide victory in the GOP primary for the U.S. Senate. With a double-digit lead in the polls over his Democrat opponent, he became a target which could no longer be ignored. Paul had previously appeared on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC and had been treated fairly at the time. But he wasn't a target of the left then. He accepted an invitation to appear on the show after his big win, and for ammunition, Maddow reached all the way back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was passed the year after Paul was born. Maddow, nevertheless, used the 45-year-old legislation as a brush to paint Paul as a racist.

That Sarah Palin had endorsed Dr. Paul early on was all the more reason for the left to go after him. They have been demonizing Gov. Palin for nearly two years, and now they are demonizing Paul and all libertarians, as guilt-by-association is one of the left's favorite Alinskyite tactics. Ironically, the left and its trained media dogs may finally be ready to let Sarah Palin be defined as a libertarian-leaning conservative. Just as soon as they have successfully demonized libertarians to the same degree that they have demonized conservatives.

- JP