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

Landslide Rand and Prescient Palin

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W. James Antle, III writes in The American Spectator Wednesday about Rand Paul's landslide Tuesday night GOP primary victory in Kentucky. The younger Paul, Says Antle, rode voter anger at Barack Obama, bipartisan bailouts of private industry, and the growth of the federal leviathan to a big electoral win. But Rand was also successful in part because he knew which of his father's policy positions to adopt and which of them to discard. Which makes the Kentucky Paul a pretty shrewd political poker player.

The electorate didn't fall for the attempts by Trey Grayson and his supporters to distort Rand Paul's views on social issues, explains Antle, so when Grayson tried to do the same with foreign policy issues, voters didn't buy that one either:

The Grayson campaign enlisted Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, and Rick Santorum, among other supporters of a neoconservative foreign policy. Yet their attacks did not move the polls -- and here Rand Paul did not completely follow his father's playbook.

Which makes Sarah Palin's endorsement of Rand seem all the more prescient today. At the beginning of February, when Gov. Palin made the endorsement, there was no shortage of "experts" who claimed that it was a bad move on her part. It only took a hundred days or so to prove them wrong.

But the Palin backing for Rand Paul has benefits for the governor beyond demonstrating that she picked a winner. Most importantly, it allows her to distance herself from the neoconservatives. The great neocon failure was to focus so intently on the war in the Mideast to the exclusion of nearly everything else. This myopic view tarnished neoconservatism to the point where it is a largely discredited theory today, and frankly, we're delighted to see it fall out of favor on the right.

We've always preferred an across-the-board conservatism as practiced by Ronald Reagan and his political disciples. Sarah Palin is one of those disciples, and she battled with the Republicans in her own state legislators as governor to try to keep spending down and budgets from ballooning. Reagan Conservatism is enjoying a resurgence in popularity, despite the efforts of the neocons to characterize it as dated and "not in tune with the times." Balderdash! Reagan was always one to acknowledge the positive influence on the conservative philosophy by fiscal libertarianism, and Sarah Palin has that same respect for libertarian Republican principles. Hence, her endorsement of Rand Paul. In fact, we believe that Gov. Palin has long wanted to reassemble the Reagan coalition, and what better way to reunite the conservative and libertarian branches of it than to give her nod to Paul the younger? As Antle writes:

Paul united his father's national army of libertarian followers, who became his avid fundraising base, with a much larger group of rank-and-file conservatives who were ready for someone who would fight for limited government. It was a union of Ron Paul Republicans and Rush Limbaugh Republicans. In April, an exit poll taken at the Tea Party protest at the National Mall showed the demonstrators' favorite politicians were Sarah Palin and Ron Paul. Rand Paul, with his focus on the size of government, unified both wings of the Tea Party movement.

So much for the neocons and the squishy Republican establishment. As for the liberal Democrats, Rand Paul has a message for them as well:



As Antle says, "Washington has been put on notice." Rand Paul, Sarah Palin and an army of outsiders are coming to take their government jobs away.

- JP

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