Mike Metroulas: Palin and the 'Conservative Intelligentsia' Backlash

The Sarah Palin who spoke at the 2008 RNC convention can win in 2012
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Mike Metroulas, libertarian contributor to Big Journalism, comments on the fallout from the recent Politico hit piece on Gov. Palin:

A recent Politico piece focusing on a “conservative intelligentsia” backlash against Sarah Palin playing identity politics gleans this nugget from George Will:

Asked if the GOP would remain the party of ideas if Palin captures the nomination, Will said: “The answer is emphatically no.”

I think self-government and individual liberty are grand ideas. Principled and limited governance is a grand idea. I’m not sure what ideas Will thinks will be lost here, but in my estimation, the federal government does not exist as some sort of symposium for over-intellectualizing or a platform for one party to promote their own agenda. Sure, that’s where we’ve been for a very, very long time (around 220 years), but wanting to scale that back is one of the best ideas I’ve ever heard. That’s what Palin brings to the table. Her current media appearances are not indicative of how she would govern, nor are they indicative of how she would conduct herself on the campaign trail.

The piece also quotes the Manhattan Institute’s Heather McDonald as saying:

“She is living up to the most skeptical assessment of her.”

I’m not so sure. The most skeptical assessment of her was that she was an absolute ignoramus whose 15 minutes of fame would be over right after Obama won the election, and we’d never hear from her again. To the chagrin of many, that didn’t happen.

The piece goes on to state:

For now, however, Palin’s appeal is largely rooted in the sympathy she’s gleaned from her loudly voiced resentments toward the left, the news media and the GOP establishment.

I don’t buy this for one second. Any wars of words she has engaged in recently have had little to do with her appeal, they have only served to galvanize her most ardent supporters, while possibly turning off other people. This is sloppy because she is not actually campaigning, nor can we say with any certainty that she is going to.

The media’s hysteria over Sarah Palin’s nomination threw her entire identity, both political and personal, into the deepest recesses of the American psyche. Painting Palin merely as a sympathetic figure, as this Politico piece does, is to deny her real appeal completely, which revolves around a genuine impulse in America that yearns for a much-needed pruning of our federal government. Much of the electorate is way beyond caring what the “conservative intelligentsia” or the GOP establishment has to say. Many Americans are more interested in what people like Sarah Palin have to say.

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- JP

Rush: The problem is Obama, not Palin

This anti-Palin vitriol from "the right" defies logic
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Rush Limbaugh commented Monday on the Palin-bashing by alleged "conservative" intellectuals:


h/t: The Daily Rushbo

- JP

Jacobson: If 'She Can't Win,' Then Neither Can We

"Let them all enter the primaries and let them all be seriously considered"
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William Jacobson, the law professor who blogs at Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion, has been on the case of the PDS-afflicted on both the left and the right who have been pushing their "can't win" meme so hard lately. The naysayers with their axes to grind insist she doesn't even deserve to be seriously considered by GOP primary voters because the 2008 Republican vice presidential just can't win a general election.

They cite as evidence her poll numbers, but they don't want to talk about how far down in the polls (22 points) Ronald Reagan was to Jimmy Carter in January, 1979. They say she is "too divisive," but Reagan was characterized in the same manner. They say she's too hated by the left, but so was George W. Bush, yet that did not prevent him from winning a second term in 2004. Tim Pawlenty and a number of other prospective GOP presidential candidates have poll numbers much lower than those of Sarah Palin, but no one is claiming that any of them "can't win." As Prof. Jacobson observes, the meme has been used almost exclusively against Sarah Palin. But he points out that she is not the issue:

The issue is whether we will demoralize voters who would work hard to elect a Republican -- even a Republican not quite to their liking -- in the general election provided the primary process were viewed as fair and open.

We saw in the 2010 elections that Tea Party supporters are among the most loyal. Where Tea Party candidates lost primaries, Tea Party supporters rallied around the winner, or at least did not actively seek to undermine the winners. By contrast, the moment establishment candidates lost, there were active attempts in some races by establishment Republicans (and unfortunately, some of the conservative blogosphere) to undermine the candidates.

There is no better way to demoralize a key segment of the Republican Party, and damage our chances in November 2012, than to announce a year before the primaries even begin that Palin should not even enter the primary fray or should not be seriously considered because she cannot win a general election.

We do not need the Republican equivalents of 2008 Democratic PUMAs, people so embittered by the perceived unfairness of the primary process that they stayed home or switched sides in November. And that will be the result of attempts to shut Palin out of the process through the "can't win" strategy.

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If "she can't win" is the means by which one of the candidates wins the Republican nomination, then we can't win either.

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- JP

Mark Meed: 4 Palin-Hating Groups Who Should Be On Her Resume

The Mos Eisley Cantina collection of characters who oppose her
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We can learn a lot about someone through an examination of the enemies he or she has cultivated. Mark Meed, in an op-ed for David Horowitz's NewsReal Blog, says Sarah has cultivated some of the best... actually, the worst, from our point of view down here in the Brazos Valley:

1. The Republican Establishment

Barbara Bush is only the latest in a long line of GOP patricians who have damned Palin with faint praise then suggested, with varying degrees of subtlety, that she quietly depart the stage so the grownups can take over... Scant mention is made of the fact these are the same grownups who presided over the frittering and fumbling away of the same Reagan legacy they rhapsodize about on the Sunday shows...

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2. “Friends” on the Right

Others, nominally on the Right side of the fence, aren’t subtle at all.

Kathleen Parker, Peggy Noonan, David Brooks and David Frum – to name just a few of the bitter old women involved – have each in their turn made pronouncements about Palin in which terms like “fatal cancer”, “joke”, “nincompoop”, “disastrous” and my personal favorite “a different version of Madonna” factor prominently. Perusing these utterances it’s easy to imagine some back-channel contest to see who can be most snide and condescending without actually leaving spittle on the page... Like the Republican old guard they relentlessly shill for, these scribes and pundits largely see political change in terms of replacing elites from the Left with elites from the Right, which necessarily includes them.

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3. The Media

So shrill and venomous has been the media’s reaction to Palin – reminiscent of the Ringwraiths screeching over the empty beds at the Prancing Pony – that it’s earned its own pseudo-psychiatric term “Palin Derangement Syndrome”... Bottom line, there is no happy-mask left for these people where Palin is concerned. With every new silly, counter-factual, hopelessly predictable hit-piece they churn out they might as well just add the boilerplate disclaimer: “I am a desperately unhappy, deeply neurotic pseudo-intellectual whose only pleasure comes imagining myself superior to Sarah Palin and every ‘ordinary’ American she represents,” because that’s what screams across the divide.

4. The Entertainment Industry

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It would be extravagant to claim that before Sarah Palin dogpile we had no inkling how vulgar, nasty and breathtakingly obtuse our entertainment and entertainers had become... We can however assert with some confidence that with Palin our glitterati have dropped the pretense that it’s only about the US government and are now utterly transparent in their contempt for the type of American Palin represents, which is most of us.

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If she achieves nothing else in her lifetime except having – just by virtue of who she is and what she represents – flushed some of them out of hiding, that alone should secure her a place in history, complete with statue, bank holiday and catchy song.

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Our Sarah does seem to rile up all the usual suspects, doesn't she?

- JP

Stacy McCain on the sneering Charles Krauthammer

"There is... a very real possibility of Palin winning the 2012 presidential nomination"
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Stacy McCain reminds us that it is not Charles Krauthammer’s fault that the media are obsessed not only with with presidential politics, but with what they see as their mission from Gawd, The Obamamessiah, to destroy Sarah Palin:

However, it is Krauthammer’s fault that he can’t speak of Palin except to dismiss her with a sneer. (Am I the only one who noticed his significant pause between “glorious” and “woman”?)

Allahpundit isn’t as openly sneering as Krauthammer: “While no one would claim that conservatism begins and ends with Palin, some of her more devoted supporters do seem to regard her as an avatar of the movement.”

Here’s my problem with such dismissive attitudes toward Palin from conservatives: It sets up the 2012 primary contest as a battle between Smart Republicans (who are presumed to oppose Palin) and Dumb Republicans (who presumably support Palin). This message — which is being shouted from the rooftops by Krauthammer, Rove and many others — will tend to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Which is to say, most of the Smart Republicans who take their political cues from the conservative intelligentsia will in fact oppose Palin. But the influence of Rove, Krauthammer et al. is not so great as they wish and, in a multi-candidate field, the irreducible hard core of Palin supporters among GOP primary voters is still large enough to win pluralities in every state where the primary electorate is limited to registered Republicans. (Seriously: Comparing the average Romney supporter to the average Palin supporter, which is more likely to trudge through the snow to attend an Iowa caucus meeting?)

There is therefore a very real possibility of Palin winning the 2012 presidential nomination, at which point all the sneering condescension of the Krauthammer/Rove class will justify the MSM in declaring, “The Dumb Republicans have won!”

And that’s not going to help beat Barack Obama, is it?

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Stacy makes a good point, and we agree. However, we don't share his presumption that Rove, Krauthammer, Frum and their ilk would prefer to see a first Sarah Palin term in the White House to a second Obama term. He argues that the conservative intelligentsia should "start acting as if a Palin presidency were both possible and preferable to Obama’s re-election," but we're not optimistic that will come to pass. After all, how many of those supposed conservatives voted for Obama? Most probably won't admit which lever they pulled when behind the curtains, but many of the Conservative Lite^® elites, including Amanda Carpenter, Joe Scarborough, Bill Bennett, Peggy Noonan were in high song of the freshman Senator's praises in the run up to the 2008 election.

Our biggest problem with Karauthammer is that he seems more offended that the press is obsessed with Gov. Palin, when he should be offended that it is obsessed with her destruction. But Krauthammer and the other right of center elites love the media. They are of the media part and parcel. Media elitism is the hand that has fed them lo these many years, and they dare not bite it. Unlike Sarah Palin, they have shown not the slightest interest in even reforming it.

- JP

Gov. Palin to Vichy Republican Kathleen Parker: I'm still standing

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John Ziegler was a guest on CNN's new ratings-challenged "Parker Spitzer" program Thursday, and the following exchange took place:

ZIEGLER: You took part in the targeting of Sarah Palin. You essentially took part in the assassination of Sarah Palin 1.0. That person is dead; she doesn't exist any more.

PARKER: No, no, no. Actually, I did not take part in it: I led it. Let's be clear. Let's get our facts straight.

Indeed, Parker began attacking Gov. Palin only weeks after John McCain named her as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election and hasn't relented to this very day.

The governor responded to the prideful Parker via Twitter Friday:

"Parker: appreciate your admittance. Now, I'm still standing;Standing by family, faith & flag. Who do u stand by today? http://bit.ly/d5p72x"

Oh, I think we know where the despicable Conservative Lite^® Parker stands...

h/t: Kristinn

- JP

Quote of the Day (October 27, 2010)

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Jane Jamison at Uncoverage:

"Apparently, [Tokyo] Rove thinks that Sarah Palin’s new family show on the Discovery Channel makes her unfit to run for the presidency. Not just unfit for the presidency, unfit to even RUN for the office... Anyone who reads my little inch of space... knows that I am not one of those Sarah-do-or-die bloggers.I have taken issue with her involvement in the California primary. That said, the woman is firing up the base, and has been keeping to an Iron woman schedule. She could run a marathon, pause to shoot a moose, throw a couple loads of laundry in, write 3 speeches for next week, give 4 radio interviews and STILL kick Karl Rove’s butt in a debate."

- JP

As Conservatism Rises, The Faux Right Kicks and Screams

Donald Douglas, on "The Glorious Grassroots Conservative Comeback":

Check out David Frum's essay yesterday, for example, "Scorched Earth Conservatives." The post is a response to David Horowitz at FrontPage Magazine, and Frum argues that "the conservative intellectual movement has become subservient to the political entertainment complex." Frum is particularly incensed by Glenn Beck's ascendancy, but Frum has had Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin in the gunsights all year; and he lumps all those heavy-hitters together to allege that they are " inviting the Ron Paul contingent to take over as the new base and face of conservatism and Republicanism."

This is so patently stupid it obviously strains credibility. Indeed, the big deal last week was the potential feud between Beck and Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin has frankly emerged as the most prominent advocate for the U.S. military on the political right today (see, "Remembering 9/11: We Are Americans"). Ron Paul's hardly a Palin ally.

What we're seeing on the left - and the Charles Johnson/David Frum condominium is fundamentallly a left-wing project - is fear and horror that conservatives are making a comeback. And what's also interesting is that the right's unapologetic partisan pugilism isn't really new at all.

Folks might take a look at Ronald Brownstein's book from last year, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America. Brownstein's introduction compares former House Minority Leader Tom Delay to Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos. Under Delay, GOP partisanship was no less sharp and uncompromising that what we're seeing in today's tea party movement and anti-ObamaCare activism...

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While Brownstein decries the "polarization," it's the case that an aggressive agenda against Democratic-socialism has long been in place on the hardline conservative right. And while the Johnson/Frum types endlessly denounce alleged "extremism" and "racism," the truth is that the grassroots right is winning the debate.

The conservative revival we are witnessing in this country has the Faux Right in a rage. They have worked for two decades to destroy Reagan conservatism and to remake the Republican Party in the image of Democrat Lite. Now more and more Americans are realizing that these ersatz conservatives have much more in common with The Left's radical elite than they do with the cause of ordinary Americans.

It's a reckoning that's been long in coming.

- JP