Quote of the Day (March 1, 2011)

Using Facebook to reach out to the rank and file
*
Seth Lipsky at The Wall Street Journal:

"So which Republican is reaching out to union labor today in the way that Reagan did? It turns out to be another union veteran, named—wait for it—Sarah Palin."

- JP

NY Sun: Palin’s Fraternal Greetings

*
In a New York Sun editorial, Seth Lipsky notes that Gov. Palin is the first Republican to reach out "so pointedly" to union members since Ronald Reagan:

Mrs. Palin, in her Facebook posting... did speak of how the president’s lecture to the AFL-CIO “must have been tough for our good union brothers and sisters to sit through, though it may have resonated with some union bosses who desire their members to adopt a herd mentality, too, so as to not dare speak up against what Washington is doing to us.” What struck us about this is that it’s hard to think of a Republican reaching out so pointedly to union members since the man who invented Big Tent Republicanism, Ronald Reagan.

Mrs. Palin’s demarche is one to keep an eye on. What are the Reagan Democrats going to do in November 2010 and November 2012? Mrs. Palin, with her campaign for the Mama Grizzlies and her “whole stampede of pink elephants,” as she put it in the now-famous video, has upended the former left-of-center feminist calculus about women voters, not to mention women candidates. The question her latest post raises is whether she’s going to strive for a similar upset in the calculus among blue collar voters who once could be counted on by the Democrats until Reagan came along and talked to them about inflation, taxes and unemployment.

She’s certainly had her eye on, say, Ohio, where she is invested in the gubernatorial race and where her endorsements and campaign contributions, Politico noted as far back as February, suggest she fully comprehends the outsized importance of the state.

Mr. Lipsky's full NY Sun editorial is here, and we recommend the read.

- JP

NY Sun Editorial: Cordoba’s Opportunity

*
The NY Sun's Seth Lipsky has authored an editorial in Monday's edition regarding the controversy over the Ground Zero mega-mosque. Mr Lipsky suggests that the Cordoba Initiative has an historic opportunity to demonstrate respect, understanding, and forbearance, a move which would diffuse a contentious situation :

The battle over a proposed $100 million mosque and Islamic center at Ground Zero could well be at a turning point, the New York Times reported over the weekend. Its assessment was made after the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, came out in opposition to situating the site adjacent to the epicenter of the attacks on September 11, 2001. We telephoned Mr. Foxman to offer congratulations. It had to have been a hard call for him, with so many supporters of the project suggesting that the sole reason for opposing it had to be bigotry.

That suggestion has struck us from the start as a libel. There may be some bigots in opposition to the project, but they would be a small percentage, in our guess. We thought Mr. Foxman put it exactly right in suggesting that the fact that the Cordoba Initiative may win the right to build at the site where extremists acting in the name of Islam slew so many innocent people doesn’t make building such a center there the right thing to do. We mentioned to him that we’d been impressed with the way Sarah Palin articulated her early opposition to the project.

“She’s got seichel,” we remarked to Mr. Foxman. It was a reference to the Yiddish word that has no single-word English translation but means a combination of intelligence, wisdom, and common sense. Mrs. Palin’s short messages on Twitter were crafted as a call not on the government to prohibit the project but on the moderate Muslims themselves to — in her now classic formulation — “refudiate” the plan. Her call was for forbearance out of understanding of the special nature of the Ground Zero site in the city’s and the nation’s memory...

Read the rest of today's NY sun editorial here.

h/t: Benyamin Korn

- JP

Seth Lipsky: The Palin Doctrine

*
In a New York Sun editorial, Seth Lipsky says that in her speeches and writings on national security and foreign policy, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate is staking out a Palin Doctrine. We've excerpted editor Lipsky's first four paragraphs:

One of the things that’s starting to emerge on the Republican side of the political struggle is a world view that can be called the Palin Doctrine. It’s remarkable that none of the other leading figures in the party has come to be associated with a particular foreign policy trajectory. Can one think, say, of a Pawlenty Doctrine or a Daniels Doctrine or a even a Perry or a Schwartzenegger or a Romney Doctrine? They each have their own bona fides, but developing the outlines of a coherent foreign policy view isn’t one of them.

Governor Palin, by contrast, has been starting to give us a glimpse what could be expected of her in foreign affairs. This has been occurring in public appearances and broadcasts and, most pointedly, in a posting on June 30 her Facebook. So while the left has been mocking her for a supposed lack of depth or learning, she has been filling in, line by line, a picture of her foreign policy views, ranging over topics from the Navy (she’s for an expansion of the fleet), to a view of the war (she’s a hawk), to a view of the dollar (she’s against a weak dollar strategy), to a view of Israel (unflinching support).

This isn't the first time talk of a Palin Doctrine has been in the news. As far back as September 2008, the phrase occurred in, among other places, a column by Arianna Huffington who likened Mrs. Palin’s to “Dick Cheney. With lipstick.” She noted, however, that the governor’s doctrine was still “under construction.” In the two years since then, the Alaskan has honed an increasingly cohesive and detailed world view. We’ve already noted her remarks in respect of the dollar, delivered in a speech in Hong Kong and on her face book page, as well as her willingness to breast the politically correct line on Israel.

One of the features of the Palin Doctrine is that the governor opposes what she calls an “enemy-centric” foreign policy. In marking this point she has picked up on the phrasing of one of the most sophisticated critics of President Obama’s foreign policy, Senator Alexandr Vondra of the Czech Republic. A one-time hero of the anti-Communist struggle, Mr. Vondra is a former Czech envoy in Washington and a former foreign minister...

Read the full NY Sun editorial here.

- JP

Seth Lipsky: Even on tough issues, Sarah Palin supports Israel

Seth Lipsky, founder and former editor of the New York Sun, comments in Tablet, an online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture, on Sarah Palin's recent remarks on Israel's West Bank settlements:

"A bit of a brouhaha has erupted regarding Sarah Palin and the Jews. It seems that the former governor of Alaska went on television to promote her new book, Going Rogue, and was asked by Barbara Walters what she thought of Israel’s West Bank settlements."

'I disagree with the Obama administration on that,' Palin replied. 'I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.'

"When I read her reply, I thought that it was wonderful. In the two generations in which I’ve been covering the Middle East debate, it was one of the few times a public figure gave in response to a question about the settlements an answer that I would call ideal. It seemed to me courageous, in that Palin was going against not only the administration but many in her own party and the gods of political correctness. There was no shilly-shallying about the Oslo process and the Quartet and the United Nations. Palin didn’t seem particularly worried one way or another about how she might be perceived. She is just on Israel’s side."

[...]

"I spent the weekend reading Going Rogue. It turns out to be a marvelous memoir by a very smart, high-spirited woman, who is handling the messiness of family life and the challenges of a public life in a way that is inspiring millions. She may not be a veteran of, say, the anti-communist battles of the free-trade union movement that made Ronald Reagan a sage on the biggest issue of his time, Soviet communism. But she has the kind of clarity of commitment on key themes that he had and the same kind of wholesome optimism—and she’s still young. I couldn’t find anything in the book that made me worry about the fact that even on the difficult issues she supports Israel."

Unlike some political figures in this country, Sarah Palin knows who America's real friends are. Read the full Lipsky opinion piece here.

- JP