board77

Dave_LF wrote:

Yes, a very good editorial with some cautionary words for those who think it's safe to dismiss her (I found it independently and just got done posting it at HoF; sorry, wasn't trying to steal your thunder).

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Were Palin actually to secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a fiasco for the G.O.P. akin to Goldwater 1964, as the most relentless conservative Palin critic, David Frum, has predicted. Or would it? No one thought Richard Nixon — a far less personable commodity than Palin — would come back either after his sour-grapes “last press conference” of 1962. But Democratic divisions and failures gave him his opportunity in 1968. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and a seemingly bottomless war in Afghanistan, you never know, as Palin likes to say, what doors might open.

It’s more likely that she will never get anywhere near the White House, and not just because of her own limitations. The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.

The title makes the point nice and succinctly: Palin broke the GOP and now she owns it.

TheEllipticalDisillusion wrote:

This is a dumbing down of the country that should be monitored cautiously.

Dave_LF wrote:

TheEllipticalDisillusion wrote:

This is a dumbing down of the country that should be monitored cautiously.

I think it calls for more than close monitoring. Sufficiently widespread, this kind of cluelessness and cultivated ignorance is an existential threat.

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Steven Jonas
So Going Rogue and its companion guide to the truth, Going Rouge (available right here on BuzzFlash), are both out. And so is Sarah Palin. She is like the cat that got out of the bag. Since leaving the Alaska governorship, she has been stoking the Palin Fires. In a state in severe economic and environmental difficulty, there was simply no future there, right; and especially Right: might even have to take stimulus money. Definitely no future even if you can see Russia from it, that is on a very clear day standing tippy-toes on its farthest western point, at the Bering Strait (a very long ways from either Anchorage or Wasilla). She has her book and it and she are getting a lot of attention. Palin runs on enemies, not problems or programs to solve them (especially if one problem is premarital sex and the only available solution is abstinence-only education in high school). Her two main enemies are "the media" and "big government."

As far as "the media" are concerned, there are few politicians that I can recall who spend more time on the media attacking the media than her. Of course after her Couric/Gibson fiascoes, she is much more careful about picking her spots. For the book, she is doing Oprah, Hannity, O'Reilly, Coulter, and, I am sure, tons of other representatives of the Beckoning Savagely Le-vinitating O'RHannibaugh Republican Scream Machine. But then again, they are not the media to which she is referring when she uses the term "the media." That media is the news media, the present-reality based media, the media that ask questions such as "what do you think of the Bush Doctrine?" (Charles Gibson) and "what have you read lately?" (Katie Couric). Those are the totally unfair, biased, "agenda-based" media. Indeed, one of Palin's talking points on her book tour is that Katie Couric came to the interview with "an agenda" that clearly reflected her "liberal bias," dontchaknow.

This is a very important armament for Palin. All the U.S. Right, whether it is to be found among what passes for "mainstream" Republicans these days such as Giuliani, or the Republican Scream Machine, or the Christian Right, attack "the media" on a regular basis and with ever-increasing venom. They do this for several reasons, all related to the fact that they have no real, workable solutions for solving the problems that eight years of Bush-Cheney have created for us, plus others of long-standing, such as health care and climate change.

So they unleash their WMD -- Weapons of Mass Distraction -- one of the principal ones being to attack the media. They also attack the media because even the fairly timid ones that we have do deal on occasion with serious issues, such as Gibson and Couric, et al, did with Palin. If the GOP leadership were to respond to the substance, they would reveal themselves as the empty vessels they are. How much better, eh, to kill, or at least try to kill the messenger.

But Palin is a special case. Her intellectual, experiential, political-historical vessel is even emptier than that of most of her rivals for the leadership of the Republican Party. So she must attack with a particular venom (but always with that smiley face). That is reflected in what her most ardent defenders these days are doing, also. Listen carefully, and whatever the question is, very often you will hear the first sentence of the very first comment of any one of her defenders/promoters contain the words "the media." Not only does that response avoid dealing with any substance, but also it very conveniently gets the argument away from policy and onto the question of "media bias." Oh how convenient. If the message is to your disadvantage, as with Republicans it almost invariably is, isn't it much better to attempt to kill the messenger than to deal with the message? Giuliani is a past master of this technique. Just watch him. My only question is, is it genetic or an acquired trait among Republicans.

And then we get to the three questions on everyone's lips: "Is she running for President?" "Could she get the GOP nomination?" "Could she win the Presidency?"

Briefly and unequivocally my answer to all three is "yes." No, she is not in it just for the book royalty and speaking engagement money. She needs that income to support herself and her family. (Do you know what her husband makes? It ain't much.) But she is talking very much like a presidential candidate, who very much would like to have the job, at least as she imagines it.

However, her dreams are not the key to figuring out what is going on here. Who has lined up behind her in the past and who is lining up now is. Bill Kristol, who has a lot of very powerful friends, plucked this woman out of nowhere. They have not gone away. They know that in 2012 it is likely that even President Obama will have made some progress in dealing with the major problems, foreign and domestic our nation faces, many of which were laid in his lap such as booby traps by the Georgites. Thus they also know that the only way they are going to win is with a media star, who is just superb at wielding Weapons of Mass Distraction. Guess who? So in addition looking at her body language and her current "small town American" book/media tour (as if the small town America to which she constantly refers represents any more than a tiny sliver of the country anymore), we have to look at whose interests she would be serving. Those are the interests of those folks who put her where she is in the first place (Kristol discovered her whilst on a political seminar cruise in Alaska) and then jammed her down the unwilling throat of John McCain.

Poor David Brooks of The New York Times. He is promoting the likes of an obscure Senator, John Thune, who won his seat running a very dirty campaign against Tom Daschle and who should easily with re-election in 2010, although Brooks promotes him as an "honorable man." Faceless, such as Gov. Pawlenty of Minnesota and Gov.-elect McDonnell of Virginia. Of course they are all "true conservatives" (which means anti-abortion rights, homophobic, as-unlimited-as-possible gunners, who are deficit hawks on everything except foreign wars and military spending). But they are going to be bowled over by the fabled "GOP base" that has turned on even the pretty far-right Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina for not being far-right enough. Sarah Palin will never be not far-right enough. Thus she has every chance of winning the Republican primaries, especially since her principal rival will be the Christian Reconstructionist from Arkansas, Mike Huckabee. Vice-Presidential slot, Mike?

As for the general election, unless President Obama has made some significant left turns by 2012, there will almost certainly be a serious left-wing third-party candidate in that race and no, I am talking about neither the Green Party nor Ralph Nader. I am talking about a serious, well-funded, well-organized one. If the fascist direction in which the GOP is definitely heading has not become more clear, and if the Democratic Party as a whole still does not recognize it much less organize to combat it, the Party could very well split, just like the Whig Party did in the run-up to the Civil War. (I happen to think that such a split is essential, and I also think that a Second Civil War is very much a possibility. But more on both those issues in this space down the road.) In a three-way race, Palin could win.

Palin is very scary. She is, as I have characterized before, Hitler in heels with a smiley face. The German industrial class did not pick Hitler because he had well thought-out solutions to the problems faced by Weimar Germany nor because he was a good administrator. They picked him because he could mobilize fear and anger. They picked him because he identified enemies that there were not themselves, even though they were the underlying causes of Germany's problems. They picked him because he was an electrifying speaker who could mesmerize masses of possible even when what he was saying did not make much sense, or worse. They picked him because he was a master of the Big Lie Technique. That is telling a big lie and telling it over and over again, very loudly. Eventually it is accepted either as truth or at least plausible. Something such as death panels.

On that score, however, Palin outdoes Hitler. He knew when he was telling a lie. Palin tells lies with abandon and doesn't seem to know when she is lying. For example, she has definitively said both that her decision to accept the offer of the Vice-Presidential slot was subject to a family vote and that it was not. She has said both that she knew in advance of her statement dissing the decision of the McCain to abandon Michigan that she knew of it and that she did not. One of each is a lie. Palin seems not to know which is which. Could that make her even more dangerous than Hitler, who was regarded as something of a joke by many on both the Right and the Left in Germany before January 30, 1933, when he took power? Only time will tell. But just think if the Nazis had invented the Bomb first.

Palin's masses love her and will continue to do so, even if Going Rouge puts the lie to every one of her so-called "policy positions" and Steve Schmidt and his McCain crew identify one lie after another about them in her book. Doesn't matter folks. Kristol and his gang picked her and are still with her. Mary Matalin and her gang have signed on (possibly looking for a job in her campaign, of course). Even Newt Gingrich, who harbors Presidential ambitions himself but is getting old and makes very opaque speeches, is lining up as well. It does not matter what the polls say now. She has not begun to fight. She will have oodles of corporate money behind her. Just by continuing to attack the media she will get more media attention than all of the other potential GOP candidates put together. And Hitler never got more that 37% of the vote in a free election. Watch out folks. Here comes Sarah, Hitler in heels with a smiley face.

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor of 30 books. In addition to being a columnist for BuzzFlash, Dr. Jonas is also Managing Editor and a Contributing Author for TPJmagazine; a Featured Writer for Dandelion Salad; a Senior Columnist for The Greanville POST; a Contributor to TheHarderStuff newsletter; a Contributor to The Planetary Movement; and a Contributing Columnist for the Project for the Old American Century, POAC.

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SARAH PALIN’S sit-down with Oprah Winfrey this week may have been the most tense TV encounter of the year, a palpable mix of suspicion and mutual need. Oprah was good for Obama, but she’s also good for books, and Palin is good for TV. When the two shook hands across the chasm of a coffee table, you wondered if the studio circuitry would blow.


It didn’t, but of all of the interlocutors Palin faced in this week’s “Going Rogue’’ media blitz, only Winfrey managed to cut through Palin’s efforts to cast herself as a victim. Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly were all too willing to blame Palin’s public relations woes in 2008 on cynical campaign operatives, evil liberals, and the “lamestream media.’’ Barbara Walters framed her as a lovable mom who makes moose hot dogs with cheese.

But sitting on the other side of Winfrey’s skeptical glare, Palin looked too cynical and savvy to play the innocent. Instead, she reverted to the mean girl, the woman who charmed conservatives by slicing gleefully into her foes, whether they be oil barons or community organizers. Her takedown of would-be son-in-law Levi Johnston was nearly virtuosic: All I want to talk about is his beautiful son, whom he hasn’t seen in a while because he’s so busy being Ricky Hollywood . . .

Johnston gives new meaning to the term opportunistic, and clearly deserves Palin’s scorn. But mean girls tend to turn on other women, and Palin’s chief target - besides those evil campaign staffers who forced her to wear designer clothes - is Katie Couric, whom she calls “the perky one.’’ Palin’s book is filled with snide remarks about Couric’s demeanor and her ratings. And Palin offers a new and inventive reason for fumbling so badly on the national stage: She was annoyed.

Couric always seemed to be looming, Palin said, asking relentless questions about policy topics and magazines. She had expected the Couric interviews “to be kind of lighthearted, fun, working mom speaking to working mom about the challenges we have with teenage daughters,’’ Palin told Winfrey. And if that had happened, how many people would have complained that Palin wasn’t being taken seriously - and that Couric lacked the gravitas to helm the evening news?

But Palin has always wanted to have it both ways, to play both sides of the gender card; that’s what makes her both fascinating and frustrating as a public figure. She’s the dragon lady and the ingénue, Rizzo and Sandy, the mom who skillfully wields her baby as a campaign tool, then can’t believe it when the press mentions her kids. She’s the woman with an innate sense of public presentation who declares, whenever she makes a gaffe, that she had no idea what to expect.

It has been this way all week, too: Palin takes her glamour shots in shorts for Runner’s World, then acts stunned when Newsweek puts one on the cover. Palin makes her daughter, Piper, a major character in her book, then gripes that the media always left Barack Obama’s kids alone. (Winfrey had to point out that Obama told the press to lay off Palin’s family, too.)

In truth, the innocent version of Palin has a lot of appeal, as a person and a politician. In “Going Rogue,’’ she writes movingly about her baby, Trig: about learning that he would have Down syndrome, telling her family the news, meeting older kids with Down syndrome on the campaign trail. Female politicians with young families are entirely too rare; too many make the tradeoff between politics and family, or launch their political careers long after their children are grown. It would, indeed, be valuable to have another down-to-earth woman, earnest and informed, in a major position of influence.

But Palin’s rise as a political rock star owes far more to her cynical, glamorous side, the one that matches the other mean girls of the conservative movement - the Coulters and the Malkins who know how to cut down their enemies without mussing their lipstick. It’s the cynical play of the gender card that gets you celebrity treatment and giant advances from publishers. Being a mommy sells policy. Being a mean girl sells books.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com.

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The Pit Bull in the China Shop


By FRANK RICH
Published: November 21, 2009
AT last the American right and left have one issue they unequivocally agree on: You don’t actually have to read Sarah Palin’s book to have an opinion about it. Last Sunday Liz Cheney praised “Going Rogue” as “well-written” on Fox News even though, by her own account, she had sampled only “parts” of it. On Tuesday, Ana Marie Cox, a correspondent for Air America, belittled the book in The Washington Post while confessing that she couldn’t claim to have “completely” read it.


“Going Rogue” will hardly be the first best seller embraced by millions for talismanic rather than literary ends. And I am not recommending that others follow my example and slog through its 400-plus pages, especially since its supposed revelations have been picked through 24/7 for a week. But sometimes I wonder if anyone has read all of what Palin would call the “dang” thing. Some of the book’s most illuminating tics have been mentioned barely — if at all — by either its fans or foes. Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves.

The book’s biggest surprise is Palin’s wide-eyed infatuation with show-business celebrities. You get nearly as much face time with Tina Fey and the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in “Going Rogue” as you do with John McCain. We learn how happy Palin was to receive calls from Bono and Warren Beatty “to share ideas and insights.” We wade through star-struck lists of campaign cameos by Robert Duvall, Jon Voight (who “blew us away”), Naomi Judd, Gary Sinise and Kelsey Grammer, among many others. Then there are the acknowledgments at the book’s end, where Palin reveals that her intimacy with media stars is such that she can air-kiss them on a first-name basis, from Greta to Laura to Rush.

Equally revealing is the one boldfaced name conspicuously left unmentioned in the book: Levi Johnston, the father of Palin’s grandchild. Though Palin and McCain milked him for photo ops at the Republican convention, he is persona non grata now that he’s taking off his campaign wardrobe. Is Johnston’s fledgling porn career the problem, or is it his public threats to strip bare Palin family secrets as well? “She knows what I got on her” is how he put it. In Palin’s interview with Oprah last week, it was questioning about Johnston, not Katie Couric, that made her nervous.

The book’s most frequently dropped names, predictably enough, are the Lord and Ronald Reagan (though not necessarily in that order). Easily the most startling passage in “Going Rogue,” running more than two pages, collates extended excerpts from a prayerful letter Palin wrote to mark the birth of Trig, her child with Down syndrome. This missive’s understandable goal was to reassert Palin’s faith and trust in God. But Palin did not write her letter to God; she wrote the letter from God, assuming His role and voice herself and signing it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.” If I may say so — Oy!

Even by the standard of politicians, this is a woman with an outsized ego. Combine that with her performance skills and an insatiable hunger for the limelight, and you can see why she will not stay in Wasilla now that she’s seen 30 Rock. The question journalists repeatedly asked last week — What are Palin’s plans for 2012? — is a red herring. Palin has no obligation to answer it. She is the pit bull in the china shop of American politics, and she can do what she wants, on her own timeline, all the while raking in the big bucks she couldn’t as a sitting governor. No one, least of all her own political party, can control her.

The fact-checking siege of “Going Rogue” — by the media, Democrats and aggrieved McCain campaign operatives alike — is another fruitless sideshow. Palin’s political appeal has never had anything to do with facts — or coherent policy positions. The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause. As Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, has correctly observed, “She represents less a philosophical strain on the right than an affect and a demographic.”

That demographic is white and non-urban: Just look at the stops and the faces on her carefully calibrated book tour. The affect is emotional — the angry air of grievance that emerged first at her campaign rallies in 2008, with their shrieked threats to Obama, and that has since resurfaced in the Hitler-fixated “tea party” movement (which she endorses in her book). It’s a politics of victimization and sloganeering with no policy solutions required beyond the conservative mantra of No Taxes. Its standard-bearer can make stuff up with impunity: “Thanks, but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere”; Obama’s “palling around with terrorists”; health care “death panels.”

After the Palin-McCain ticket lost, conservative pundits admonished her to start studying the issues. If “Going Rogue” and its promotional interviews are any indication, she has ignored their entreaties during her months at liberty. Last week, Greta Van Susteren chastised Oprah for not asking Palin “one policy question,” but when Barbara Walters did ask some, Palin either recycled Dick Cheney verbatim (Obama is “dithering”) or ran aground. Her argument for why “Jewish settlements” should be expanded on the West Bank was that “more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” It was unclear what she was talking about — unless it was the “rapture” theology that requires the mass return of Jews to settle the Holy Land as a precondition for the return of Christ.

The discredited neocon hacks who have latched on to Palin as a potential ticket back into power have their work cut out for them. But it’s better for Palin’s purposes to remain as blank a slate as possible anyway. Some of her most ardent supporters realize that she’ll drive still more independent voters away if she fills in too many details. And so Matthew Continetti, the author of the just-published “Persecution of Sarah Palin” and her most persistent cheerleader after William Kristol, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that her role model for 2012 should be Bob McDonnell, the new Republican governor-elect of Virginia, who won on “a bipartisan, center-right approach.”

What Continetti means is that Palin could still somehow fudge her history as McDonnell did; his campaign kept his career-long history as a political acolyte and financial beneficiary of Pat Robertson on the down-low. Even the far right has figured out that homophobia is a turnoff to swing voters, which is why Palin goes out of her way in “Going Rogue” to remind us she has her very own lesbian friend. (What’s left unsaid is that the book’s credited ghost writer, Lynn Vincent, labeled homosexuality as “deviance” in her own writings for World, the evangelical magazine.)

But no matter how much Palin tries to pass for “center-right,” she’s unlikely to fool that vast pool of voters left, right and center who have already written her off as unqualified for the White House. The G.O.P. establishment knows this, and is frightened. The demographic that Palin attracts is in decline; there’s no way the math of her fan base adds up to an Electoral College victory.

Yet among Republicans she still ties Mitt Romney in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with 65 percent giving her serious presidential consideration, just behind the 71 for her evangelical rival, Mike Huckabee. The crowds lining up in the cold for her book tour are likely to be the most motivated to line up at the polls in G.O.P. primaries. They don’t speak the same language as Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner or, for that matter, McCain. They are more likely to heed Palin salesmen like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh than baffled Bush administration grandees like Peter Wehner, who last week called Palin “a cultural figure much more than a political one” on the Web site of the establishment conservative organ Commentary.

Culture is politics. Palin is at the red-hot center of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black president and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those Americans who haven’t benefited from bailouts. As Palin thrives on the ire of the left, so she does from the disdain of Republican leaders who, with a condescension rivaling the sexism they decry in liberals, belittle her as a lightweight or instruct her to eat think-tank spinach.

The only person who can derail Palin is Palin herself. Should she not self-destruct, she will doom G.O.P. hopes of a 2012 comeback. But the rest of the country cannot rest easy. The rage out there is larger than Palin and defies partisan labeling. Her ever-present booster Continetti, writing in The Weekly Standard, suggested that she recast the century-old populist outrage of William Jennings Bryan by adopting the message “You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of Goldman Sachs.” If Obama can’t tamp down that rage across the political map, Palin will at the very least pave the way for a demagogue with less baggage to pick up her torch.