The Republican party, what’s left of it, is now in much the same situation the Democrats had been in throughout much of the Bush era. They are fractured and without an obvious leader or consistent voice. T-Ball moms, lightheaded from the lack of oxygen there inside the snow globe, could win Palin the nomination. A term-and-one-half mayor and half-term governor whose biggest political achievement thus far has been to help the Democrats win a House district they’ve lost 75 years running, Palin continues to dazzle the clueless, the nail-biters, the beleaguered sock-puppet mommies who glance at headlines and grasp only sound bites.

She won’t go away.

She just won’t. The election was over a year ago last week. But there she is, dominating a slow news week as the nation continues to hold its breath over health care reform. Sarah Palin, former vice-presidential candidate, former governor of Alaska, former mayor of Wasilla, a small Alaskan town, all but single-handedly crushed the GOP’s otherwise slam-dunk victory in upstate New York's 23rd Congressional District’s special election by endorsing not the moderate Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava, but the right-wing independent Doug Hoffman, splitting the GOP vote and guaranteeing a Democratic win in the district. The politically clumsy former governor continues to demonstrate George W. Bush levels of sheer incompetence and vapidity while, perplexingly, remaining popular among certain segments of America. Those “certain segments” consist largely of white housewives, but white housewives vote. Unfortunately, they vote for people like Palin and the intolerable religious nut Michele Bachmann, another soccer mom gone to Washington.

There is apparently something truly appealing about the ordinary, as ordinary is Sarah Palin’s stock and trade. Ordinary is what she sells. It is, of course, transparently untrue—there is nothing ordinary about this woman who claims Christian faith but is documented to have lied seemingly ad nauseam. An ordinary moose-hunting apostolic hockey mom who was found to have abused the power of her office and whose biological parentage of her autistic son remains a hot topic for conspiracy buffs.

I don’t think I even fault Mrs. Palin for anything, though, so much as I fault her base—whoever those people are. I’ve been severely criticized for promoting the idea that a majority of stay-at-home moms trend toward being under-informed, cocooned within the snow globe of their strap-the-kids-in-the-minivan microverse. People who embrace insane concepts like T-Ball, in which we don’t keep score so “everybody wins.” Well, guess what, lady, in real life, everybody doesn’t win. And you’re just raising yet another navel-staring, empty suit whose sense of entitlement will drive him or her to be yet more shallow, selfish losers. T-Ball is evil because it is, flatly, a lie. Kids need to learn how to win and how to lose. Losing hurts, but it builds character. T-Ball teaches us nothing, and Sarah Palin is the political equivalent of T-Ball.

Her first book, Going Rogue, will be released this week, and it is guaranteed to be a best seller as both friend and foe will certainly pick it up. The book reportedly has five chapters—very long chapters—but zero policy positions and not a lot of insight into her vision for America. That the book appears to be intended to position Palin for a 2010 Senate or 2012 presidential run seems obvious. What’s less obvious is why she’d want to put herself and her family through all that.

The Republican party, what’s left of it, is now in much the same situation the Democrats had been in throughout much of the Bush era. They are fractured and without an obvious leader or consistent voice. Republicans are mostly identified with circus clowns like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. This apparently irks most old school Reagan Republicans, who find the excesses of Bill O’Reilly and Shawn Hannity undignified and grating. I’d imagine most grown-up, sane Republicans (including John McCain) find Sarah Palin repulsive and wish she’d just quietly go away. Palin is a polarizing figure to a political party that desperately needs unity and diversity. If she runs, the party elders will likely try to kneecap her early on to avoid an all-out war to keep this silly woman—who doesn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was or that Africa was a continent and not a country—from stepping onto the same debate platform with Barack Obama, one of the most brilliant political performers in human history. While Obama would likely be handicapped by any such debate—our expectations of Palin would be so lowered that a win for her would be to simply not trip as she crosses the platform—I believe even a studied, polished-up Palin who invests in preparation (rather than blowing it off as she did during her campaign) would still pale beneath Obama’s charisma.

Most especially if the president has a record he can run on. Obama has come under increasing and withering criticism for his economic and foreign affairs initiatives. Most of the complaints seem to be about the passage of time. The nation has a short attention span. We expect every crime to be solved before the fourth commercial, ever war to be won in a matter of weeks if not days, and the economic crisis should surely have ended by now. We’ve grown weary of the defense that America’s great challenges were left on Obama’s doorstep by George W. Bush. And, like it or not, America is divided by race, with millions of angry people out there angry not over any specific thing Obama has done so much as they are angered by Obama’s mere existence. It is these people who seize any issue, any agenda item, to harangue the president over. It is childish and plain stupid to expect this president to solve, in a year, what the previous president—the guy *they liked*—could not solve in eight years. And, having not fixed everything George Bush broke in the first ten months of his term, to brand Obama’s presidency a failure.

The simple math is this: Obama’s got a lot of cards laid out on the table. But if even one of them turns up an Ace—a serious win for America—be it the economy, health care, trade, Iran, Afghanistan—any one of them, Obama will be unstoppable in 2012. I doubt he’s making all of these moves at the same time for political reasons. I believe he doesn’t think the U.S. president should sit on his hands for two years or “take it slow,” as his critics demand. I mean, why? Why can’t we multi-task? America has a lot of challenges and needs a multi-tasking president. It is also the politically smart move—take all the beatings up front, hope for a big win on some front by the 2010 midterms, run on those wins 2011-2012—when he may be facing Sarah Palin. A term-and-one-half mayor and half-term governor whose biggest political achievement thus far has been to help the Democrats win a House district they’ve lost 75 years running. This is Sarah Palin.

Even scarier, the T-Ball moms, lightheaded from the lack of oxygen there inside the snow globe, could win Palin the nomination. Having survived Oprah Winfrey last week, and now telling her own version of history in her five chapters, Palin continues to find ways to stay in the public eye even though she’s chosen not to serve out her first term in state-wide office. While the traditional GOP runs for cover, Palin continues to dazzle the clueless, the nail-biters, the beleaguered sock-puppet mommies who glance at headlines and grasp only sound bites, I’m not talking about single moms struggling to survive or even working moms struggling for balance in their lives and trying to find more time for themselves and their kids. I’m talking about a certain class of individual who does not worry about bills all that much, and whose existence is largely defined by the air pockets of denial they buoy themselves with as they float through days filled with T-Ball and Later Gator.

These folks, men and women, usually aren’t dealing with issues of survival. Such issues tend to menace the rest of us, causing us to perhaps scrutinize the world around us a bit harder. It is, perhaps, harder for me to put blind trust in a political leader, a civil activist or even a pastor, than it was in, say, 1975. All those people in whom I’d placed that unflinching trust have failed me. Every one of them. Sarah Palin’s hockey mom façade is an appeal to ignorance, to that age of innocence where people actually paid good money for Ford Pintos and Chrysler Reliant-K’s. In that sense, she is an ersatz Reagan, who was, himself, more style than substance. But Ronnie did have substance. In his best days, he was a man to be reckoned with—even if I mostly disagreed with him. Palin is not even as good as Reagan in terms of presenting a veneer of competence. And, if Reagan wasn’t entirely who his image promised him to be, beneath Palin’s much thinner veneer is a shocking lack of vision, ethics or substance. This is not a quality human being. Beyond making money off of her five chapters I am unsure of her motives for sticking around in the public limelight, but there she is again. Whatever her motives, I am convinced of this: they are purely selfish. I doubt there are many sober, non-wingnut Republicans who want Sarah Palin around. She is, at the end of the day, Voter Repellant, virtually guaranteed to rush the independents over to Obama. Which, ironically, actually makes me appreciate her just the slightest bit.

I could go on, recounting Mrs. Palin’s many, many tragically comedic misfires, but I’ve already done that in my penultimate essay about the 2008 election. For those of you cheering Mrs. Palin on, I urge you to revisit that essay here.

Christopher J. Priest
15 November 2009
editor@praisenet.org
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