McCain’s Gift to the GOP, Palin the Time Bomb?
Why did John McCain pick Sarah Palin, anyway? Could he have had a long range goal of crippling the religious right? I’ll believe that if he goes back to his old self, the bipartisan pragmatist. Still, if Sarah Palin continues on her course, she will gain strength and then shoot herself and the extremist Christian mullahs in the foot, hopefully in 2012.
There’s an interesting article by Rick Horowitz, reading the tea leaves as to just why John McCain gave us Sarah Palin as his running mate on that dark day in September. The theory he puts forth is that the offering to the religious right in this country was more like a poison pill, that the Palin candidacy would show the extremists on the religious right how little their power can effect things. Here’s a bit of Horowitz’s speculation, from yesrick.com:
But from what John McCain did know, he had to realize that, eye-candy considerations aside, Sarah Palin was an embodiment — hell, a caricature! — of everything he couldn’t stand about the right-hand end of the Grand Old Party.
Put her on the ticket, and let her implode. Let her take the blame for scaring off the moderate Republicans and independents he’d have needed to have even a shot at winning. And if she should decide to spend the weeks after the coming debacle still blabbing away, so much the better. Every time she opens her mouth, she’ll make the Republican right look more and more wrong.
“They’ll be ruined for a generation!” he’s thinking. “That’s exactly what they deserve!”
Just a theory.
Would you rather believe he picked her because he actually thought she was qualified?
I’m not one to believe John McCain would denigrate his own ambitions in favor of teaching the extremists on the religious right a lesson. I think McCain and his team were ambitious and thought, informed by incompetence that rivals Bush, that Palin might energize the “base.” Be that as it may, Horowitz’s theory includes the notion that the religious right will fall because of Palin, and I’m not going to dispute that part of it.
Oh, sure, Palin may be able to help the GOP capture the Senate seat in Georgia for Saxby Chambliss by campaigning for him in Georgia, but her critics in alaska are already using her support of Chambliss the chickenhawk. Here’s a bit from Matt Zency of the Anchorage Daily News:
The man who couldn’t bring himself to serve in the military said a man who left three limbs behind in war was a weakling who would turn the country over to terrorists.
Chambliss was a congressman during the 9-11 attacks. Congressional Quarterly’s “Politics in America 2006” noted that Congressman Chambliss “quipped that one route to security would be for local sheriffs to ‘arrest every Muslim that comes across the state line.’”
So there you have the fine American that Palin is trying to re-elect to the U.S. Senate.
Gov. Palin’s eldest joined the Army and has been deployed to Iraq. As a justifiably proud military mom, she might ask herself why she is using her conservative star power to support such a reprehensible Republican chicken hawk.
Zency does well to point out that Palin is supporting a chickenhawk running against a man who actually defended his country, Jim Martin, and who ran the ugliest campaign possible against Max Cleland back in 2002. Perhaps he could have more fully noted Palin’s neglect of her own state in her time spent in Georgia, and her likely future visits to Iowa, but that will come, no doubt. At least one poll is showing that Georgia race close, but I fully expect, and am not all that disappointed in the notion, that Saxby Chambliss will turn out the victor there.
I am not worried that Sarah Palin may help Saxby Chambliss win because I think first of all that Martin was a severe underdog, and that Chambliss was likely to win anyway. Second, though, in order for Palin to completely destroy the extremist religious right they’ve all got to get behind her, and they will only do so if she shows to them she can help in at least one win. Georgia is a good place for her on that score, where they are suspicious of Democrats in the first place, and where there’s a stong evangelical movement. I’m not all that upset. Hey, this win by Chambliss could keep Palin in the running for 2012, and that’s all to the good for Obama and the Dems.
No, I do not believe Sarah Palin has a chance at swaying centrist voters in this country, and she needs those centrist voters if she is to have any chance in 2012. I’ll also hope, though I’m not sure there are many left, that the moderate Republicans, the sane ones, work actively against her candidacy. At this time that means they end up backing Guiliani or Romney, with Jindal, Huckabee and Palin duking it out for the extreemist support. Those five factions are going to make things uglier in the GOP over the next few years than they are even now. And if the GOP in the house and Senate cooperate with as much gridlock as they can muster, the set-up for Obama couldn’t be better. No, the gridlock won’t work against Obama, but we’ll all be here to chronicle their attempts.
What we’re going to see in 2012 is an economy on the mend, a military situation aimed int he right direction towards Osama and the real terrorists, allies who are again willing to deal with the US and our policies, and the steadiness of leadership we need. What we’ll see among the Republicans is the kind of infighting and dirty politics, against each other (Palin has shown she doesn’t shrink from such tactics) that will remind Americans of the Bush Administration. That’s all to the good.
Having been an avid observer of the Palin phenomena since her nomination for V.P. I think that in six months we’ll know more about her political situation.
A number of important issues have yet to be properly vetted. From the Mother Courage heroic birth of Trig to her involvement with the AIP, there remains a plethora of unanswered questions.
At some point I would hope that an in depth essay on Alaskan politics will appear. From what little I have learned, it does seem to be definitely right of center. With the spectre of Ted Stevens just off stage and the looming problems for Don Young, there should be more demand for scrutiny of the state political party that has produced them.
She’s definitely landed but they haven’t unloaded all of her baggage.
Remember, Sarah Palin worked for Stevens with his PAC. There’s surely some connection there that will spoil her reputation. Still, I suppose we can’t count on the media enamored of her looks and guile. I’m not worried.
I work for an antiwar non-profit, which was holding its annual convention in Minneapolis the week before the RNC came to town. I was getting ready to begin setting up for the morning when the announcement was made that Palin was the VP pick. Surprisingly enough, I had heard of the Governor before-on a PBS show that looked at the popular new “reformer” from the state of AK. The ploy reeked of shamelessness, a way to lurch for Hillary supporters…you know, we women are so easily confused, we simply can’t distinguish one vagina from another.
Many of us stayed in Minneapolis for the convention; between the RNC delegates in the Ramada we were at, the various wingers strewn about the street to gawk at the gestapo stormtroopers taking down scads of peaceful protesters (they actually broke out the cameras like it was the bloody circus) and the random people we would encounter at the gas stations, bars and stores in town, I can say that these people were elated by Sarah Palin. To the point that, before and directly after her speech at the Excel Center, I began to get a bit nervous.
But, then the Gods smiled upon us and brought the nation and the world to a fiery, shrieking halt. Be thankful that things began to crumble when they did, not just because of their effect on the election, but for the fact that Herr Bush now owns the clusterf*** that he has wrought. And Palin, well, she was allowed to talk. Sort of. Between her foreign policy experience involving the Ruskies and a periscope, the zero Supreme Court cases she could name (including the AK centered Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, decided on June 25, 2008), ditto to her ability to provide the names of the media sources she read (”all of them…any of them” doesn’t count, especially when you have a damn degree in journalism), and so on. Time, as it is wont to do, clarified the role of Sarah Palin for all to see. She was the knee-capper to McCain’s *ahem* statesman, the siren of the heavy breathing, frothy mouthed base. She was the “new,” the “change” the party recognized as necessary to their survival past an election that was lost from its earliest days.
One thing I will say about Sarah Palin is that she is ambitious, and she won’t be fading into the woodwork any time soon. I welcome the fissure in the Republican Party, as it is the logical result of a conglomeration of largely unrelated factions (fiscal conservatives, social isolationists/nativists, big business moneyed interests, PNAC neo-cons, the Religious Right) held together less by a common theme than a shared loathing of the Democrat/liberal/progressive agenda. The theocratic wing of the party has gotten a raw deal from those they have elected, being occasionally tossed a symbolic bone in the form of an ultra conservative court appointee here, a piece of restrictive legislation there, with little progress made on the key issues, like overturning Roe v. Wade. So now, this loud, angry and well organized group stands ready to perform an ideological coup and seize the reigns of the Republican moniker.
Am I pleased to see the conniving, megalomaniacs in the ivory towers, who have callously used the (albeit deluded) faith of people they considered less than themselves to perpetuate their own agendas devoured by the monster they have created? Absolutely. Am I pleased to see the Dominionists slap a Jesus fish on the ass of the elephant and ride it into the ground? You betcha. Am I looking forward to the next four years being peppered with vapid, folksy soundbites, an explosion of babies named Trig, Track and Piper and proudly ignorant nonsense winkingly delivered to the tune of mangled syntax and unfinished gerunds.
In this respect, 2012 can’t get here soon enough.
Palin was a Disaster to the McCain ticket. I know republicans here won’t admit it and continue to deny the true facts. This is a nation that is divided republicans vs democrats. It is 50-50 and who wins an election with this electorate wins by appealing to independents and some voters from your opposing party. Palin SCARED the hell out of those voters that are not committed and are NOT ideological driven.
Sorry guys. Your caribou Barbie mobilized YOUR BASE, and with your base alone, you can’t win.
sunshine, please don’t tell me there are Repuglicans here! I couldn’t stand such a revelation!