Two years ago today, Sen. John McCain threw the political world for a loop by announcing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Last August 29, I wrote this, considering the first year’s fruits of that decision:
One year later, I don’t take any of that back. I’m sorry for the hammering Gov. Palin and her family have taken, much of which has sickened me; I’m sorry for the lies and smears she’s had to deal with, and for what that says about the state of our political culture. But my respect for her, and my sense that she’s the best leader this country has to put forward, haven’t changed, even through a fairly bumpy year.Some might say that’s unreasonable of me; but in proper perspective, I don’t believe it is. That perspective, I think, is supplied by a long article Stephen F. Hayward posted a couple days ago on NRO entitled, “The Reagan Revolution and Its Discontents.” It’s a good and thoughtful piece, and I commend it to your attention for a number of reasons. Hayward wrote it, by his own statement, to clear away some of the fogginess of nostalgia from the conservative memory of President Reagan and his accomplishments, and also to remind us, almost thirty years on, of the political reality the Great Communicator faced in his day; the piece succeeds quite nicely in both aims, in my judgment. I was particularly interested, though, in this section for its application to the current political situation:
Both [Reagan and FDR] had to battle not only with the other party, but also with their own. Both men by degrees successfully transformed their own parties, while at the same time frustrating and deflecting the course of the rival party for a time. This, I suggest, is the heart of the real and enduring Reagan Revolution (or Age of Reagan).
Liberal ideologues who despaired over the limits of the New Deal overlooked that FDR had to carry along a large number of Democrats who opposed the New Deal. Reagan’s experience was similar, as he had to carry along a number of Republicans who were opposed to or lukewarm about his conservative philosophy. This problem would dog Reagan for his entire presidency. Robert Novak observed in late 1987: “True believers in Reagan’s efforts to radically transform how America is governed were outnumbered by orthodox Republicans who would have been more at home serving Jerry Ford.” . . .
Reagan’s dramatic landslide election in 1980 posed two problems: Democrats had to figure out how to oppose Reagan; Republicans, how to contain him. . . .
The lesson of FDR and Reagan is that changing one’s own party can be more difficult than beating the opposition.
As Hayward says, understanding that lesson is critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of President Reagan, or for that matter of Gov. Reagan; and as has been pointed out here before, it’s also critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of Sarah Palin.
This is true in two ways. In the first place, of course, it’s true of her career before last August 29; even more than President Reagan, her political rise was a rise against the establishment of her own party. If you’re not familiar with the story, R. A. Mansour’s post “Who Is Sarah Palin” offers an excellent sketch. Sarah Palin ran for mayor of Wasilla as a political insurgent against a good old boys’ network that was running the town for its own benefit; once in office, she continued to show the guts to buck the town establishment.
Later, having been named as ethics commissioner and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission—her big break, and her first big payday—when she discovered that one of her fellow commissioners, Randy Ruedrich (who also happened to be the head of the Alaska Republican Party) was misusing his position, she blew the whistle, even though it meant resigning her job. Then she ran against the Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, who had appointed both her and Ruedrich; in retrospect, we can say “of course she won,” but it was anything but an “of course” at the time.
Like Gov. Reagan, she was not the choice of the party establishment, but was launching a takeover from outside that establishment; as with President Reagan, her dramatic victory posed as big a problem to her own party, who saw her not as their leader but as someone they had to contain, as to the theoretical opposition. President Reagan never told the Congress “All of you here need some adult supervision!” as Gov. Palin did (earning herself the lasting enmity of the Republican president of the Alaska State Senate, Lyda Green), but I’m sure he would have appreciated the line.
This is why she spent the first part of her term in Alaska working as much with the Democrats as with her (supposed) own party: she had to, in order to accomplish things like chopping up the backroom deal Gov. Murkowski had worked out with Big Oil to replace it with a workable new severance-tax law that would be good for Alaska, not just for Big Oil, or to put a bill together that would finally get a process moving to build a natural-gas pipeline from the Northern Slope to the Lower 48.
Now, of course, her opponents like to minimize her accomplishments and carp about this or that, but they’re missing the point: given the fact that she was governing in the teeth of opposition from her own party, working to transform that party as much as to enact policy, it may well be possible to say of her as we can of President Reagan that Gov. Palin did less than she had hoped and less than people wanted—that doesn’t change the fact that, as Gary McDowell said of the Gipper, she did “a **** of a lot more than people thought [she] would.”
This is a point which is especially critical to bear in mind in considering this last calendar year for Gov. Palin. Where before, she was able to work with the Alaska Democrats to get legislation passed—after all, her initiatives were popular, and her war with her own party establishment only helped them in their efforts against Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young—her performance in the presidential campaign made her Public Enemy No. 1 for the national Democratic Party, meaning that the Alaska Democrats could no longer afford to do anything that would give her good publicity. (Given the close connections between prominent Democrats in Alaska and the Obama White House, there’s no doubt in my mind that that imperative came all the way from the top.)
This, combined with the time- and energy-wasting barrage of ludicrous, transparently malicious ethics charges, combined to hamstring her administration. The #1 goal of the Left was to keep her from accomplishing anything (yes, I believe that was even ahead of bankrupting her through legal bills, which I figure was #2), so as to be able to portray her in future races as a lightweight who was overmatched by her office. Now, in a rational world, this wouldn’t have worked, because by the numbers, the Republicans had sufficient votes in the legislature to pass her agenda into law; but as already noted, this isn’t a rational world, and a large chunk of the Alaska GOP wasn’t on her side, but rather sided with the Democrats against her. This is the sort of thing that can happen when you’re faced with having to try to transform your own party.
To complicate matters, this struggle in Alaska has been mirrored on a national scale. The GOP is referred to as the party of Reagan, but it isn’t in any meaningful sense; indeed, I think Heyman overstates the degree to which it ever really was. One can point to Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1994 and the Contract with America as evidence of a Reaganite legacy, but Rep. Gingrich himself was an insurgent in the party, and the conservative principles of the Contract didn’t really last long; perhaps the most telling thing is that the party didn’t nominate a conservative as its standard-bearer in 1998, but an old warhorse of the pre-Reagan Republican establishment, Bob Dole. Indeed, to this date, for all his success, Ronald Reagan remains sui generis among Republican presidential nominees.
As a result, the national Republican establishment reacted (and keeps reacting) to Gov. Palin in the same way they reacted to Gov. Reagan—belittling her intelligence, mocking her ideas, trying to deny her credit for her accomplishments, and generally trying to tear her down in any way they can, while still trying to make as much use as they can out of her popularity. This, combined with the hostility of the party’s state organization in Alaska, left her with little structural support or cover against the attacks of the Left (an understatement, actually, given that some in the party actually piled on). Collectively, this put her in a very unusual position for an elected official: having her office become a hindrance to her effectiveness and ability to function rather than an advantage.
As such, Gov. Palin’s utterly un-telegraphed resignation is one of those events that was shocking at the time but in retrospect seems almost obvious—we should have seen it coming. We would have, were it not the sort of thing that professional politicians never do. Your typical politician, after all, holds on to power with the awe-inspiring single-mindedness of the clinically obsessed; we knew Gov. Palin to be anything but a typical politician and a woman who could say, “Politically speaking, if I die, I die,” but our expectations are too well shaped by the normal course of events to be truly able to predict that she would defy that norm as she did. Had we been able to join her in thinking outside the box (or perhaps I should say, the straitjacket) of those expectations, though, we would have seen what she saw: that the only way for her to carry on effectively with her mission was to step down from office and go to work as a private citizen.
Which, of course, she has, with verve and gusto and considerable effectiveness. (Google “Facebook ‘Sarah Palin,'” and you’ll get “about 9,520,000” hits.) As Gov. Reagan did, so Gov. Palin has found it necessary to go “into the wilderness”—which is to say, back into the real world outside a government position—in order to carry on with her efforts to shift the institutional GOP back toward its conservative base. The Juneau statehouse was too small, remote and encumbered a platform for her to be able to work effectively; she needed to create a better one for herself. In her use of Facebook, she’s demonstrating her ability to do exactly that—yes, she’ll need to go beyond Facebook as well, but it’s proving a mighty fine place to start—and though she’s dragging much of the GOP elite with her kicking, screaming, and complaining, she is dragging them nevertheless. No matter how much they might protest or wish it were otherwise, she is the one who has set the agenda for the party’s opposition to Obamacare; she is the one who played the biggest part in stopping the administration’s energy-tax agenda cold; and increasingly, she is recognized as the Republican whose leadership matters the most in this country, regardless of official position or lack thereof.
Of course, there are many people in both parties who have a vested interest in changing that reality—Democrats who oppose her, and Republicans who want to contain her—and so the resistance continues. As such, though Gov. Palin’s resignation outflanked them, the efforts to use it against her continue as well. Most of those efforts are pointless and ineffective, since they rest on the assertion that Gov. Palin is finished in politics because she no longer holds office; that doesn’t hold water, both because of their continued attacks and because the American people don’t value being elected to office as highly as politicians do. There is one question, however, that does linger with many people: if she resigned from office once, how can we be sure she wouldn’t do it again if she won the White House?
The answer to that is found in considering both halves of the problem she faced in Alaska. One, the state’s executive-ethics law, does not exist on the national level; were she elected president, she would not be vulnerable to a barrage of bogus charges as she was as governor. The other, the absolute opposition she faced from a majority of her own party in Alaska, is as I said part and parcel of the work of transforming the GOP, and would be a problem for President Palin to some degree as it was for President Reagan. However, there are two good reasons to think that it would be a problem which would be far easier for President Palin to overcome than it was for Governor Palin.
One, if she does in fact end up running and winning in 2012 (or at any later date), she will by virtue of that simple fact have a demonstrated national support base of some 60 million voters. As Barack Obama has already shown, being able to remind people that you won gives you considerable political leverage. That’s leverage far beyond what she had simply by virtue of winning a single gubernatorial election in a low-population state, because that’s a vastly greater number of voters. (Had things played out differently in Alaska, had she had a couple of terms, her re-election and her ability to influence the re-election campaigns of other Alaskan politicians would have started to give her that sort of leverage on a state level, but that leverage would always have been affected by events on the national scene.) As such, she would have a lot more political capital to use to deal with recalcitrant members of her own party, as well as with more conservative members of the Democratic caucuses.
And two, Gov. Palin has a tremendous opportunity ahead of her in the 2009-10 elections. By campaigning for Republican candidates around the country, she has the chance to build a constituency for herself in the national party institution, in three ways. The first, most basic, and most important, is by working to get people elected who share her principles, and who thus will tend out of their own political beliefs and instincts to support the same things she supports. By campaigning, especially in House elections, for the election of true conservatives—and I hope she finds good opportunities to do so not just in the general election but in primaries, working to win nominations for conservatives over establishment types (as for example, dare I say, Marco Rubio in Florida?)—she has the chance to shape the congressional Republican caucuses into bodies which will be more likely to follow her lead, should she run and win in 2012.
The second way is dicier, but still essential: by campaigning for other Republican candidates and helping them win elections, she’ll earn good will and put them in her debt. As the recent behavior of Saxby Chambliss shows, this isn’t as reliable a way of building support as it should be—you just can’t count on most politicians not to welch on a debt—but it’s necessary all the same. You might not be able to count on them returning the favor if you help them, but you can surely count on them not helping you if you don’t.
The third comes back to that whole question of leverage. As I said, if Gov. Palin becomes President Palin, she will have shown by that fact that she has a strong political base; but that will be much more impressive to folks on the Hill if she’s already shown that her base won’t just help her get elected, but also translates into downballot clout. If she flexes real political muscle during the mid-term elections, if she shows that her support is broad enough and strong enough to influence House, Senate and gubernatorial races across the country—if she makes it clear to everyone that being endorsed by Sarah Palin is a good thing for Republican politicians—then the GOP will get the idea that opposing her is not likely to be a good thing for Republican politicians. That will make the congressional GOP and the rest of the party establishment much more likely to follow her lead.
All of which is to say, the next key stage of the Palin Revolution, if it is to come fully to fruition, is the next election cycle; that will be the point at which her leadership will, I believe, really begin to take hold in the party in an institutional way, and the necessary groundwork for the future Palin administration for which we hope. It’s been a hard year for Gov. Palin, but it’s been a year which has produced many good things, too; and as startling and controversial as her resignation was, she has proven that it was not the beginning of the end of her political career, but rather the end of the beginning. The best, I believe, is yet to be; and for that, I am thankful.
So, yeah, it’s not just me; what Gov. Palin needed to do and set out to do, she’s doing, and she’s doing it with style.
