Those who are hoping that Gov. Palin will quietly disappear into one of history’s footnotes—a group which includes Republican supporters of other 2012 contenders as well as many Democrats—would do well to listen to what Cokie Roberts has to say on the subject, because there’s a reason she’s one of the top political reporters in the country. As the daughter of two successful politicians and an experienced and gifted correspondent, she knows her field better than most. Her conviction that “there’s more of Sarah Palin in our future” is grounded in part in her observation that “the camera loves” Gov. Palin, which is certainly true and important; of more significance, though, is her comment that Gov. Palin feels “she was vastly disserved by the McCain campaign and I agree with her.” What Ms. Roberts realizes and many others do not is that many of Gov. Palin’s negatives are the result of her mishandling by the McCain campaign, not her own personality, inclinations, and gifts, and thus won’t be coming along with her. To expect those negatives to endure and drag her career down when she won’t be reinforcing them is simply unreasonable. Two years is a long time in American politics, and four years is pretty near a lifetime; Gov. Palin will have plenty of opportunities over the next few years to dispell the negative perceptions of her among independent voters, and all she’ll need to do to accomplish that is to be herself.(Note: the original article from the Boston Herald has been archived and is only available for purchase.)
Category Archives: Politics
Brief comment on Barack Obama’s Cabinet choices
There have been a lot of comments on the people Barack Obama has chosen for various positions, and the significance of the fact that from Rahm Emanuel on, he’s opted to build a team of Bush appointees and Clintonites (including perhaps his best pick, Timothy Geithner, who looks at first blush like the best Treasury appointee in decades); but despite the skepticism of folks like Paul Mirengoff, I tend to agree with Jonah Goldberg and Victor Davis Hanson: in his appointments, President Obama has basically given the giant finger to his leftist base. I think Dr. Hanson is dead on to call this “one of [the] most profound bait-and-switch campaigns in our political history.” Throw in his perfunctory support for Jim Martin in the Georgia runoff election against incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss (while on the other side, Sarah Palin was barnstorming across Georgia as Sen. Chambliss’ chosen closer), and it really looks to me like he’s doing everything he can to keep the Democratic caucus on the Hill from running the show. I’m not sure if it will work, but I appreciate the effort.
Update: Here’s Investor’s Business Daily‘s Michael Ramirez’ take on this:
From the library
A couple days ago, I pulled The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract off the shelf for a little light reading, and was interested to run across this item (the title is original):
YOU’D HAVE A HECK OF A TIME PROVING HE WAS WRONGIn 1960 Jackie Robinson went to visit both of the presidential candidates, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. He endorsed Nixon. In 1964 Robinson worked for Barry Goldwater. He felt that Lyndon Johnson, by politicizing the race issue, would ultimately undermine support for civil rights—as, of course, he did. Robinson realized that civil rights gains could not continue without the support of both political parties. “It would make everything I worked for meaningless,” Robinson told Roger Kahn, “if baseball is integrated but political parties were segregated.”
Make of that what you will, but Jackie Robinson was nobody’s fool. I’m reminded of the question someone asked recently (I don’t remember where I read it), would Americans have been so ready to elect Barack Obama to the White House if they hadn’t grown used to seeing first Colin Powell and then Condoleeza Rice on the news every night as Secretary of State?
Camille Paglia on Sarah Palin
Even though I don’t agree with Camille Paglia on very much (if anything) politically, I admire her greatly for her honesty, the clarity of her perception, and the true independence of her mind, and also for her great gifts as a writer. Her latest column in Salon shows her at the top of her form, particularly in this telling observation about Barack Obama:
As I’ve watched Obama gracefully step up to podiums or move through crowds, I’ve been reminded not of basketball, with its feints and pivots, but of surfing, that art form of his native Hawaii. . . Obama’s ability to stay on his feet and outrun the most menacing waves that threaten to engulf him seems to embody the breezy, sunny spirit of the American surfer.
It also shows her refusal to close her eyes for the sake of ideology, as she expresses concern over
the mainstream media’s avoidance of forthright dealing with several controversies that had been dogging Obama—even as every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai.
She mentions specifically the evasiveness of the Obama campaign, and the unanswered questions about his association with Bill Ayers and (especially, to her) Bernardine Dohrn, writing,
We don’t need another presidency that finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling. I deeply admire Obama, but as a voter I don’t like feeling gamed or played.
Those two sentences, comparing the behavior of Sen. Obama and his campaign to that of the hated President Bush and his administration, have to have cost her. Paglia spends a fair chunk of her column on Ayers and Dohrn, whom she clearly finds disturbing; and from there she turns to Gov. Palin, writing,
Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don’t know their asses from their elbows.Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology—contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is—and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English—big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns—that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee—what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry’s nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama’s pick and who was on everyone’s short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin’s. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking comedown for an energetic Alaskan—nothing but droning committees and incestuous back-scratching. No, Sarah Palin should stick to her governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit, as Richard Nixon did in his long haul back from political limbo following his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962. Step by step, the mainstream media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is.
It’s a powerful smackdown to groupthink and cant from someone who’s as free of both as any columnist around (on either side of the political aisle); the fact that it’s also a powerful defense of someone who both needs and deserves it just makes it better.
Clarification and further comment on double standards
After I put up my post last night on “the double standard of the Left,” frequent commenter and cyberfriend Doug Hagler called me out on a couple things. I posted a response to him in the comments there, but after thinking about it a bit, I decided to post an edited version of that comment on the main page as well.Part of his objection was to the blog to which I linked—or rather, to the commenters on that blog. As I noted, on high-traffic blogs, I don’t read the comments unless I know they’re tightly patrolled (as with, for example, U.S.S. Mariner, or Adam Brickley’s blog), because otherwise, they will uniformly be ugly. (And if you think this just applies to political blogs, spend some time in the sports blogosphere—your eyes will be opened. Republicans vs. Democrats has nothing on Red Sox. vs. Yankees.)More importantly, to point out a double standard on the Left is not to imply anything, positive or negative, about the Right; there’s simply no logical connection there. If there’s one thing I’ve found to hold true about groups of people, it’s that they’re all the same—the same tendencies, good and bad, will tend to emerge in roughly the same proportions unless something specific to the group acts to emphasize or suppress them. As such, do I imagine that being conservative means that one is immune to certain sins? No, certainly not. In this particular case, for instance, I know full well that the Right has its tendencies toward double standards, too. However, I will note that in areas in which the Right tends to get publicly sanctimonious, it usually follows through against its own, even if only because the media won’t let it do otherwise. Where is Mark Foley? Where is Larry Craig? Where is Ted Haggard? The list is not without exception (David Vitter comes to mind; the only explanation I have for his survival is that Louisiana is a different world politically), but neither is it short. When you have a preacher peddling leftist hate, like the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., liberals defend him; by contrast, preachers peddling rightist hate will often find their sharpest critics among evangelicals. Fred Phelps, that malignancy on the body politic, is a classic example.The question with regard to the attack on Mount Hope Church is, are there liberals who will call a spade a spade here, the way evangelicals (and even some fundamentalists) routinely do every time Phelps opens his yap, and denounce this as an intolerant assault on freedom of speech and freedom of religion? And with regard to the Obama campaign’s disabling of protections against credit-card fraud, will the liberals who sermonize about the corrupting influence of money in politics step up and call this what it is—namely, corrupt? The point is not that there’s supposedly some kind of vast left-wing conspiracy—we got enough of that kind of talk in the other direction from the Clintons. The point is, when the Left talks about tolerance, and political ethics, and the the need for campaign-finance reform, and all those things, are those just clubs to use to beat up Republicans? Or are folks on the Left willing to call out their own side on these issues?Certainly, Republicans aren’t perfect in this respect, but there are always GOP pundits and politicians willing to take up that role. The question is, are there leaders and media figures on the Left who will do the same? Or do they only care when it’s Republicans who are guilty?
Why the 44th President is doomed
No, I didn’t say “Why Barack Obama is doomed”; I don’t think his policy appointments and decisions will help the economic situation any, but I’m not suggesting that John McCain would have had the winning economic strategy. Rather, the point is that there isn’t a winning economic strategy at this point—the forces in play are just too big. Read Michael Lewis’ excellent piece in Condé Nast Portfolio to understand why. It’s long, but well worth it; remember, this is the guy who first identified the roots of the problem 20 years ago in his book Liar’s Poker, returning to autopsy the patient who died of the cancer he originally diagnosed. Trust me, read the whole thing—read it to the end; it will blow your mind. Then read the accompanying article on why there won’t be a recovery for a while yet, despite what the optimists say, and reflect on the fact that presidents always get blamed when bad things happen, whether it’s their fault or not. (George W. Bush can point to the mishandling of Katrina by Kathleen Blanco and Ray Nagin, for which he took pretty much all the blame outside of Louisiana; granted, Michael Brown and FEMA also did a very poor job, but the hit President Bush’s popularity took had far more to do with matters under their control than with things for which he was actually responsible. The only upside for Republicans is that this did lead the people of Louisiana to elect Bobby Jindal the next time around.) The Oval Office is going to be a rough place to be in 2010, and would be no matter who was sitting in it, for reasons which in large part will have nothing to do with its occupant. (At least on the economic side; when it comes to foreign policy, that’s another matter.)HT: Baseball Crank
The bottom line on this campaign
is that I ended up thinking a lot less of both the final candidates when it finished than I did when they first started running.Oddly enough, the opposite is true of Hillary Clinton.(I still think she’s a political opportunist, etc.; but I have to admire the spirit and resiliency she showed, even if it was in the service of raw, vindictive ambition. The negative things that she displayed during this campaign didn’t surprise me any, but we also, I think, saw some really positive aspects to her that I at least hadn’t seen before.)
Too little, too late
After sitting sphinx-like as his senior staff impugned Sarah Palin’s intelligence and character, John McCain finally opened his mouth—and this is the best he was willing to do? I’m sorry, Senator, but that’s just plain pathetic. To wait so long to say anything, and then not to address any of the specific lies floating around out there or call out any of the liars from behind their curtain of anonymity—especially given his vigorous defense of Barack Obama against attacks he deemed inappropriate—to fail to defend her against false charges given how hard she worked for you and how badly she was pummeled by your opponents for supporting your cause . . . that’s purely dishonorable. There is no other word for it.
The double standard of the Left, in full force
as seen in two very different ways. For one, the Obama campaign has officially gotten away with fraud, which isn’t surprising. What’s rather more surprising is that they’re still getting away with it. Check out Gateway Pundit for the thorough rundown of how the Obama organization has been enabling—and is continuing to enable—significant credit-card fraud in order to fill their coffers. They will, of course, not be audited or investigated—that sort of thing is only for Republicans.For another, my prayers go out to the folks at Mount Hope Church in Lansing, MI who were assaulted—there is no other word for it—by a radical gay group this past Sunday. I know that church, slightly; I’ve never attended there (though I’ve driven by it many times), but we’ve known people who attended there, and know it by reputation. It’s a good church, and didn’t deserve this attack. Don’t expect the MSM to decry the intolerance of their attackers, though—again, that sort of thing is only for Republicans.
Palin-bashers discover the Law of Unintended Consequences
I took note last Friday of the dishonorable cowards in the McCain campaign who started trashing Sarah Palin before the election had even been held, presumably to try to shift the blame for the loss away from their own performance.It didn’t work. It didn’t work because Gov. Palin made an implausible scapegoat when conservative pundits had been griping in print for weeks about how badly the campaign was being run (with one aspect of that being their mishandling of Gov. Palin). It didn’t work because the conservative base, on the whole, is far more impressed with her than it is with Sen. McCain. Neither of these things should be surprising, as both were eminently predictable.What’s more interesting is the other reason it didn’t work: because other staffers on the campaign wouldn’t stand for it either. Folks like Randy Scheunemann (Sen. McCain’s top foreign-policy advisor), Steve Biegun (who briefed her on foreign policy)—and even the folks believed to be behind the leaks, Nicolle Wallace (a senior campaign advisor) and Steve Schmidt (one of the two heads of the campaign)—as well as longtime Palin staffer Meg Stapleton, a wave of denials has washed away the charges, and left a very positive picture of Gov. Palin behind. Not exactly what they’d hoped to accomplish, I’m sure.
“I’ve been working over 20 years in Washington and I’ve been around literally dozens and dozens of politicians. She is among the smartest, toughest, most capable politicians I’ve ever dealt with,” Scheunemann said. “She has a photographic memory.”————————————Nicolle Wallace, a senior adviser to McCain who helped on the Palin account early on, said Friday on NBC that the governor was “perhaps the most un-diva politician I’ve seen.”Twelve hours before Palin said all she’d ever asked for was a Diet Dr Pepper, Wallace told NBC: “The only thing I’ve seen her ask for is a diet soda.” . . .“Gov. Palin was a breath of fresh air, particularly for those of us who’ve been living in the Washington bubble,” said Tracey Schmitt, the vice presidential nominee’s traveling spokeswoman and a veteran of the RNC and both Bush campaigns. “Because she is a working mom, she brought a real sense of perspective to the campaign trail, which was important.”Schmitt said that Palin’s effort on McCain’s behalf was a dogged one—that she was completely devoted to helping the man who made her famous.“She was tireless on the stump and would have shaken every hand on the rope line if there were time,” Schmitt recalled. “It was evident that this work ethic and enthusiasm was fueled by her sincere commitment to helping Sen. McCain get elected.”Two other McCain aides who were pressed unexpectedly into Palin duty also have only positive things to say about her now.“One of the great developments of this campaign is the addition of Sarah Palin as a powerful and energetic new voice in American public life,” said Taylor Griffin, a McCain press aide who had been focusing on economic issues until he was dispatched to Alaska in late August. “She’s smart, insightful, and has an uncanny ability to ask the right questions.”John Green was McCain’s Capitol Hill liaison for much of the year but was quietly tasked this fall with helping Palin deal with some of her Alaska-related issues, spending significant time there and with her on the campaign trail.“I thought she was an exceptional political person, but more than that an exceptional person,” Green said. “She’s in line with conservative principles and is an everyday Republican—what we’re going to have to find more if we’re going to get back to being a majority party.”————————————In general, according to Beigun, Palin had a steep learning curve on foreign issues, about what you would expect from a governor. But she has “great instincts and great core values,” and is “an instinctive internationalist.” The stories against her are being “fed by an unnamed source who is allowed by the press to make ad hominem attacks on background.” Biegun, who spent dozens and dozens of hours briefing Palin on these issues, is happy to defend her, on the record, under his own name.