Category Archives: Sarah Palin

Gov. Palin and the abortion shift

Posted on by | No Comments

About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way. For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed
from her magnificence, she whom all Asia and the world worship.”

—Ephesians 19:23-27 (ESV)

Recent polling on American opinions on abortion has shown some interesting results.  According to American Thinker,

In [August] 2008, overall support for keeping abortion legal in all or most cases, was at 54%, a clear majority. This year, however, Pew polling found that support for legal abortion is down to 46%, while support for making the procedure illegal in most or all cases rose from 41% to 44%. . . .

Support for keeping abortion legal in most or all cases among the 18-29 year olds has fallen a full 5% since last August. In August 2008, legal abortion support among 18-29 year olds stood at 52%; this April it’s down to 47%. Support for making abortion illegal in most or all cases has risen 3% and is now at 48%. . . .

The most notable decline in the support for legal abortion has been among those highly-cherished, sought after Independent voters. As Pew notes:

There has been notable decline in the proportion of independents saying abortion should be legal in most or all cases; majorities of independents favored legal abortion in August and the two October surveys, but just 44% do so today. In addition, the proportion of moderate and liberal Republicans saying abortion should be legal declined between August and late October (from 67% to 57%). In the current survey, just 43% of moderate and liberal Republicans say abortion should legal in most or all cases.

The most recent Gallup polling backs up this shift:

A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice.” This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.

The new results, obtained from Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey, represent a significant shift from a year ago, when 50% were pro-choice and 44% pro-life. Prior to now, the highest percentage identifying as pro-life was 46%, in both August 2001 and May 2002.

The May 2009 survey documents comparable changes in public views about the legality of abortion. In answer to a question providing three options for the extent to which abortion should be legal, about as many Americans now say the procedure should be illegal in all circumstances (23%) as say it should be legal under any circumstances (22%). This contrasts with the last four years, when Gallup found a strong tilt of public attitudes in favor of unrestricted abortion.

Americans’ recent shift toward the pro-life position is confirmed in two other surveys. The same three abortion questions asked on the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey were included in Gallup Poll Daily tracking from May 12-13, with nearly identical results, including a 50% to 43% pro-life versus pro-choice split on the self-identification question. . . .

The source of the shift in abortion views is clear in the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey. The percentage of Republicans (including independents who lean Republican) calling themselves “pro-life” rose by 10 points over the past year, from 60% to 70%, while there has been essentially no change in the views of Democrats and Democratic leaners.

Clearly, there has been a significant shift in the electorate on this issue—not overwhelming, but significant—since last August.  R. A. Mansour offers, I believe, the key explanation for this shift:

A sharp decline since last August? Hmmm, what happened last August?

Oh, yes. Hurricane Sarah happened. And she introduced the nation to her beautiful and perfect son Trig.

It seems to me that the pro-abortion lobby depends for its success on people not looking too closely at abortion or thinking about it too deeply; that’s why they fight tooth and nail any effort to require doctors to give women considering abortion any information about what will be done to them (beyond of course the minimum:  “You will no longer be pregnant at the end of it”).  With any other surgical procedure, the law requires that patients be fully informed so as to be able to give appropriate consent—but not with abortion, because giving women more information might cause them to change their mind and choose not to have one after all.  The pro-abortion lobby doesn’t want them to make that choice, and so it seeks to keep them uninformed.

Gov. Palin’s abrupt appearance on the national scene, however, got a lot of people thinking about abortion in a way they hadn’t before; Pew and Gallup are now showing us the consequences of that fact.  It’s no surprise, then, that the likes of Demetrius in our own day are stirring up a riot;  you can almost hear them talking amongst themselves:

“Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Alaska but across America this Palin has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that Abortion is not really good. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Abortion may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Hollywood and the world worship.”

For all their sneers and smears, it’s really Gov. Palin’s opponents who are on the side of ignorance, because they’re the ones who profit from it.

 

Political fairy tales never end right

Posted on by | No Comments

Once upon a time, there was a politician who said,

Let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a VP. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. . . .

You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and you know teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits. . . .

Our people were not involved in any way in this, and they will not be. And if I ever thought that it was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that—they’d be fired.

That politician was very good at saying things that made people think highly of him, and so in the fullness of time, he grew up and became President of the United States. But along the way, he picked up a traveling companion, a Scarecrow named Joe who said whatever came into his mind, including using Gov. Palin’s youngest child to score political points; and the politician didn’t fire him, or stop him, or tell him to back off. And this was a sign that maybe he didn’t mean what he said after all. And the press continued to do what he’d told them not to do, and he said nothing further; and this was another sign.

And then after the politician became president, there came the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, at which it is traditional to have a comedian make fun of the president, to show that the president can laugh at himself and take a joke. But since this politician didn’t like laughing at himself and taking jokes, they had a comedian to make fun of his opponents instead, including a crude “joke” about Gov. Palin and her family. The comedian told this joke right in front of the politician who had once said,

Let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics.

In any proper fairy tale, this should be the cue for the politician to step up and say, “I said this was inappropriate, and I meant it. I said we need to respect those with whom we disagree, and I meant it. I said we need to base our politics on political issues, not on character assassination, and I meant it. Stop this nonsense right now.” This should be the cue for the politician to defend the one unjustly abused.

Did he? No . . . he laughed. All his words about the good, the true and the beautiful were just words.

Political fairy tales never end right.

(Crossposted at Conservatives4Palin.)

Mitt Romney, the Beltway GOP, and the meaning of Evansville

Posted on by | No Comments

(Note: this was originally posted at Conservatives4Palin.)

I didn’t blog about it much, but at the beginning of the last presidential campaign, I was intending to vote for Mitt Romney. I wasn’t a huge fan, but my primary concern was finding someone who could beat Rudy Giuliani, the one person in the race I simply could not support; on that score, Gov. Romney seemed like the best option. He was the most conservative of the plausible candidates, and had proven himself to be an effective executive in a number of positions. His record in Massachusetts doesn’t look as good now as it did before I really understood the situation with RomneyCare, but even given that fiasco, the man’s a capable administrator with the guts to make tough decisions. I still think he would have made a better president than John McCain, though Sen. McCain made a better losing nominee since he brought Sarah Palin on the national stage.

That said, since Gov. Romney began his run for the nomination, the only thing he’s done that hasn’t lowered my opinion of him was to suspend his campaign; at every other point, the more I’ve seen of him, the less I’ve thought of him. His recent attempts to diminish Gov. Palin, both directly and by proxy, only compound that; I understand why he’s doing it, but this is one case where to understand most definitely is not to forgive. The fact that he’s denigrating someone who simply doesn’t deserve it is certainly no more acceptable because he’s doing it out of raw ambition, after all.

Gov. Romney’s comments aren’t only ignoble, however, they’re also revealingly clueless. I’m not certain whether he really believes what he’s saying or merely considers it to be a plausible line of attack, but either way, it seems clear that he does not in fact understand Gov. Palin’s influence, which means that he doesn’t understand the reasons for her influence—and in this, I believe he’s representative of the GOP Beltway types who now consider him the rightful heir (or at least a rightful aspirant) to the party’s mantle.

They don’t like her because she’s not one of them, and they fail to understand that that’s whyshe’s influential: that she isn’t one of them is the whole point. She’s one of us, a politician who remains of and for the ordinary barbarians of this country, and at this point, any effort—anyeffort, no matter what else it has going for it—to elevate another Beltway insider as the GOP’s standard bearer is doomed to failure.

All of this, of course, has been said before, here and elsewhere; but there’s a particular aspect to it which I believe is highlighted in a bitterly ironic way by Mitt Romney, of all people, dissing Gov. Palin as just another pretty face. I don’t mean the fact that Gov. Romney himself consciously tried to use his looks to his advantage, and thus was far more deserving of his own jab than Gov. Palin, though the irony there is sharp enough; but there’s something more significant in play here as well, something which is thrown into sharp relief by Gov. Palin’s trip last month to Evansville, IN.

The key thing to understand about that visit is something the executive director of Vandenburgh County RTL said, which Joseph Russo used in his headline: “[Palin] walks the walk and talks the talk. She could . . . be doing other things, but she chose to do this.”

To know just how much that means, you need to know something about the pro-life movement: it has been the beneficiary, from many on the Right, of much talk and very little walk. It’s a grassroots movement outside the elite culture, outside the halls of power, that is primarily used rather than supported by those who have influence. I can’t think how many strong pro-life people I know who looked back at the Bush 43 administration last year and said, in essence, yeah, he gave us Roberts and Alito, but what else did he do for us? Was it worth what we did for him? And the thing is, George W. Bush was no worse in that respect than any other leading conservative politician—he was, in fact, completely typical.

And he wasn’t only typical of politicians, either. I know a pastor who served for many years as the senior pastor of a large, influential Southern Baptist church in one of the cities of the Deep South—a good man, a godly man, and one well familiar with the corridors of power and the wielders of influence in the Southern Baptist Convention. We were talking one time about the whole issue of abortion, and he made a statement that absolutely floored me: he declared that over his whole career, he had never known a Southern Baptist pastor who risked anything for the pro-life movement.

Now, consider that. The SBC is known throughout the country as a conservative Christian denomination, it’s known everywhere for its support of the conservative social agenda, and if you asked a random selection of non-Southern Baptists what they knew about it, I’d bet most of them would mention its opposition to abortion somewhere in there—and yet, according to him, that has all just been words. When the rubber meets the road, effectively, he said, Southern Baptist pastors have been unwilling to walk the talk, unwilling to lay their reputations, the reputations of their congregations, their positions, or anything else on the line to back up what they said they believed. And in that, I don’t say this to bash the SBC, because in my experience, they too are typical.

The point here, let me reiterate, is not to criticize George W. Bush, or my colleagues in the Southern Baptist Church—or me, for that matter; in all honesty, I have to admit that there have been times that I too have ducked away from the issue of abortion instead of taking a stand. I speak here with the rueful honesty of a regretful and repentant sinner; I know I’m no one to cast the first stone. My point, rather, is this: when you see someone willing to put their political capital where their mouth is, willing to lay something on the line and risk something real for the sake of a cause in which they claim to believe, pay attention. Pay attention, because here you have found someone who actually believes something, and does so strongly enough to live it out when it matters.

This, to come at last to the promise of my title, is the meaning of Evansville—and make no mistake, it’s a meaning that the organizers of those events understand perfectly. They have no doubt seen plenty of Republican types show up for the photo op and then be long gone when it mattered; for Gov. Palin to come and speak, especially at a time when she (and everyone else who was paying attention) had to know she was going to get hammered by the ankle-biters back in Alaska—to make an effort that actually cost her something in order to support a cause she believes in—clearly meant the world to them. That she refused the offer of a fundraiser as part of the deal (which I suspect she would have seen as cheapening her visit, and quite frankly would have cheapened it) only made her visit all the more meaningful.

The thing is, those folks in Vandenburgh County were absolutely right to feel that way, and to see Gov. Palin that way, because with that trip she did something that politicians rarely do: she gave of herself for the sake of others. She showed by her actions that her political positions aren’t just political positions, they’re things that she believes deeply enough and strongly enough that she’s willing to spend her own political capital and put herself on the line for their sake, and for the sake of the people involved. She showed that she was willing to make that effort and take the criticism and the sniping from the peanut gallery for the sake of people trying to save the lives of unborn children in southern Indiana, and for the sake of Down Syndrome children like her own youngest son. She showed that what she believes isn’t a matter of political convenience, nor is it subject to renegotiation for the sake of political advantage, because it’s rooted in who she is and what she cares about and what drives her to do what she does.

And in that, she separated herself—decisively—from Mitt Romney, the GOP establishment as a whole (though not all its members; it was also heartening to see Michael Steele there, and one may hope that this is a sign of things to come), the conservative chattering classes, and many of the party’s presidential hopefuls. And in that, she showed clearly the roots of her influence, and the reason why that influence will not wane unless she decides to lay it aside. To borrow a line from Abraham Lincoln on U. S. Grant which others have borrowed recently, we’ve decided that we can’t spare this woman—she fights. If the Beltway GOP wants to win our support, let them stop trying to tear her down, and go and do likewise.

A pastoral comment on Sarah Palin

Posted on by | No Comments

I forgot to mention this yesterday, what with everything else going on, but I have another post up over on Conservatives4Palin.  Counsel for leaders within the church is also of value for Christians called to leadership outside the church, since I believe exercising Christian leadership in the marketplace and in government is an important form of Christian ministry.

Sarah Palin for the Hoosier unborn

Posted on by | No Comments

I would have loved to have been down in Evansville to hear RNC Chairman Michael Steele (even after his recent bout with Foot-in-Mouth disease, I still like the guy) and Gov. Palin, but there was no way I could justify the time; and really, it was an event for the folks in Vandenburgh County, and it would have felt like horning in.  So here’s the next best thing: complete video of her speech in Evansville, beginning with Chairman Steele’s introduction:

Note on building a movement

Posted on by | No Comments

Quoth Robert Stacy McCain,

So if you’re a conservative out there in Ohio or Florida or Colorado who’s waiting for RNC HQ to save the GOP, you’re part of the problem. If you want to be part of the solution, you’ve got to become an activist. You’ve got to organize.

Create a movement, and don’t worry about who the leader of the movement is. Be your own leader.

Wise words.  One thing though, Mr. McCain:  We’re doing it.  We’re doing it one flash at a time.

Update:  David Bozeman has some good thoughts on this as well.

Political machines hate reformers

Posted on by | 7 Comments

That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of most of the news stories about Sarah Palin in recent months. It’s the reason for the wrangling between her and the Democrats over the Juneau-area state senate seat; it’s the reason for the fight over her AG nominee, Wayne Anthony Ross; it’s the reason for the sniping from machine tools in the state legislature like Fairbanks RINO Jay Ramras; it’s the reason the New York Times paid a visit to Alaska. This is what all the badmouthing boils down to.

Obviously, the stories about members of her family are not, in and of themselves, in this category; however, the fact that the MSM is more interested in the likes of Levi Johnston than they are in, say, President Obama’s child-rapist half-brother Samson is also a reflection of the fact that political machines don’t like reformers. Now, I don’t happen to think that Samson Obama ought to be a major political story, or indeed that he has any greater significance than anyone else who likes to rape 13-year-old girls, which is one reason I haven’t blogged about him; Barack Obama is human, and therefore a sinner like all the rest of us, and the same is true of his family, and some of those folks are going to be worse sinners than others. What matters is who he is and what he does. However, the same is true of Gov. Palin, even with respect to her children—anyone who thinks it’s possible to be a good-enough parent to ensure that your 17-year-old daughter is immune to the kinds of bad decisions and sinful acts to which 17-year-olds are prone is probably expecting that check from Nigeria any day now.

If Bristol Palin deserves attention from the MSM, well, what Samson Obama did was a heck of a lot worse—by that standard, he ought to be on front pages as far as the eye can see. And he isn’t. Why? Because of ideology, to be sure, but also because President Obama doesn’t threaten the machine—he’s of the machine, he owes it, and he can be trusted to behave accordingly. Gov. Palin isn’t, and doesn’t, and can’t, and so every bit of influence she gains is a direct threat to the (bi-partisan) political establishment that can neither predict nor control her.

This goes all the way back to the very beginning of her political career. (Note: much of this is covered in R. A. Mansour’s excellent post “Who Is Sarah Palin?”) In her first step into politics, she won a seat on the city council of Wasilla. At that point, she had the backing of her mayor. Did she repay his support by being a loyal supporter of his administration, following the expected rules of political patronage? No, she didn’t; when she decided that he was governing badly and in a manner that she considered bad for the community, she challenged him, ran against him, and defeated him. He’s still complaining about her ingratitude.

Later, after she lost the race for lieutenant governor in 2004, the new Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, one of the entrenched leaders of the oil-money-fueled Alaska GOP political machine, appointed her as ethics supervisor and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. One of her fellow commissioners was Randy Ruedrich, who also chaired the Alaska Republican Party; when she discovered he was guilty of ethics violations, she blew the whistle on him, even though she ended up having to quit the commission (giving up a six-figure salary) to do so. Gov. Murkowski backed Ruedrich, but he ended up paying a significant fine for his actions. In 2006, at least in part because of this and other dubious actions on Gov. Murkowski’s part, she ran against him as a Republican but a party outsider, and beat him.

If you’re keeping score, that’s twice that she was recruited by a Republican incumbent to be a good little foot soldier, declined to be a good little foot soldier in the face of her political patron’s bad conduct, and knocked said incumbent out of office. Those of you with a taste for old political fiction will probably understand why, even more than Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, the politician of whom Gov. Palin reminds me most is Orrin Knox, the fictional senior U. S. Senator from Illinois (small irony there) in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. When it comes to dealing with her own party, she has definitely acted in line with Sen. Knox’s motto: “I don’t give a —- about being liked, but I intend to be respected.”

Now, up until about August 28 of last year, none of this posed any particular problems for the Democratic political machine, either in Alaska or nationally. You see, the national political machine’s biggest concern (in both parties) for holding statehouses has to do with the redistricting that takes place every decade, and Alaska has only one House seat and isn’t likely to gain a second one; as such, that doesn’t apply. Democratic interest in Alaska, then, was primarily focused on trying to unseat the state’s senior U. S. Senator, the corrupt but wily and very powerful Ted Stevens, and its lone House member, Rep. Don Young—and in that effort, Gov. Palin was a great help, which made her the Democrats’ favorite Republican. Sure, they had every intention of trying as hard as they could to unseat her in 2010, but at that point, she was more a help to them than a hindrance. She’d worked with Democrats in the Alaska legislature to replace laws that had essentially been written by oil-company lobbyists—specifically, the tax code on resource extraction and a gas-pipeline bill—with laws that were better for the people and state of Alaska. Back then, while Alaska Democrats weren’t above trying to take her down, they were happy to give Gov. Palin the credit for killing the “Bridge to Nowhere,” because it helped them make their case against the Alaskans who really mattered in her party.

And then John McCain named her his running mate—and everything changed. Suddenly, she was the Alaskan who mattered in her party, because she mattered in the presidential race; she gave the McCain campaign an energy it hadn’t had since the New Hampshire primary—the 2000 New Hampshire primary, that is—and thus became Public Enemy #1 for the national Democratic machine, and so for the Alaska Democratic machine as well. Conservatives4Palin has chronicled at length how the Obama campaign’s officials in Alaska, folks like State Senators Hollis French and Kim Elton, tried to bring her down (even going so far as to promise an “October surprise”), and how St. Sen. Elton got his payoff for his actions in support of the Obama campaign.

That, by the way, was supposed to be a cascading payoff; the Alaska Democratic Party machine thought it could giftwrap St. Sen. Elton’s seat for St. Rep. Beth Kerttula (one of those Democrats who’d supported Gov. Palin until she became a threat to the Obama campaign), and then giftwrap her seat in turn for Kim Metcalfe, who chairs the local party in Juneau. But Gov. Palin doesn’t appreciate machine politics when practiced by either party—she’s willing to work with Democrats, but she’s as opposed to the Democratic machine as she is to the Republican machine, and so she’s been refusing to play along with their back-room maneuvers.

Gov. Palin is now in a difficult, though probably inevitable, position: she is opposed by a bi-partisan coalition of the machine politicians in Alaska, who oppose each other on policy but share a common higher loyalty to the old boys’ club and the perks and procedures to which they’re accustomed. Gov. Palin has the support of a strong majority of the Alaskan people, but only a minority of the state’s politicians. This has meant that the state legislature has been in full foot-dragging mode through the entire session—a fact which they now intend, via the Democratic Party PR department (aka the MSM, specifically the New York Times), to blame on her.

That the MSM will coordinate with the Democratic/Republican machine in Alaska on this is, I believe, a sign of their deepest agenda here—not just their general bias against conservatives, but a deeper bias yet: as much as they bleat about “speaking truth to power,” they are not the outside critics of the machine that they pretend to be. Rather, they are a part of the machine, they are inside the corridors of power, that’s where they want to be, and they really have no true understanding or interest of the world outside those corridors.

This is true, I believe, even of the conservatives within the MSM, which is why a lot of the elite conservative writers have been almost as unfair to Gov. Palin as their liberal colleagues; and if a Democratic version of Gov. Palin were ever to emerge, a true reformer who bucked the party machine, I don’t think the likes of Eleanor Clift and Paul Krugman would be any kinder to that individual than the likes of David Brooks and David Frum have been to Gov. Palin. The initial MSM reaction to the appointment of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to Hillary Clinton’s vacant seat in the U.S. Senate certainly supports that thought.

In other words, what we’re seeing here is the utter bankruptcy of the MSM as an “independent free press”; they are nothing of the kind. They are organs of elite opinion, constituent parts of the political machine. This, more than ideology, is the reason why they’re so determined to bring Gov. Palin down, because she represents a threat to their worldview on a more basic level even than ideology: she threatens their sense of their own superiority, and the rules by which they operate, and the perks and the comfort zone which those rules ensure, just as much as she threatens all those things for the machine politicians she’s been relentlessly at work to overcome and bring down.

This is one of the reasons why we need the continued rise of the citizen punditry via the blogosphere—we need to reclaim the national discussion on issues from the machine almost as much as we need to reclaim our government. (I say “almost” because whatever its failings, talk radio has also been outside the political machine, for the most part.) And it’s why we need to support Gov. Palin, and why I so much appreciate the independents and moderate Democrats who do, because if she goes down to defeat—if the Alaska political machine defeats her, or the national Democratic machine defeats her—the odds that someone else will try to buck the machine and bring real political reform to this country approach zero . . . from beneath.

Remember this, as you read the stories about Sarah Palin: remember that she’s spent her career trying to reform the machine politics of Alaska, and remember that political machines hate reformers—and they’re the ones who have the money, and the media. All Gov. Palin has is the truth, and the support of those of us who are fed up with the machine. Remember that, and don’t believe the hate.

Update: Welcome to folks dropping by from C4P; my posting has tilted toward religious topics in the last week or so, but even if that isn’t up your alley, you might also find my post in defense of the citizen punditry of particular interest. I hope to have a reflection on Gov. Palin’s visit to Evansville up in the next day or two as well.

Where does experience come from? Bad judgment

Posted on by | 2 Comments

I haven’t had anything to say about Levi Johnston’s decision to exploit his inadvertent fame by going on national TV to trash his ex-fiancée, because I don’t think there’s all that much to be said, really, and because the folks at C4P have been doing a good job of saying it (here and here); this leaves me with a low opinion of the kid and a lower one of her sister (who does indeed seem to be jealous of Bristol Palin and glad that her brother’s no longer engaged), but so what?  Something did occur to me, though, which I thought might be worth noting:  while I really don’t care all that much about Johnston, being far, far more concerned about the Palin family, I do have to wonder—while all the attention’s on what this kid’s doing to his ex and her family, did any adult sit down and try to tell him what he’d be doing to himself?  Or did any adult in his life even think that far ahead?

Someone should have.  For the short term, this no doubt seems like a great idea to him—make some money, hurt his ex, hurt her parents while he’s at it (since it appears they never cared for him much), get some attention.  But what about the long term?  What effect is this likely to have on his adult life?  It’s hard to say for sure, but it can’t be good.  This whole thing will blow over, the news cycle will move on, the PR effects will fade . . . and then the real meaning of his actions will set in.

Obviously, he’s permanently alienated the mother of his son and her family, which is going to do bad things for his relationship with that son in the future; maybe he’s shallow enough that that will never bother him, but while I think he’s pretty shallow, I don’t see any reason to believe he’s that bad.  And whether he is or isn’t, this is going to hang over any future relationships he might have; any woman who comes along is going to look at him as a man with a son from whose mother he’s estranged because he took advantage of her and betrayed her.  Which is to say, if he wants to get married, have kids, etc., he’s set up a heck of a hurdle for himself to get there.

Then there’s the question of the wider consequences of his actions.  In Alaska, of course, he’s a marked man—everybody knows who he is, and that’s going to be the case for a long time.  There are probably those whose desire to bring down Sarah Palin is so great that his dishonorable behavior won’t hurt him in their eyes . . . but before he goes and applies for a position on Hollis French’s staff, he ought to consider that his evident immaturity, irresponsibility and bad judgment still won’t recommend him for anything.  Folks like that want to use you, kid, not employ you; they see you as a tool, not someone on whom they want to rely (even if they thought you were actually reliable—a conclusion which your behavior to this point does not tend to support).

Meanwhile, those without a strong political animus against Gov. Palin will focus mainly on what this reveals about Johnston’s character and judgment—and what it reveals isn’t good.  For the rest of his life, he’s going to be the guy who got a girl pregnant, dumped her, then went on national TV to make a quick buck trashing her.  That’s the sort of thing that gives most people a built-in prejudice against you; it’s the sort of thing that makes it hard to convince folks that you’re trustworthy, responsible, and a man of integrity.  As such, it’s the sort of thing that tends to work against your ability to get good jobs and make a good living; if you do get a job, it can be the sort of thing that makes people not want to do business with your employer.

And that’s not just in Alaska, either.  It will be worst there, no doubt, but even if he leaves the state to get away from the stigma, this is the age of the Internet; anyone looking to hire him, or date him, or work with him, is going to Google him if they don’t know who he is, and if they do that, it will all be there.  Those folks will have to ask themselves whether they want to be associated with the guy who got a girl pregnant, dumped her, then went on national TV to make a quick buck trashing her—and I suspect that not all that many people will.  Even if they like the political effect of his actions, the fact remains that he didn’t do what he did because he was a deep-cover Democratic Party dirty-tricks specialist, he did it because he’s an immature, low-character jerk (or something of that sort).  What he did before, he might very well do it again—and if you’re associated with him, this time it might be your daughter, or someone else you care about.  As such, even those who like and appreciate his actions at a distance aren’t likely to approve of them close up.

All of which is to say, there’s likely to be fallout from this whole episode for many years into Levi Johnston’s future, and there’s no good reason to think that any of it will be positive.  I could always be wrong, but it seems to me that what Johnston has done is likely to make it harder for him to form another stable romantic relationship, harder for him to get a woman to trust him enough to stay with him, harder for him to get good jobs, and harder for him to keep them.  The support of political liberals for his actions will probably prove to be abstract, not translating into meaningful support for him at a personal level, while the animus of political conservatives will most likely be very concrete and very direct; those who judge him without regard to political concerns will find little good to say about him from his behavior in recent months.  I hope Tyra Banks paid him well for the ratings boost, and I hope he’s smart enough to save most of it . . . I think he may need it.

Franklin Graham likes Sarah Palin’s coattails

Posted on by | 9 Comments

I have an envelope sitting on my desk from Samaritan’s Purse, the organization founded by Franklin Graham; on the outside, the envelope references two of the many projects in which they’re involved:

Ministry in the Slums of Honduras

Feeding Families on the Alaska Frontier

Now, had you asked me in advance which of these two would get top billing, I would have figured from past experience that it would be Honduras, which sounds more exotic and a bigger deal.  Past fundraising appeals from Franklin Graham, whether for Samaritan’s Purse or for his father’s ministry, have featured evangelistic work in places like India for just that reason.  But no, Honduras is relegated to a small strip below the address window of the envelope.  Most of the front of the envelope is taken up with the mission to Alaska.

Why? My best guess in two words:  Sarah Palin.

Most of the right side of the front of the envelope, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the total space, is occupied by a picture of Graham standing next to Gov. Palin, both grinning (he looks very like his father in this shot), handing out a big box of food.  The picture dominates the envelope; the eye goes first to Graham, looking down into the box, then moves immediately to the Governor, because she’s dressed in red and so stands out from the rest of the colors in the picture.  The message in this one is very clear:  Franklin Graham is allied with Sarah Palin—they’re working together to minister to the people of Alaska.

Lest you think I’m overemphasizing this, I’m not.  Open the envelope and pull out the letter, the first thing you see is a different photo, filling the top half of the page, of Graham and Gov. Palin giving away another large box of food; the only major difference in composition is that Graham is significantly closer to the camera and therefore looms larger.  Gov. Palin is still dead-center in the shot, and her red still draws the eye.  The caption, at the top of the page, reads, “EMERGENCY FOOD:  Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and I delivered much-needed boxes of food to native families in the wilderness of western Alaska.”  In the text of the letter, the governor’s office is mentioned in the second paragraph, she’s mentioned by name—and praised in strong terms—in the third, and the entire fourth paragraph is her praise of Samaritan’s Purse.

In other words, one of the main things this letter wants you to take away is that Gov. Palin loves Franklin Graham and Samaritan’s Purse, and that they’re allies in ministry.  This is, of course, a fundraising letter, so what this tells you is that Graham and his staff think that invoking her name is a good way to get people to give money—and that’s no small judgment, because these folks are past masters at this craft.  When most folks think of Billy Graham, they don’t think of him as a fundraiser, but all those crusades cost a great deal of money; who exactly was responsible for raising it initially I don’t know, but over the years, that’s one of the areas at which the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has gotten very, very good.  If they think Gov. Palin’s picture and imprimatur will help them raise money from the sort of folks who support them, they’re no doubt right.

Why does this matter?  Well, besides the fact that Samaritan’s Purse is a good ministry that will do a great deal of good work with that money, it also matters because those same folks make up a sizable chunk of the Republican base—and for that matter, the Blue Dog wing of Democratic voters, many of whom now self-identify as Palin Democrats.  The calculation of Franklin Graham and the development folks at Samaritan’s Purse with regard to Gov. Palin’s probable effect on their fundraising isn’t a political one, but it has political implications; at its root, it’s the same calculation Saxby Chambliss made when he invited Gov. Palin to be the closer for his campaign in the runoff election for Senate in Georgia:  Sarah Palin has big coattails.  She inspires a lot of people across this country, and if she supports someone or something, that will encourage many, many other folks to do the same—with votes, time, money, whatever.  Whether it’s “Vote for Saxby” or “give money to Samaritan’s Purse,” if she says it, millions of people take it a lot more seriously than if someone else says it.  That matters.  It matters a lot.

This also matters because it’s a good gauge that all the Democratic efforts to smear this woman aren’t really working.  Sure, they’re no doubt serving to fire up the Party faithful, but outside of the elite echo chambers where people pull out lines to convinced each other of things of which they’re both already convinced, when it comes to actually changing the minds of the citizenry, they aren’t taking root.  For all the work the Democrat smear machine is putting into breaking her image as someone of high morals and ethics, that’s clearly how most people in this country think of her, or else her support wouldn’t be this useful to an evangelical ministry like Samaritan’s Purse; they clearly don’t see her as damaged goods, or they wouldn’t be parading her support the way they are.

One might also point out that it matters because it means that Graham and his staff have a better feel for the political realities in this country right now, even without trying, than the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the various other party organs that exist inside that great echo chamber of the DC-NY corridor.  Were that not the case, the NRSC and NRCC would have hung on and waited for her to agree to attend their event (as she probably would have done) when she could do so at an appropriate point, rather than turning to Newt Gingrich as a speaker.

The bottom line is that this fundraising letter is just one more piece of evidence of Sarah Palin’s extraordinary appeal and connection to a vast swath of the American populace; Palin Power is a very real thing, and the folks at Samaritan’s Purse clearly judged it well worth their while to make a deliberate and intentional effort to tap into it.  (Which, since she supports and appreciates their efforts, was an entirely appropriate and valid thing for them to do.)  The sooner the national GOP starts doing so as well in an intelligent way—namely, without asking her to tap-dance to their tune for the privilege—the better off they’ll be.

Update:  When I posted this, I was so focused on the letter that I wasn’t thinking about the trip it recounts, so I didn’t link to the post Joseph Russo put up on that trip at the time.  That omission is now corrected.  It’s particularly significant because that post sparked people to donate to Samaritan’s Purse in honor of Gov. Palin, which probably contributed to their decision to highlight the trip.