There are folks out there (like Examiner.com‘s George Copeland) suggesting that Sarah Palin may have resigned from office to set up a run for the presidency in 2012, not as a Republican, but as an independent candidate. While I tend to doubt that that will be her approach, the party mandarins have every reason to worry about what she might do to them. After all, the last time Sarah Palin resigned from a position, it was the beginning of an all-out assault on the Alaska GOP, which had betrayed the party’s core principles with its corruption and cronyism. Following her resignation, her political career was widely pronounced dead at the scene, but in fact it was only the beginning of the political insurgency that would carry her to the governor’s mansion. The past is no guarantee of the future, but there is certainly considerable reason to think that we might see history repeating itself here.
And if so, there’s good reason for it. Michelle Malkin took a well-deserved rhetorical machete to the Beltway GOP last week after the news broke of David Keene’s utterly disgusting attempt to extort money from FedEx, declaring,
We’ve got major battles on the Hill and fundamental principles to defend.
Show the corrupted, Beltway-infected, power-drunk Republicans the door.
And get back to work.
I heartily agree. To this point, though, not enough Republican voters have; when I tried a while back to argue over on RedState that conservatives should back Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao (R-LA) in a primary challenge to Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), I was shouted down by a bunch of folks saying, in essence, “His voting record’s good—never mind the prostitution thing.” Here’s hoping that sort of attitude is starting to change; it has to. My second-favorite politician, Florida’s Marco Rubio, is right to say,
The Republican party should be the party that always understands that what people want more than anything else in life is for the chance to provide security for themselves and their family and to leave their kids better off than themselves. . . .
For many Americans our party has become indistinguishable from the Democrats. We’re viewed as the party of hypocrites who say one thing and do another.
The only way we’re going to fix that, and the only way we’re going to have a political party whose leaders represent and stay true to the beliefs and concerns of those who elect them, is to finish clearing the decks of the low-character power-focused Washington-corrupted lowlifes who currently make up the bulk of the national party establishment. Gov. Palin, throughout her political career, has been about cleaning folks like that out of the Republican Party, first locally and then on the state level. Now she’s stepping down from her position in Alaska so she can take them on—and take them out—on the national stage. All I can say is—you go, Gov.; we’re behind you every step of the way.
(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)
You know, Rob, the more one studies politics and political history, the more the paradoxes get "in your face." Here's a big paradox: After Lincoln, the three most beloved and honored Presidents in the Republican Party's history were gentlemen (in every sense of the word) that were the LEAST partisan Republican in their approach to doing business. Those men were: Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and…Ronald Reagan.
The only real problem the GOP has right now is that it it letting people speak for them who have no sense of that paradox. And I'm not talking about the Bush family; I'm referring to people who have aped the infernal Lefty notion of "no enemies on the Left." These are the same people who get into an arrogant attitude that Reagan's 11th commandment applies to non-Republicans. I am, of course, referring to Peggy Noonan and David Brooks, but there are others that would surprise quite a few folks if they showed up on this list.
So don't worry too much about the average GOP elected official or rank-and-file member; they KNOW WHAT THEY HAVE in Sarah Palin, and will go to the mattresses for her. If you want to, though, you can worry about the Noonans and the Brookses who are about to find out what happens when their media gravy train gets derailed.
I agree with much of what you're saying, except that I don't think you're right about "the average GOP elected official"; a lot depends on how you define "average," to be sure, but there are certainly too many folks elected under the banner of the GOP who are very much in the Noonan/Brooks mold as you define it. That's especially true when you consider the folks who have seniority (or who have effectively inherited seniority, like Lisa Murkowski).
I'm also not sure on what basis you would declare Reagan to be not a partisan Republican; it seems to me that at the very least, he was quite a bit more partisan in his mode of operation than was his successor, the elder Bush.