The Party of Palin?
by Marion Maneker
As the papers dissect where and how McCain lost the Presidency and focus on Rahm Emmanuel and who will be next announced as part of the Obama team, the Republicans have a lot of soul searching to do. The question is whether the Republican party can overcome the twin blows of botching the bailout vote and losing the presidential campaign.
The WSJ looked at the party in the aftermath today and what they saw isn’t pretty.
“Complicating the coming fight is a widening gap between the party’s grass-roots activists and its intellectual elite. Gov. Palin sits squarely in the center of the debate. Embraced by many social conservatives in the party’s base, she was dismissed by some party leaders, including some former government officials who endorsed Democrat Barack Obama. Activists see her as the party’s future, others as a novice whose at-times shaky performance has doomed her prospects — a split reflected in polls that showed her popularity dropping during the general election, but her supporters’ enthusiasm high.
“She’s a star among conservatives, but the crucial independent voter has a different perspective, and the lesson for the GOP…is if you lose the center, you lose America,” said pollster Frank Luntz, who blamed Republican losses in 2006 and 2008 on a failure to appeal to independents.
“The Sarah Palin phenomenon is not going to disappear,” said Tim Morgan, deputy managing editor of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today. Gov. Palin has the potential, he said, to build a movement on issues including increased domestic energy production and a tough line on illegal immigration.
Gov. Palin also won support from some party die-hards, even as others, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, distanced themselves from her. “She has energized our base like I’ve never seen,” Ohio Sen. George Voinovich said at a Monday rally in Lakewood, Ohio, where he introduced the Republican vice-presidential nominee.”
The problem isn’t Palin as much as what she represents: the rural underclass that is resentful and isolated from economic opportunity. If the Republican party remains captive to that group, it too will be increasingly isolated and bereft of the kind of ideas that animated the conservative revolution. If Obama is smart and continues to seize the center by confounding expectations, the Republicans could become like the UK’s Conservative party, a leaderless afterthought.
The Journal points out that the future of the party now lies in Congress where a new look is unlikely to emerge: “In the party’s immediate future is a battle for leadership in a shrunken Capitol Hill caucus, which has grown more conservative as it has grown smaller.”
And many in the party know it: “We’ve lost our credibility,” said Scott Klug, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin who said he fears the party is entering a long period of retrenchment. “We’re just going to be in the wilderness for a while.”
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November 5th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Like Scott Klug, I’m from Wisconsin. Taking the Republicans to the wilderness is a great idea. Some of them need to get so lost they don’t find their way back. I’m thinking mostly of national Republican figures who have abandoned Wisconsin Republicans to a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators. The Repubs come around for money and then spend it “strategically” which, of course, means somewhere else.
November 5th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Klug said: “We’re just going to be in the wilderness for a while.”
Yeah, like twenty years.
November 5th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
“She energized our base like I’ve never seen,” says the Ohio Senator.
Ron Paul energized the libertarian base like I’d never seen before during the primaries… turns out that neither he nor Bob Barr won the election, either! Maybe it’s time for the Republicans to find a new base. According to exit polls McCain got 32% of the under 30 vote… ouch!
November 5th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Somewhere along the line, Republicans managed to forget the difference between “principle” and “ideology.” Principles are flexible, and are amenable to change in light of experience. Ideologies become ossified, and reality bent and twisted in order to fit the ideology.
Republicans need, and this country needs them to, return to a set of flexible principles that are amenable to change in light of experience and new information. Until that happens, politics in this country will continue to be fractured and destructive.
November 5th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
The problem is that they’ve screwed their own branding by trying to bring together groups that really don’t have a common reason to be together.
You have:
- Fiscal liberatarians who hate the IRS, hate taxes, hate government regulation in all flavors. They had succeeded in selling this prescription to the public for 30 years, but we just had it blow up in all its $10 trillion glory. It’s a failed ideology and everyone knows it now.
- Social fascists who want to use the awesome power of the Federal Government to enforce their Talibanish morals on everyone. This was obvious to everyone when Congress and Bush stopped all important tasks to intervene in the case of a single brain-dead woman.
- Neo-conservatives — the “democracy evangelicals” — who want to use the military to create democracy while totally disdaining the State Department’s role in diplomacy. People aren’t so happy with the idea of a holy empire.
- True conservatives, who feel like they are being edged out as the other three factions became more dominant in the party.
Sarah Palin falls more into the social fascist group than anything. She’s just happy as a clam to tax oil companies more to “spread the wealth” to Alaska’s population; she’s definitely not a neo-conservative in anything but a sort-of reactionary sense; and she hasn’t thought deeply enough about fiscal policy beyond redistribution of oil company wealth to be a true conservative in any real sense. He appeal is strictly in those groups that want to abolish sex they don’t approve of. She talks a good game — you betcha! — but she doesn’t have a clear idea about what she wants to do for any population larger than, say, Wasilla.
The party needs to decide whether their core principles mean anything. So far, it appears that they don’t.
Personally, I would prefer to see the rise of a third party that focused on fiscal conservatives and social liberatarians. That’s where most of the mushy middle is now anyway.
November 5th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Happened to tune in to Fox out of curiosity last night. They were almost to the postmortem stage and someone cited a stat that, among those who thought Palin’s qualifications were important, most voted for Obama. Her wing of the party is going to be more and more isolated and irrelevant as the mainstream worry more and more about economic survival in a recession/depression that may drag out for a decade and less about gay marriage, somewhat like the prohibition movement.
November 5th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Ha! To paraphrase W, “Bring her on!”
I’d love to see an Obama / Palin matchup in 2012.
He could spend the entire campaign in the rose garden and still win in a landslide! He might even beat Nixon’s record of 49 to 1 over McGovern in ’72.
November 5th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
“The problem is that they’ve screwed their own branding by trying to bring together groups that really don’t have a common reason to be together.”
My problem with both the Democrats and Republican parties. Social Liberalism mixed with Fiscal Conservatism and the reciprocal. Just does not seem to add up. Even worse, the Republicans have seemed unable to give up on the “spend” portion of the criticism they have had of their opposition. Borrow and spend is not an acceptable substitution for Tax and spend.
Eventually Junior is going to figure out it is not in his best interest to service the debt that Grandpa ran up, and will print up a dozen or so trillion dollar bills to pay it off. Will China and Japan figure it out that it is coming before the printing press gets going, or not?
“It’s a failed ideology and everyone knows it now.”
Well 51.5% of us.
“…you betcha!”
Great story on NPR this afternoon with the political writers for the WSJ and NYT. They speculated that the Republicans will head further down the wrong path before they fix things. The prediction was for 15 years of Democratic dominance.
November 6th, 2008 at 6:43 am
Reagan’s gift to the GOP, the loon balls are “the base.” His gifts to America: Greenspan, Social Security used to cover the deficit, debt, the watershed cowardly retreat from Lebanon that emboldened the Muslim fundamentalists… Thanks Reagan, voting has its consequences.
November 6th, 2008 at 7:43 am
But they still wan’t to put him on Rushmore. Galls them that Roosevelt is an icon.
November 6th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Did I read it in TBP or see elsewhere – the notion of America has become an Entertainment Dominated Culture.
That is spot on.
I think Hollywood better wake up or the current spectrum of violent drama, sex, song & dance will face the fate of SUVs in a oil short world. Fit for a IEW flameout.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Palin didn’t know Africa is a continent, McCain aides say
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/06/palin_and_africa/