On Palin’s Record
Posted on October 9th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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For the record, I wouldn’t go as far as David Brooks did in calling Sarah Palin a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party.” Besides being unfair to her, that seems a bit rich from someone who cheered on almost every single misguided and terrible policy of the Bush administration, which has been the metastasizing cancer in the Republican body for years. However, I do not understand the idea that there has been no conservative critique of her record. I have said on more than one occasion that I assumed conservatives did not approve of windfall profits taxes, net increases in spending or leaving behind enormous amounts of debt. If that has changed for the sake of this one campaign and candidate, I did not get the memo from the Central Committee that so many others seem to have received.
Palin supported tax increases on oil companies, which ultimately impose costs on consumers, so that she can give away more money in Alaska and buy her extraordinarily high levels of support. While I do not consider earmarks to be the grave evil that the McCain/Palin ticket claim them to be, Alaska under Palin remains the leading recipient of per capita federal earmark funding. She embraced the bridge boondoggle until it became politically radioactive, and now she pretends that she was its mortal foe. She left Wasilla under a mountain of debt, and also bungled the management of purchasing the land where the athletic facility was to be built so badly that it has imposed additional costs on Wasilla. Spending has skyrocketed under her administration. Now for good measure she has demonstrated a woeful lack of understanding of many major national and international issues, which drives home how unprepared she is, but would anyone on the right honestly look at her record as an executive before this and say, “Yes, this is the sort of thing I want to see at the federal level”? If conservatives don’t care about this, I suppose that’s their business, but can we stop pretending that this critique is based purely on whether or not she has done well in a couple of interviews? Whether judged “superficially” or on substance, there is not much there that conservatives can find that is very encouraging.
Her critics have been studying the details of her record for over a month. Have her supporters made anything like the same kind of effort, or are they, like Obama fans, simply caught up in the enthusiasm?
Filed under: politics
The present “conservatives” are nothing of the sort. The neocon/kulturkampf alliance have wrested that name away from the original conservatives, and the OCs aren’t going to get it back. At this point, you’ve got to think of a new name for what used to be “conservative.”
I don’t accept that. One of the purposes of this magazine has been to salvage the word and what it is supposed to mean from those who have distorted and abused it. Whether or not we “get it back,” I am not inclined to let the people who have trashed it have it.
“I am not inclined to let the people who have trashed it have it.”
I understand that motivation. I think it’s a doomed project, though. It seems to me “political” words are more subject to being flipped more easily than other words: “cup” is going to retain its primary meaning as long as there is English; “gay,” “liberal,” and now “conservative” changed their meanings virtually overnight. I’m not sure you can retrieve the old meaning, but good luck - writing from the left-of-center I’m coming to feel strongly this country needs old-style “conservatives” more now than it ever has before.
They are just happy to have their own “Messiah.” That is the point. She is a full blooded social conservative. She is not a true fiscal conservative.
A fuller look at what she is would make her a Socially Conservative Democrat or a Fiscally Liberal Republican.
What’s funny about this is that Club for Growth, which waged full-scale war against Huckabee for the same kind of record, has had nothing but good things to say about her. Huckabee’s mistake seems to have been that he was in office too long and assembled too much of a record.
Or maybe it’s just sexism. The Palin pick was a complete pander to the PUMAs that had the collateral effect of appealing to the social conservatives at the same time. Huckabee wouldn’t have brought disgruntled Democrats over. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Olympia Snowe or Christine Todd Whitman wouldn’t have excited the religious right. Plus she didn’t abort Trig and walked the walk - that demands respect.
Her record, when only googled as lightly as McCain’s staff did, portrays her as some kind of reformer, which she is not. She is just a good backstabber.
So, with the thin veneer of the reformer image and strict social conservative creds, they sold the first impression and it has stuck, because the Republicans need their own rock star.
I suppose if John Dewey could wrest the word “liberal” from the right, AmConMag might be able to re-capture “conservative.” But, there are lot more folks pulling on the opposite side of the rope.
“Huckabee’s mistake seems to have been that he was in office too long and assembled too much of a record.”
I think Huck’s mistake was that he tried for the top of the ticket. Silly social conservative, Trix are for the establishment!
Palin supported tax increases on oil companies, which ultimately impose costs on consumers, so that she can give away more money in Alaska and buy her extraordinarily high levels of support.
Based on imperfect understanding, I have supposed that Mrs. Palin supported the oil-tax increase because the oil companies’ Alaska-derived windfall profits were otherwise flowing out of the state. It seemed to me that, as Alaska’s governor, Mrs. Palin was putting Alaska first.
Is my understanding incorrect? If not, then in what way has Mrs. Palin strayed in this matter from the straight and narrow path?
(For what it’s worth—and it isn’t worth much, which means that readers can safely skip this paragraph—I personally have always felt sort of ambivalently toward windfall profits taxes. Though I have admittedly never stood in a position to pay such taxes, it seems to me that such taxes would necessarily have to encourage a corporation to play funny accounting tricks to avoid the tax by spreading a windfall profit out on the books over several tax years, which could hardly be a good thing; but so long as a windfall profits tax were moderate in size I admit that I would find it hard to object to the tax in principle. The devil is in the details, which is why most such taxes probably are not a good idea on the whole. The Alaska case however seems to me to have been a special one.)
Howard
Econ 101: Tax something, you’ll get less of it. If you’re serious about increasing oil production, you should be for reducing taxes on oil companies.
I remember how back in the early 1970’s Sen. Eugene McCarthy caught hell from liberal columnist Jeff Greenfield and others for supporting the 27% oil depletion allowance, which is something like the reverse of a “windfall profits tax”. (Repealing the oil depletion allowance was a liberal panacea of the time.) McCarthy supported it because he thought it was a simple question of fairness. There isn’t much oil drilling in McCarthy’s home state of Minnesota.
How many national-level advisors did Palin have in Wasilla? Did she have an endless series of advisors on financial matters and the like? While there might be issues with her handling of matters in Wasilla, it’s not really possible to say there would be similar problems on a national level because of all the people who’d surround her giving better advice than she’s probably received in the past.
Meanwhile, the McCain/Palin bashing is going to help the Democratic Party elect someone who used to belong to a (per them) “socialist democratic” party, someone who’s shown little regard for the First Amendment, someone who would be the furthest left president in our entire history. And, those bashers are also going to give a tremendous victory to all of BHO’s supporters - including almost the entire MSM - and validate their extremely sleazy campaign to get him elected.
The choice comes down to a little damage vs. a wholesale disaster for the U.S.
Ah, I see the “stabbed in the back” narrative is beginning to be promulgated.
24 - you mean all the people that surrounded George W. Bush? That’s who we are talking about, and they are a large part of why we are where we are today. Definition of insanity, indeed!
DaveA, indya: I’ve been highly critical of Bush for over four years, including calling him a Quisling.
If BHO becomes president, you’re going to wish you had a time machine to go back to the halcyon Bush years.
If Obama becomes President, we will have a time machine. It will have taken us back to the Carter Administration. Relax. Been there, done that, and there were worse eras. Like, say, the last eight years…
Explain the disaster. I keep hearing Obama is going to be bad for the US but never how.
Why is every democratic candidate teh most leftist evah!!!!!?
Where has he shown little regard for the 1st amendment? How can you call him leftist and say he’ll restrict freedoms?
Don’t say he’s a socialist tell me why he’s a socialist. Convince me.
I just checked your website where you state fences make good neighbors. Nice one. I bet you read Liberal Fascism.
24AheadDotCom,
Sigh, how did you find this site? What did we do to deserve you?
Despite the fact that this is a conservative site, you won’t find it any more congenial to your particular brand of “conservatism” than the liberal sites that you haunt. You will find that, with regard to foreign policy, in contrast to the typical liberal site, where the only real difference between the typical “progressive” and yourself is that you are a little more blood thirsty in pursuit of (essentially) the same foriegn policy goals, Mr. Larison and most of his readers have a meaningfully different foreign policy viewpoint. We’re non-interventionists. You will find that one of the major reasons that Mr. Larison is not a big fan of Obama is that he thinks that Obama is far, far too much of an interventionist, and isn’t much better than McCain in those terms. To use language that you might understand better, Obama is far too hawkish for Mr. Larison’s taste.
Nor does Mr. Larison, whose conservative bona fides are better than yours will ever be, agree with the silly Obama as radical smear. Quite the opposite. Of course, Obama is too liberal for Mr. Larison on domestic issues (though that means something different for him than is does for you - by the perverted standards of intellectually bankrupt movement conservatism, Mr. Larison is a “liberal” on most civil liberties issues); then again, so is McCain, and he doesn’t expect Obama to be THAT different on that front either.
Which is to say that, while Mr. Larison isn’t voting for Obama, he CERTAINLY isn’t voting for McCain. Nor are most of his readers, and the kind of arguments that you are making are not well calculated to change the minds of even Mr. Larison’s conservative readers.
Greetings… I’m not sure you’ll wonder how I also found this site (see reply to “24AheadDotCom”). But I want you to know up front, I’m glad I found it.
I am a flat-out, unapologetic, and devoted Obama supporter. Regardless of who he’s running against, I personally believe he’s an exceptional candidate, a dedicated public servant, and the best possible man for this job… which, naturally, I believe George Bush has botched miserably for all of his eight years of trying.
If you’re still reading, though, I’d like to say this: thank you. Thank you for being the kinds of conservatives who have views, speak intelligently and in what seems like a normal tone (in writing), and actual seem to have taken the time to cook the rationale behind their positions.
McCain and Palin? Disasters for America — a point on which I think some or even many of you might also agree. Just as you might say the same for Obama-Biden.
But at least you’ve said so with civility and reason.
It was a tragedy for America when we started celebrating mediocrity and “averageness” in our leaders. Likewise, it was a tragedy when somehow it became unhip for the public to take pride in being thin in their knowledge of the politics that so directly impact our lives.
I praise you for bringing common sense back to the table.
JF
P.S. May the best man win… and God willing, in the next election at least, my we see “best men” (or women) running on both tickets.
jackster12: “Thank you for being the kinds of conservatives who have views, speak intelligently and in what seems like a normal tone (in writing), and actual seem to have taken the time to cook the rationale behind their positions.”
I’d like to second that sentiment, and it’s why I enjoy reading and engaging with the likes of Larison, Sullivan and the Culture11 gang, even though I’m neither a paleocon nor a Burkean conservative.