A Sure Path To Self-Destruction
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Still, who could help McCain beat back a populist conservative challenger? Sarah Palin. I predict that Palin will come to Arizona next summer to campaign for McCain, will make an impassioned case for him, and will help him win. She will thereby repay McCain for his confidence in picking her last year, help keep McCain as a crucial voice in the Senate for a strong foreign policy, and get credit for being a different kind of populist conservative—a Reaganite, not a Buchananite, populist—than the immigration-obsessed, voter-alienating (he was ousted in 2006 in a Republican district) Hayworth. ~Bill Kristol
One of the amusing things about Palin supporters is that very few of them are prepared to accept that Palin and McCain represent the same part of the Republican Party. For the most part, the people who love Palin loathe McCain as all the things they oppose in the GOP. It as if they think her appearance on the national stage would have happened apart from him. It is as if they black out all of the occasions when she endorsed positions McCain held (as she had to do as his running mate) that they otherwise find unacceptable. If she is supposed to represent some great right-populist hope, he is the deal-brokering, bipartisan “moderate” Beltway denizen who assiduously cultivates the media, but the reality is that he chose her partly because she reminded him of his own combative, arrogant, egocentric style and his habit of breaking party ranks to aggrandize himself.
Were she to side openly with McCain in a primary against Hayworth, whose views match up a lot more closely with her supporters’ views, she would be seen as imitating McCain’s worst habits. She would be considered a worse sell-out than McCain. She would be doing exactly the opposite of what she did in NY-23. Her intervention may have failed to elect Hoffman, but rank-and-file conservatives generally loved her for it anyway. She would fritter all that away if she backed McCain. In exchange for the contempt and disaffection of the people who currently adore her, she would win the enduring affection of editors at The Weekly Standard. McCain seems to be satisfied with this, but I doubt it would be enough for Palin.
Perhaps Palin could come up with some tortured rationale that siding with the establishment-friendly incumbent would be the crazy “maverick” thing to do, much as she claimed that staying in office would be the easy way out and quitting would be the courageous, bold move, but she would destroy the foundation of rank-and-file conservatives’ love for her. Palin generated such excitement because she was perceived by conservatives to be very different from McCain. This was wrong in many ways, but this was the source of all those enthusiastic calls for Palin to head the ticket and it is the reason why most conservatives instinctively sided with her during the campaign and all the internal squabbles with McCain’s staff. If she intervenes on McCain’s behalf, especially if it seems likely that Hayworth would otherwise win the nomination, she will destroy the political persona she has been crafting for the last year and cut herself off from the base she has thus far managed to captivate.
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11 Responses to “A Sure Path To Self-Destruction”
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I think you’ve hit upon the limits of the “maverick” label in contemporary American politics. There is a circumscribed area for debate within the two parties, so being a maverick usually ends up being an exercise in marketing a false image or compromising those purported principles of non-conformity. The real mavericks, your Ron Pauls or Paul Wellstones, end up on the outside looking in. All the more reason to decry our two party system. Sure, it makes things tidy and easy to describe, but it shuts out legitimate critiques and perspectives. In this over-simplified world, whenever the two parties actually come to a consensus, it often turns out to be a ghastly mistake.
one would think that ‘kristol ball’ had read palin’s book by now. makes a second honeymoon sound remote. palin seems to be doing a decent job of alienating her own supporters–she ducked out early from a book signing in indiana, much to the great chagrin of many palinites.
I think you might be giving the activist base too much intellectual credit here. Certainly an endorsement of John McCain would not positively benefit her reputation, but I don’t think it would hurt her much either, as her popularity does not seem to come from any real principle at all. Indeed, some issues seem to become GOP orthodoxy just by virtue of being endorsed by Palin. Drilling in Alaska, for instance, became a party obsession right after it was discovered that this issue was the only one the former Governor could discuss with anything resembling fluency. Her redistribution of oil profits, to give another example, has been interpreted not as a small and forgivable deviancy but an actual application of conservative principle.
The legacies of George W Bush and Ronald Reagan are instructive. Some Republicans can adopt moderate positions without suffering much of a fallout, provided they perform the right culture poses and infuriate the right segments. At this point, an affection for Sarah Palin has become nothing more than a surrogate means of expressing contempt for the liberal intelligentsia.
Im not saying she can ostentatiously defend all establishment candidates from grassroots challengers, but just as only Nixon could go to china, only Palin has the capital to advocate moderation in this environment. Once the GOP base decides they like someone – i mean really like them – they will perform any acrobatics, however convoluted, to prolong their worship.
I am still trying to figure out what “positions” we are talking about.
Palin generates excitement not for her views- but for herself, representing identity politics at its worst. The excitement is over who she is- folksy hunter, mom, plain talkin’ critic of the pointey headed intellectuals;
Her talking points are exactly the same as McCains/ Pawlnety’s, Gingrich’s, Romney’s, etc.
Cut Taxes, More Military.
And there doesn’t seem to be anything behind the talking points.
Worse, she is surrounded by and supported by exactly the same coterie of GWB advisors and neocons.
So in the end, what she represents is a third term for the GWB crowd.
She has not framed any vision for what America should be, no sense of what government should be in relation to the people. In the absense of any overarching vision or idea, there is only identity- and it is the identity of people who are seething with rage and fear and resentment. They are angry at immigrants, at some vaguely defined amorphous “elite”- not an economic Wall Street elite, but the elite of media, of Hollywood, the people who are irreligious, the college professors who smirk at the honest small town heartland Americans.
It really is a culture war, masked behind an economic facade; AIG fleecing the taxpayers generates only token hostillity on right wing Palin-supporting blogs, but ACORN filing false voter registration forms provokes near-apoplexy.
@nrmurra, my recollection differs in that I remember drilling in ANWR being a favorite topic of at least two dittoheads I have the misfortune to know (in-laws) well before Palin came into public prominence, and I’m reasonably sure that they were reflecting the Limbaughian party line of the time in doing so (recall that oil prices peaked in . I don’t really think it would have been _that_ much lower in emphasis had McCain picked somebody else.
Yeah, it doesn’t seem like doing anything to help McCain will in fact do anything to help Palin herself, and by definition what is good for SP is good for (the real) America. I don’t see the Weekly Standard crowd having enough leverage in the establishment to deliver what it would take to buy Palin’s support against Hayworth.
OTOH, it seems to me that you give the Palinites too much credit, and in an odd sort of way you give her too little with “Perhaps Palin could come up with some tortured rationale …” The emotional frenzy of her base is self-sustaining at this point (not clear how long that will last), and should she make some mavericky public Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the more establishment GOP, then the accolytes would swing right in line. (is there some CW singer or group particularly associated with Palin? I need to get an analogy with “Songs for John Doe”).
Reason60
You nailed it.
Thanks bayesian. On reflection I think you may be right about the Anwar thing. My general point was that some candidates are so powerfully glorified that, even if they betray orthodox principles, the base will still go to absurd lengths to defend them. Although the grassroots have recently developed a fetish for throwing out moderates, one should not rely on them to do this very consistently, so I suspect Palin would have do much more than endorse McCain to lose favor.
“The legacies of George W Bush and Ronald Reagan are instructive. Some Republicans can adopt moderate positions without suffering much of a fallout, provided they perform the right culture poses and infuriate the right segments.”
I don’t think you can put Reagan in that class. When he did something moderate, like raise taxes, it wasn’t accepted because of any other posturing on Reagan’s part. It was accepted because the GOP and conservatism was still dominated by relatively reasonable people.
Mike
I live in Phoenix, and the reason Hayworth lost his seat was due to nothing other than redistricting. It had been a seat that he narrowly won in each term, and when the district was redrawn, they took away some of the conservative areas and put them in John Shadegg’s, and they replaced them with more liberal regions like Tempe.
Hayworth is a solid debater and no neocon. He supported Duncan Hunter in 2008, liked Huckabee and I never heard him bash Ron Paul or make fun of him the way many other radio hosts did. The media here loathes Hayworth, and he would have a tough time winning the Senate seat IF he runs and beats McCain…but who cares. McCain is “moderate” on all the wrong issues, and is enthusiastic about all the worst aspects of Bush’s policies.
As for Palin, if she came here to campaign I don’t think it would make much difference. Palin seems to have a net negative effect these days. More and more people are realizing she’s an unreflective intellectual lightweight without capacitance.
Larison really killed this one. He has been on a roll lately.
nmurra: “…, but just as only Nixon could go to china, only Palin has the capital to advocate moderation in this environment. Once the GOP base decides they like someone – i mean really like them – they will perform any acrobatics, however convoluted, to prolong their worship.”
As said above, that doesn’t necessarily follow. And betting on Nixon going to China is like betting on Stalin being nice – I’m sure that it happens, but only rarely (remember that Nixon got his start as a red-baiter).