This morning, before class, I took a quick surf of the blogosphere and saw one post after another on Palin. Did Palin help or hurt McCain? Let’s talk about Palin making mooseburgers. Is Piper really wearing high heels? What happened with Palin at the Republican Governors convention? Will she be the sacrificial lamb of 2012? Will she make a ton with a book deal? These stories were on both sides of the blogosphere.
Why so many Palin stories?
Apt. 11d 
Why Palin? I’ve got two guesses:
1. Democrats and Independents were less likely to vote for McCain because of Palin, and find her a curse on the Republican establishment. Some Conservatives, though, truly believe she is the future of the party. Either David Brooks or the staff of National Review is very, very wrong, and its worth investigating which one it is.
2. The chance of a Palin/Romney primary (or, better, a Palin/ Romney ticket!) in 2012 — offering the chance to talk about Mitt, Tagg, Todd, and Trig in the same sentence on a daily basis is just too scrumptious to pass up. (“Tagg will be watching Trig while Mitt and Todd campaign in Akron. . .”)
After four years of the relatively mellifluous Michelle, Malia, and Sasha, America will be ready for the completely ludicrous, sharp, one-syllable names that only ludicrous, sharp, white people can give each other.
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The On Point weekly roundup today entertained the idea of Palin ’12, and Jack Beatty (The Atlantic) scoffed at the idea, saying that no unelected vice-presidential candidate had ever gone on to be President. A few minutes later they played a clip of Bush sounding an awful lot like Palin. I laughed out loud and then had to explain it to my nine year-old.
[link to radio show http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2008/11/week-in-the-news-5/%5D
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We know voters think Palin’s not qualified, even the ones that voted for her.
Huh? The very link DailyKos provides shows that while, yes, 16% of McCain voters thought Palin was unqualified to be president, 17% of Obama voters thought Biden was unqualified to be president.
I wish I actually took DailyKos seriously, as this would be a great piece of media statistical malpractice to fold into my “fun” lectures the last week of class…
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Palin is a major wedge in the GOP. She brings out the deep division that is going to wreak havoc in that party for years to come. That’s noteworthy.
And kind of delicious. Palin is one of the reasons that the GOP future is dim, dim, dim.
Speaking of dim…
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“Palin is a major wedge in the GOP.”
Doesn’t she have something like 90% favorability among Republicans right now?
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“Doesn’t she have something like 90% favorability among Republicans right now?”
Maybe, among what’s left of the Republicans. She’s probably wedged out a lot of people form under the Big Tent, and now they consider themselves independents.
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Amy P,
The longer that Palin loyalists avoid seeing the problem, the better. So please, keep telling yourself that Palin is not an issue. Please ignore the fact that all of the intellectual conservatives who found her utterly unqualified and down right scary. Please forget about all the Bush voters who couldn’t bear to vote for Mccain-Palin. And by all means, gloss over the fact that her position on abortion is out of touch with mainstream America.
Thank you.
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“Ninety-one percent (91%) of Republicans have a favorable view of Palin, including 65% who say their view is Very Favorable. Only eight percent (8%) have an unfavorable view of her, including three percent (3%) Very Unfavorable.
“When asked to choose among some of the GOP’s top names for their choice for the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, 64% say Palin. The next closest contenders are two former governors and unsuccessful challengers for the presidential nomination this year — Mike Huckabee of Arkansas with 12% support and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts with 11%.”
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_2012/69_of_gop_voters_say_palin_helped_mccain
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McCain supporter here. I like Sarah Palin. Position on abortion is not a factor for me in elections – either way. Amy P may not agree with us but she does understand us.
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“Maybe, among what’s left of the Republicans. She’s probably wedged out a lot of people form under the Big Tent, and now they consider themselves independents.”
This is true big time among non-whites. Although it usually seems largely a fantasy that Repubs will attract more black votes (they peaked at 14%) in Reagan’s landslide re-election, they’ve been doing a very good job making other non-whites, who have voted with the repubs (hispanics/asians) feel excluded. Asian support has been in a steep decline since 1992, an election the Republicans lost.
Palin (“rural”/”urban”, “real” America) definitely represents that exclusion.
And, stats on Republicans supporting Palin aren’t telling us why. Carosgram & Amy — do you think Palin is qualified to be president now? And/or you think she will be in 2012? I don’t, but of course, I don’t think GW Bush is, either, and I think he’s done a lovely job of proving that over the last years.
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PS: But, I think it’s great if the Repubs still want to support that wing of the party — I think the Dems can beat it handily, and it will give us time to strengthen the coalitions we’re building.
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Some CNN dude – 64% of Republicans want Palin to run again 2012.
Paul Begala – and 100% of Democrats.
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By 2012, the country will either have ridden out the recession or not. If the recession is over, Obama will be re-elected. If the recession is still going strong (which it may well if we start bailing out every badly run major US corporation), a Republican is going to win. There’s also the question of Iraq–if Obama pulls out from a relatively peaceful Iraq and then a bloodbath ensues, that’s going to be an issue. Of course, both of these things are avoidable. The question is, will Obama avoid them?
By 2012, Palin will have had four years more experience. She’ll have to go through the Republican primaries, which will be rough, but she will have a huge fund-raising advantage over her Republican opponents.
On a different note, I think the lesson of the past few months has been that we (Americans in general) need much more economically sophisticated politicians. I have yet to hear a plausible explanation of how the bailout is supposed to work. I am quite confident that it isn’t going to stop a severe multi-year recession (that was going to happen no matter what). As I’ve seen other people argue, there has been a huge misallocation of resources into the housing industry. Millions of former housing workers need to be absorbed back into the rest of the economy, which unfortunately doesn’t need any extra workers right now. This is going to be a very slow process. I’ve also seen the housing bubble guys argue that housing is a lagging indicator and that any recession fix that starts with the housing sector is going to be a failure. First people need jobs and security, and then they’ll feel like buying houses.
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“This is true big time among non-whites. Although it usually seems largely a fantasy that Repubs will attract more black votes (they peaked at 14%) in Reagan’s landslide re-election, they’ve been doing a very good job making other non-whites, who have voted with the repubs (hispanics/asians) feel excluded. Asian support has been in a steep decline since 1992, an election the Republicans lost.”
bj,
There was a huge push by Bush’s people for Hispanic voters, fueled by the fact that Bush has taken a fair share of Hispanic votes over the years (he didn’t win, but I think he was managing around 40%). Take, for instance, the hugely unpopular amnesty thing, as well as the “ownership society” of the early Bush administration. I don’t know if the Bush administration took any action for the “ownership society,” but the theory was that by encouraging minority home ownership, traditionally non-homeowning minorities could be magically transformed into Republicans. Comprehensive immigration reform (with amnesty) was horribly unpopular with Republicans and with the country at large, but both Bush and McCain pushed it hard anyway. Only a huge popular backlash prevented it from becoming law. It’s also arguable that No Child Left Behind primarily benefits African Americans and Hispanics, because of the way that it makes it impossible for schools to hide their low test scores behind strong white or Asian scores. This is a short list, but all of these items were very costly (if not disastrous) politically.
I agree that I haven’t seen any sort of Republican outreach specifically toward Asians (that may be due to the concentration of Asians in unwinnable areas). There definitely is a attempt to fight over Jewish voters, though (hence whatshername’s Great Shlep thing).
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I suppose it’s time to update what I used to write about Newt Gingrich: God will not be good enough to Democrats to give them Sarah Palin to run against for President in 2012.
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Amy — you’re citing “outreach” efforts as a reason why people shouldn’t feel excluded.
When 93% (93%–it’s quite unbelievable, actually, in this day, in my world) of the delegates to the Republican convention are white, non-whites look on the party as a tent that doesn’t include them. The stats the convention is 93% white, 2% black, 5% Latino, and 0% Asian — though Asian statistics are poor.
There are quite a few issues on which the Republicans can compete for the non-white vote, but the party is warring internally on many of them (including immigration reform). But, at the risk treading into pretty racially loaded ground, non-whites, these days, expect a place at the table, not just consideration of their presumed interests.
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“I suppose it’s time to update what I used to write about Newt Gingrich: God will not be good enough to Democrats to give them Sarah Palin to run against for President in 2012.”
Doug,
That’s what Rush Limbaugh thought about Obama when he launched Operation Chaos.
“When 93% (93%–it’s quite unbelievable, actually, in this day, in my world) of the delegates to the Republican convention are white, non-whites look on the party as a tent that doesn’t include them.”
bj,
Ramesh Ponnuru once said that there’s a name for the one person of color at a Republican event–keynote speaker. More seriously, African American politicians or public figures who are Republican, conservative, or conservative-leaning pay a huge personal price to do so. They get called Uncle Toms, it’s said that they aren’t really Black, they get their images painted over with blackface, etc. Most gallingly, when their political opponents do that, it’s not a career-killer for the perps, because the targets aren’t really Black, so it doesn’t count. Honestly, why would anybody sign up for that ride?
There was a very similar dynamic at play in the Palin candidacy. On the one hand, Republicans get criticized for running old white guys in suits. On the other hand, much of the violence of the negative response to Palin had a lot to do with her being a non-conventionally feminist woman and was explicitly misogynistic (take for example Sandra Bernhard’s memorable contribution to the Palin discussion). And as a Washington Post/Newsweek blogger put it, “[Palin’s] greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”
There is a similar dynamic in both cases–the Republican woman or African American is a traitor, an escapee, a turncoat, an impostor, and doesn’t deserve the common decencies.
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bj,
One more thing–note how eager Republicans are to believe in and embrace Bobby Jindal. (Curiously, I can name four different South Asian-origin conservative figures off the top of my head: Ponnuru, Dinesh D’Souza, Jindal and Reihan Salam. Salam is sort of a baby pundit, but he has co-authored a book on the future of the GOP with Ross Douthat. I can’t think of any liberal South Asian-origin figures, but probably that’s just because it’s not my milieu.)
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Fareed Zakaria.
Gayatri Spivak. Ok, not a pundit, but she was the “It” Critic when I was in grad school.
Anil Dash.
Mindy Kaling. (OK, reaching. But she rules anyway.)
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“Yet Republican denial is unabated. In an interview with Palin the weekend before the election, a conservative Wall Street Journal editorialist asked whether “the G.O.P. doesn’t in fact have a perception problem, that it is no longer viewed as a big tent.” A perception problem? Hello — how about a reality problem?”
Yeah, maybe those non-whites who, in their heart of hearts, favor the Republicans are
To quote Frank Rich’s NYtimes column today.
and,
Pawlenty:
““if you lose all of the Northeast, all of the Great Lakes states, all of the West Coast, increasing numbers of Western states, increasing numbers of mid-Atlantic states, have a big deficit with women, have a big deficit with modest income voters, have a big deficit with Hispanic voters, have a big deficit with African-Americans, and expect that’s going to be a success formula for the future.”
(but, I’ll bow out, ’cause I have no problem with the Republican party moving towards obsolescence. I’m not one of those who is worried. I think the Democrats can balance themselves).
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Sometimes I feel as though there is a much bigger dis-connect between the “Republican Elite” and the “Republicans” than there is between the comparable wings of Democrats.
I am thinking of the “will he or won’t he” and the ecstasy of “He will!” when Fred Thompson joined the race, and then proceeded to get about 14 votes total.
The high-brow debate between the Fred supporters and Mitt supporters degrading into the the horror of the “Mike Huckabee or John McCain” reality.
The fact that, from what I heard, if the Republican primaries weren’t winner-take-all, Huckabee would have actually won to primaries.
So, when I hear in National Review or Weekly Standard that Bobby Jindal or Sarah Palin or Tim Pawlenty is the future of the party, I am no more confident than before that Republicans will actually vote for these people.
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