Palin owes her power to identity politics, pitched with moralistic topspin. She exploits the same populist impulse that fueled the career of William Jennings Bryan—an impulse described by one Bryan biographer as “the yearning for a society run by and for ordinary people who lead virtuous lives.” From Vanity Fair, September 2010
Is it even remotely possible that this dangerous lunatic could end up as President of the United States? The story is that she is preparing a run, setting up fundraising bodies, collecting direct-mail lists, distributing IOU’s to any number of Republican House and Senate candidates. That looks like groundwork. This looks like someone who believes her own (selected) press. I am so smart that even I don’t know how smart I am. Everybody who matters knows how smart I am.
There is something seriously demented about American politics. Americans hate their government. They believe that Washington is full of idiots and liars. These are the people they elected. Okay– so we were a tricked. These people were good when I voted for them, and then they got corrupted by Washington.
So a new guy comes along and says I won’t get corrupted. I’m going to clean out Washington. So they elect him. Two years later they hate him too. They hate him so much that when he spends $30 million smothering the state with ads declaring that his opponent is a child-molester and a heretic, they vote for him again. That’s all it takes, apparently, to fool the American voter. $30 million, supplied by the lobbyists representing the companies that persuaded their representative to do their bidding instead of the voters’.
So ask these voters, what’s ruining this country? Those damn unpatriotic foreigners! Feminists! People who don’t wear American flags in their lapels. Moslems! Mexicans! Homosexuals!
My friends, there isn’t a single Mexican in the country who can pay your Congressman enough money to do his will– but that’s who you’re upset about? You complain about the government wasting money on roads and schools, while they build billions of dollars of weapons for imaginary enemies? You have been driven into massive debts and bankruptcy and you’ve lost your job and your house because of the actions of greedy, dishonest American investment bankers, and you don’t like Obama because he’s smart and thinks he’s better than you?
The Vanity Fair piece on Palin is fascinating if only for a glimpse on that perennial American political paradox: how millionaire white American capitalists inevitably campaign for political office as “just folks” and try — and often succeed in painting their Democrat opponents as “elitists”.
Sarah Palin is America’s Evita in that regard– the poor little aw shucks hockey mom with down home values and divinely inspired common sense. How far that can take you in federal politics if you don’t even know who Margaret Thatcher is (presumably, she does now) is the question to be answered in 2012.
A friend of mine has mused that the Democrats should have lost the last election on purpose– the country was going to hell as a result of George Bush’s incompetence and there would be hell to pay and most people are too stupid to connect policies and consequences and delayed consequences, so whoever was in charge at the moment would get the blame.
My theory is that the Democrats did try to lose the election. They almost nominated a woman, realized she might win, thought better of it, and nominated a black man instead. Ridiculously, he won anyway.
There really, somewhere, should be a picture of John McCain sitting in an easy chair smiling. Smiling away…. Well, he should be smiling– instead, he seems bitter. Does he seriously believe that he could have come up with a plan that would have balanced the budget and reduced unemployment to 7% by now? Sure– by cutting taxes for the richest 1% of the population.