The Queen of the North Abdicates

This started out as a piece to refute a DailyKos blogger who wrote a sensible piece on why Mitt Romney would be the Republican nominee for President in 2012. My argument was that Sarah Palin is the most popular Republican and is the living incarnation of the much diminished Republican base and would have advantages throughout the primary season until about March.

With the events of the last few days, one is compelled to comment on Mother Bear (as she refers to herself) deserting her Alaskan cubs. Over July 4th, we were treated to even more bizarreness. Palin's lawyer rifled off a long letter threatening to sue Shannyn Moore of www.themudflats.net , a blogger on all things Alaskan, for suggesting there was an 'iceberg coming to sink the S.S. Palin". The Alaskan bureau of the FBI made a public comment they were not investigating Sarah Palin and said "there are no wiggle words in that comment." After her relatively incoherent resignation statement, Palin issued a Fourth of July greeting on her Facebook, which suggested a set of issues she would pursue in the future and that she chastised the press for not understanding her decision was about "the country". Who knew? Her resignation speech was almost all Alaska oriented suggesting that she could advocate for Alaska better out of office then within.

Ed Rollins, who is an old master of Republican politics and favorable to Palin, thought the whole staging of the resignation speech inept and the timing highly suspicious because you hastily call a Friday before a holiday press conference to hide bad news and not announce anything positive. Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe fame , who also resigned from Congress,claimed you needed a clear reason for resigning from public office and she didn't give it. He pointed to his own reason because his 14-year old son was in trouble and the counsellors said he couldn't spend 220 nights a year away from him. Bill Kristol, who has the practical political sense of a gnat, said "It could be a crazy move like a fox." And Karl Rove pontificated this morning the Palin move was "risky".

When she announced, the conservative bloggers made statements like "She has been Called"," She has crossed the Rubican", "She is playing chess while others are playing checkers","She will be Obama's worst nightmare." They also thought the speech was good and an example she can speak without a teleprompter--there was actually one there.

Like any political event, this is multivalent--it has several meanings, none of which are dominant to the narrative. Let's look at the resignation event. None of the Alaskan Republicans had been informed. The Republican Governors Association had talked to her that day and knew she was not running for re-election--which makes sense if you running for President--but not that she was resigning. The Lt. Governor only knew Wednesday night during a visit to her office. The careful thought process she mentioned didn't seem to be true. Her husband had to fly in from an offshore fishing job, her brother didn't know, her spokeswomen was on vacation, Bristol wasn't present and it was clear her family didn't have clue. The press had two hours advanced notice--so as to drive 45 minutes to Wasilla--the venue was not in any government building. The whole thing reeked of an adhoc moment arranged on a whim. If Greta von Sustern, who's married to her national political adviser, was surprised and shocked, you know it was whimsy. If Fox News didn't make it there and Rupert Murdoch is her benefactor with the book contracts, something was really off.

The Alaskan audience thought her delivery was more rambling than usual and she appeared nervous and anxious as if she wanted to get out of Dodge in a hurry. Respected author Joe McGinnis, who has written a book on Alaska and is said to be working on one about Sarah Palin, told a radio audience that a leading Alaskan Republican told him "she's psycho." Paul Begala reminded us of Hunter Thompson's old adage,"When things get weird, the weird goes pro." Washington writers believe that her resignation showed a lack of understanding about governance,especially her reference to not needing the title. I was reminded of Carl Hiassen's mysterious Florida governor, who resigned and disappeared and showed up in his novels working to preserve the Everglades. Maybe she would disappear and end up saving the Polar Bears but that's not what this is about.

If you want the polar opposite of No Drama Obama, it's Sarah Palin in her Diva mode. She made it clear to the McCain campaign that she has a firm grasp of who she is and what she's about. And she makes the average politician blush with her raw ambition. Unlike Joe the Plumber who learned from God he shouldn't run for office, Sarah Palin in her facebook entry claimed to be going to a higher calling. Her own biography shows an ever-evolving personality, jumping from ambition to ambition, position to position. This is the second time she has resigned a state-wide position. Her days as Alaskan Governor were numbered--the legislature and she were at logger heads, the native American groups were in total mutiny, now fishing openly and illegally because of the starvation during the last few months, and her own cabinet was resigning everyday. Her once high popularity was plummeting but still above 50%--but this was before the roof caves in on Alaska's economy.

There are reasons to believe more scandals might emerge from Todd Palin's business dealings but I doubt this was the cause of the move. One Alaskan journalist said that Sarah Palin showed an inordinate sensitivity to blog posts and rumors surrounding her. She was apparently very thin-skinned, not the best situation for the blood sport of politics. She complains about the major media "attacks" on her but she never mentions that the primary sources for these attacks are Republicans themselves and not the Left. I found the whole Obama campaign extremely reserved about using any of the materials about her during their campaign. While she exhalted in whipping up anti-Obama sentiment by saying he "palled around with terrorists", referring to Bill Ayres, and by raising the issue of Jeremiah Wright. The Secret Service reported that death threats against Obama spiked during this period and remain higher than against any President in living memory. But she can't take the heat when it's brought against her.

It's true she was not introduced on the national stage with adequate preparation from the McCain camp and let's face it she was never vetted. It's reasonable that she would want to control the narrative when she re-introduces herself for 2012. The fact of the matter is that she tired of governing Alaska. The state had not allowed her to commute from Wasilla, instead of living at the Governor's Mansion. She was under the gun through many ethics complaints as caused by her own ethics law. And she saw the possibilities for her to fill the gapping vaccum in the leadership of the National Republican Party.

With lawyer bills nearing 2/3rd of a million dollars, she probably took out the calculator and totalled her advance for her memoirs,the fees for a couple of speeches and the deal she has been taking about with NBC, and the numbers told her to take a hike. Her PAC money could not be used to pay down the legal fees until she left office and under disclosure laws in Alaska she would have to reveal the amount of her book contracts rumored to range from $2 million to $11 million. In her mid-40s, she could earn enough in a very short time to take care of her family and have a nice nest egg for a run in 2012.

All of this would be risky from a conventional political point of view but her base support fundamentally believes all politicians are compromised and corrupt and she is a fresh, authentic and honest voice in a pretty putrid business. All the advice that she needs to brush up on policy issues--while making sense--has no relationship to those who support her. "We don't want that stinkin' policy business." If anyone has taken an honest look at the Republican base recently, one notices that there is no interest in governance or in government in general. Sarah Palin is culture warrior par excellence.

As I've said countless times, she pushes all the buttons of the diminished Republican base and she represents the Republican demographic perfectly--white, evangelical,rural. She is an end-timer like George W.Bush and Ronald Reagan, a creationist, a global warming denier,an absolutist on abortion issues and gun rights, and anti-gay. She holds the belief you drill your way to energy independence,give a blank check on defense expenditures and cut all taxes and she and her husband are sympathetic to secessionist views, now manifested in the 10th amendment movement. Her views on hunting make Wayne La Pierre look like a pacifist. She is the total anti-Obama and that's why the Republican base loves her.

How narrow has that base become? Senator De Mint of South Carolina wrote recently that conservative icon Ronald Reagan compromised his beliefs too much as President. George W. Bush, who ran the most ideologically conservative administration in my lifetime, is now linked to Obama as a heretic who vastly expanded government programs. We're getting down to Goldwater territory here,except Barry had a very strong libertarian streak which would not have tolerated the militancy of social conservatives. Sarah Palin's politics are essentially theological on the far-right end of the evangelical spectrum. There is a type of nativism there about preserving the "real America" and reviving "the country" that has a frightening tinge to it.

She is right in line with those of the base that believe the party should purge itself of RINOs--the definition of which grows all the time--and that a pure religious and economic conservative message will bring them to victory. The problem is that good conservative ideas have become diluted by politicians who don't walk the walk. The creator of the Free Republic, Jim Robinson, in his invitation to a Freeper Convention in Washington, summed up the sentiment with --a paraphrase--"Down with Socialism, Down with Obama, and Down with Romney."

A recent Republican survey showed that Republicans overwhelmingly believed that the best political ideas right now are coming from the grassroots and not from conservative think tanks or the politicians themselves. In her resignation speech, she talked about change from the bottom-up--an Obama phrase-- but with,I believe, a difference. I think you will see her speaking before groups of cultural conservatives over the next few years and not to the Republican Party per se. I'm also dubious about her stated commitments to raise funds for the party but rather see her inject herself in primary contests against moderates such as the Senate race in Florida. Michael Steele claims he wants to use her in the New Jersey and Virginia Governor races. the latter I can see because the Republican candidate was a protege of Pat Robertson and she made her mark campaigning for the "real Virginia" during the 2008 election.

Sarah Palin is the logical extension of the George W. Bush conundrum--ideology over competence. Instead of re-gaining competence, the Republican base wants to push ideology to its extreme. In times of economic depression and global problems, the simplest formulas might prove to be the most emotionally powerful. Palin working the lower 48 over the next few years is potentially social dynamite. She has charisma in her own funky way and will make potential candidates like Romney and Huckabee look like also-rans. Why would you support a preacher when you can support a believer? Or why would you support someone who has been successful in the private sector when that sector so badly failed America? And with the broad base of evangelicals, how can you support a Morman--someone you think of as a cult member? What would be perceived in conventional political terms as strengths for Romney would be seen as the same old weaknesses of a Rino too attached to our political structures.

If Barack Obama is the radical moderate as I've argued, Sarah Palin is the radical--period.

The one impression I got from the whole resignation flap is that I'm not convinced Sarah Palin has the endurance to last the whole route to the Presidential nomination. I think her ambition has outstripped her physical and psychic strength to go through the mundane process of developing a campaign staff, developing a communications strategy and filing all the proper papers for the primaries. And while she is trying to play a legal hardball with the media now, she will not be able to continue this for a period of time, if she is to be viable as national candidate. All candidates want to develop an unfiltered way to get out their message and she will be able to through her television show and memoirs but in the nitty gritty of campaigning it is inevitable that you have to submit to questioning, even about your family.

I think Republicans will have too much to handle when she migrates to the lower 48. She won't be Obama's worst nightmare, she could well become the GOP's.