MELANIE PHILLIPS ON PALIN
American tea-party dishes hopey-changey thing
Monday, 8th February 2010
As all sentient people on the planet are now aware, Sarah Palin is a figure of extreme derision. She has been mocked for her ignorance of the world beyond Wasilla, Alaska, her total absence of education let alone sophistication, her wince-worthy wordplay, her homespun hicksville homiletics, her God-bothering gabbiness, her chavvy dysfunctional family (is she the grandmother of her son?? is she the mother of her grandson???), her hair, her glasses, her hockeyness, her beyond caricaturableness…has there ever been such a total idiot and embarrassment in political life?
How is it then that such an all-time airhead who, we were reliably informed, was ‘toast’ when she bowed out of Alaskan politics, has now put herself at the head of the most significant grassroots movement in America, the ‘Tea-Party’ populist revolt? The ‘Tea-Party’ movement started as a set of word-of mouth spontaneous protests against big government in general and Obama’s policies in particular; it caught fire and has now grown into a force big enough seriously to discomfit the Obamatons (and also the Republicans). As with all movements which reflect the passionately held views of ordinary people that they are not being listened to, the ‘Tea-Party’ movement was ignored and scorned in equal measure by the American pundocracy and dismissed by mainstream politicians.
It was therefore a movement tailor-made for Sarah Palin, who was duly received ecstatically when she addressed it last weekend. You can see why they love her: it’s called cutting to the chase, aka going for the jugular:
‘How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out for you?’ she asked at one point. She blasted [Obama] for rising deficits, ‘apologizing for America’ in speeches in other countries, and for allowing the so-called Christmas bomber to board a plane headed for the United States, saying he was weak on the war on terrorism. ‘To win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law,’ she declared.
As Mark Leibovich wrote in the New York Times:
Ms. Palin represents a new breed of unelected public figures operating in an environment in which politics, news media and celebrity are fused as never before. Whether she ever runs for anything else, Ms. Palin has already achieved a status that has become an end in itself: access to an electronic bully pulpit, a staff to guide her, an enormous income and none of the bother or accountability of having to govern or campaign for office.
‘Few public figures not in office have leveraged the nexus between media and political positioning as Sarah Palin has,’ said the Washington lawyer Robert Barnett (who negotiated, among other things, Ms. Palin’s lucrative deal with Fox News, an arrangement with the Washington Speaker’s Bureau that pays her a reported $100,000 a pop, and a deal with Harper Collins to write her memoir, ‘Going Rogue,’ which has already earned her upward of eight figures). Beyond what her Fox-watchers and Facebookers can see, Ms. Palin is quietly assembling the infrastructure of an expanding political operation.
That’s some stupid woman.
What obsesses people is whether Palin will run for President against Obama. But her significance goes beyond the question of whether she personally can or should do so. As Jennifer Rubin noted on the Commentary blog:
She is making the case that there is a powerful political movement, test run in Massachusetts, for independent-minded populists and conservatives.
The key point about Palin and the ‘Tea-Party’ movement is the challenge these are flinging down represent to the political establishment, Republican as well as Democrat, conservative as well as liberal. What Palin articulates — the reason for her appeal and for the strength of the ‘Tea-Party movement’ — is the ‘core’ conservative agenda that not just Democrats but also Republicans to at least some extent appear to have lost sight of.
In Britain, that core conservative agenda of defending life, liberty and social order (which in turn offers the best chance of success in the pursuit of happiness) is scorned not just by Labour but by the ‘Red Tory’/’Blue Labour ‘hopey-changey ‘Cameroons. ‘Core conservative’ voters, currently scorned and abandoned by the Conservative party, are in despair over the non-choice on offer to them at the forthcoming election.
Britain needs its own ‘Tea-Party’ movement to challenge the whole dopey-changey thing here, too.
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