About where I’ve ended up:
[N]ow I have more . . . experience with Governor Palin. And pretty much everything she has said or done since her appearance on the national stage – beginning with her acceptance speech – has soured me on her. It’s decreasingly plausible to me that she’s who I thought she was when she was nominated. Based on her performance on the campaign trail so far, she’s a shallow and demagogic politician. And if, on the off chance, that’s not who she is, then it’s instructive that the McCain campaign seems to be eager to have her play this particular character.
She’s still not a terribly crucial factor in my decisionmaking about this election. But she’s a negative factor for McCain in my mind. This is not a new conclusion for me; I started trending in this direction, as I say, within a few days of the announcement of her nomination. I probably would have trended faster were it not for, well, the sort of coverage Alex Massie describes here. But, you know, my opinion of the coverage shouldn’t determine my opinion of the candidate. And, in the end, it doesn’t.
In my own case it was Palin’s sheer geographical and cultural distance from the Washington rot that initially gave me the hope that maybe – just maybe – she’d be able to help to effect a genuine break from it: perhaps not right away, as second-in-command to John McCain, but hopefully later on, with some credibility of her own that would enable her fabled independent streak to take over. It’s become clear, though, that such hopes were illusory, and not only because her libertarian credentials were pretty minimal, her executive record a disaster, and most of the more exciting rumors about her political leanings quickly shot down – in addition to all of this, it has become pretty evident that Sarah Palin is just another politician, and not an especially talented one at that: she does tolerably (but only just tolerably) well when she’s in her comfort zone, but when it comes time to parrot the party line she both (1) has no problem with doing just that and (2) does a remarkably crappy job of it to boot. If I wanted talking points on why we need to “support” Israel, pick a fight with the Russians, and bomb Teheran at the drop of a hat, I’d turn on Fox News Sunday; there’s no need for Sarah Palin’s Amateur Hour when I can go right to the horses’ mouths to get the straight dope (ha!).
Too soon, in other words, and not only because Palin obviously had a lot of studying to do and would have done well to expand her executive repertoire, but also because the national GOP she’s committed herself to propping up is presently rotten on matters foreign and either bereft of ideas or similarly rotten when it comes to the domestic. (That’s not to say that the other party is offering anything much better on either count; they’re not.) In another environment, could Sarah Palin have become the sort of freedom-favoring champion of military restraint that American conservatism so dreadfully needs? Perhaps, though I’ll admit that I’ve been sufficiently underwhelmed by her performance so far that I presently lack confidence in even this rather vacuous counterfactual, and that to my eyes Palin has come across much more as a substanceless hack than a principled and independent-minded politician with a non-trivial willingness to break from the orthodoxy. But even if she could be more than that, that’s obviously not what she is right now: it’s pretty clearly a deadly combination of blind party loyalty and sheer personal ambition that’s driving this train, and where the rails are leading I can hardly bear to guess. She is, in other words, about what you should expect from someone willing to abandon her home state to take lessons from Joe Lieberman and serve as the understudy to the likes of John McCain.
P.S. The importance of the point that Noah makes at the end of his post, which is pretty much the corollary to one that Dan Koffler articulated a while back, can’t be overstated: any Obama supporters who think that their shrill and inanity-focused attacks on Governor Palin have helped their candidate’s cause more than they have hindered it have got to find a new way of gauging public opinion, and fast.
Filed under: foreign affairs, politics
I am with Yglesias on this one: criticizing your opponent makes her less popular.
Which is not to say all criticism is ethical merely because its effective. In Palin’s case, the media’s criticism on Palin was reprehensible.
In re: to your electoral comment, for the sake of argument let’s concede that liberals unfairly criticized Palin. Furthermore, let’s concede that this mendacious criticism caused a blow back and re-energized the conservative base. Lastly, let’s assume these kinds of marginal issues significantly affect who will be the next president of the United States.
Assuming all that, consider this: liberals have had to deal with George W. Bush for eight years. Whatever Palin did to energize the conservative base is a candle to what Bush has done for liberals.
But I don’t think many of those assumptions hold much water. At the end of the day, I don’t think these kinds of issues matter much one way or the other.
Obama will probably win because the economy sucks. The reason Obama will win is not because he has expertise on the economy (from his recent hackish comments on it, I wonder), but because people associate economic well being with Democrats and national security with Republicans.
Palin is someone’s Vice-President pick – she chose to play second fiddle and thus play along to someone else’s script, ie McCain’s campaign handlers. As for the “real” Sarah Palin, we’ll never know her in this election cycle.
She’s certainly an underwhelming VP pick. A generous opinion would hold that she’s been plucked too early for national exposure. Others may say she’s too marginal, shallow and bereft of book-smarts to ever amount to much.
Thing is, politics is about crooked lines that make no sense to mere mortals who believe in personal merit, character and intelligence. I understand those elite conservatives who disparage of the populist conservatives and their preference for uncouth Jacksonians raisin’ hell. But again this makes politics out to be an intellectual exercise. Politics is the preserve of Fortuna. Or better yet, Forrest Gump’s Box of Chocolates “You never know what you’re gonna get next.” All of this means that in virtue of the circumstances which have thrown Palin to the limelight and to the fore of the campaign – forces beyond her control, really – by virtue of all these I say she has earned her way to place where she now stands. And she’s likely to play it to the max for the next several years to come (Fortuna has told me the GOP will lose this time around, btw).
“Sarah Palin is just another politician, and not an especially talented one at that”
Not that being a good politician is very often something good, but why do you say this? She has won a lot, and she has an incredibly high approval rating. (Historically high.) And I can’t think of any way in which she has sold herself (in some notable way) out to get that rating.
Well that only shows that she’s an effective Alaskan politician, and not that she has the skills to succeed at the national level. (It’s also notable that small states tend to have highly popular governors, that she’s only a couple of years in, etc.) But my bigger point is not just that she’s done a bad job of handling questions when she’s been out of her depth, but that a smart politician aiming for national office would have been doing a hell of a lot more preparation in the years beforehand, and would have had the good sense to say “No” if he or she wasn’t sufficiently prepared. Palin obviously has too high a sense of her own abilities; she thought she could wing it but obviously she can’t. And by my lights, that’s not political talent.
I would never claim that Palin hasn’t “earned” her present position – but obviously she did have control of it: she could just have said “No”. And perhaps this whole affair will play out in Palin’s favor even if she and John McCain do crash and burn – it seems to me, though, that she’s going to be forever identified with the bad old GOP and won’t have a chance to be a credible leader in the attempt to rebuild from the ashes. She’s simply shown herself to be far too hackish over the past few weeks.
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1.) Palin’s unorthodox biography and reformist tendencies raised unreasonable expectations within certain circles.
2.) She then proceeded to do what VP picks are supposed to do – parrot the top of the ticket’s talking points and attack her opponent.
3.) Now we’re all really disappointed. What, exactly, were we expecting when she was picked? Was she supposed to go off the reservation and undermine McCain’s message? I find it difficult to imagine a career politician doing anything differently.
4.) If you want Palin to embody the reformist wing of the GOP, you have to take that sort of thing on faith during an election season. She’s constrained by too many factors (the press, the opposition, the need to stay ‘on-message’) to give a full and honest accounting of her core personal beliefs.
I’m not willing to take Palin’s candidacy on faith, but given the circumstances, I think you condemn her performance a little too harshly.
Well, she could at least have done a good job of parroting McCain’s message …
[...] than cop to the fact that the Maverick blew it. (The subsidiary issue is, as John Schwenkler has been doing his thankless best to point out, Andrew Sullivan is mucking up the real and abundant devastating arguments against the [...]
I’m having a tough time getting a grasp of Palin’s political identity, ie as to whether she points to the past or to the future. I use the conditional tense when discussing her.
I’m not from the West, I know few Goldwater types and I’ve discovered that I don’t understand Alaskans. Be that as it may, there are some characteristics of hers which may portend for the GOP’s future & add to its overrall identity. I want to draw a parallel with a certain phenomenon – whose name escapes me – but has to do with very old cultural traits and customs being preserved in the outer peripheries far away from the home country which first produced them. Like English in Newfoundland with their (supposedly) Elizabethan English diction.
Getting back to Palin & Alaskan political traits – imagine plucking a Leveller from 17th century England and putting him (or her) in the American frontier, or Alaska for that matter, far away from the influences of mainstream politics. I’d say the result is a Radical in politics – emphasis on radical=roots, not “radical leftism”. And this being America, unorthodox Dissenter Protestantism (ie, Evangelicals) remains in the mix,too.
The kind of conservatism this represents is more like that of a conservatism of disposition & sentiment though perhaps more egalitarian & parochial in mindset, hardly curious about world affairs let alone policy details, and conceives of government’s scope & purpose in the most narrow of terms.
For those who would like the USA to be less involved in world affairs, less “imperial”, more inward-looking and not bound by cumbersome foreign alliances, Palin fits the bill more than McCain (obviously) but also Obama and Biden.
If ever there was an argument promoting the ignorance and below-average worldiness in a leader, it’d be this one.
I like this:
I think that there is a lot here that’s right, and it’s this sort of thing that got me at least halfway excited about some of Palin’s foreign policy instincts, not to mention the fact that she seemed to lean libertarian on a bunch of domestic issues in ways that McCain simply doesn’t. But what’s got me so disappointed in her is that all of that was just so thin: if her instincts do indeed tell her to be “inward-looking and not bound by cumbersome foreign alliances” (though don’t forget that Israeli flag!), then she’s certainly been willing to sell them out pretty quickly for a chance at the Vice Presidency. That’s part of what I had in mind when I said that Palin could have turned out to be a decent politician “in another environment”: in the present one, though, she’s pretty much just a typical neocon, and a dull and unconvincing one at that.
P.S. She’s still better than Biden, though.
[...] don’t have much to say here that I haven’t said before, so I’ll just throw it to Glenn Greenwald: Sarah Palin’s performance in the tiny [...]