An extended excerpt. From The Nation. This link. [italics added]November 16, 2009 --- Warming up for a [Going Rogue book] tour that will take her across Middle America in a bus, Palin tested her lines in a November 7 speech before a crowd of 5,000 anti-abortion activists in Wisconsin. She promptly cited an urban legend as a "disturbing trend," claiming the Treasury Department had moved the phrase "In God We Trust" from presidential dollar coins. (The rumor most likely originated with a 2006 story on the far-right website WorldNetDaily.)
Palin did not hesitate to take up this "controversy," however false, since it conveniently pits a tyrannical, God-destroying, secular big government against humble God-fearing folk.
Palin's influence is now unparalleled. Through her Twitter account, she was the one who pushed the rumor of "death panels" into the national healthcare debate, prompting the White House to issue a series of defensive responses. Unfazed by its absurdity, she repeated the charge in her recent speech in Wisconsin. In a special Congressional election in New York's 23rd Congressional district, Palin's endorsement of Doug Hoffman, an unknown far-right third-party candidate, helped force a popular moderate Republican politician, Dede Scozzafava, from the race. In the end, Palin's ideological purge in upstate New York led to an improbable Democratic victory, the first in that GOP-heavy district in more than 100 years.
Though the ideological purge may have backfired, Palin's participation in it magnified her influence in the party.
"She's gangbusters!" a leading conservative radio host exclaimed to me. "There is nobody in the Republican Party who can raise money like her or top her name recognition."
During the 2008 presidential race, some Republican Party elders warned of Palin's destructive influence. They insisted she was a polarizing figure whose extremism would accelerate the Party's slide toward the political and cultural margins. New York Times columnist David Brooks, a card-carrying neocon who had written glowingly of Senator McCain, claimed Palin represented "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party." Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for President Reagan and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, blasted Palin as "a dope and unqualified from the start."According to an October 19 Gallup poll, the former governor of Alaska has become one of the most polarizing and unpopular politicians in the country. Since she quit the governorship to pursue her lucrative book deal, a move that upset many in Alaska's Republican leadership and cost the state's taxpayers almost $200,000, her unfavorability rating has spiked to 50 percent while her favorability has sunk to 40 percent, again according to Gallup's figures. (The only nationally known politician who is less popular right now, according to the poll, is John Edwards, the former two-term senator who fathered a child out of wedlock and paid his mistress hush money while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination on a social justice platform.)
Queen Esther
If Palin is indeed a cancer on the GOP, why can't the Republican establishment retire her to a quiet life of moose hunting in the political wilderness? Why has her appeal only increased in the wake of her catastrophic political expeditions? Why won't she listen to, or abide by, conventional political wisdom?
The answer lies beyond the realm of polls and punditry in the political psychology of the movement that animates and, to a great degree, controls, the Republican grassroots--a uniquely evangelical subculture defined by the personal crises of its believers and their perceived persecution at the hands of cosmopolitan elites.
By emphasizing her own crises and her victimization by the "liberal media," Palin has established an invisible, indissoluble bond with adherents of that subculture--so visceral it transcends any rational political analysis. As a result, her career has become a vehicle through which the right-wing evangelical movement feels it can express its deepest identity in opposition both to secular society and to its representatives in the Obama White House. Palin is perceived by its leaders--and followers--not as another cynical politician or even as a self-promoting celebrity but as a kind of magical helper, the God-fearing glamor girl who parachuted into their backwater towns to lift them from the drudgery of everyday life, assuring them that they represented the "Real America."
If McCain had taken his preferred choice for a running mate in 2008, he would have chosen Joseph Lieberman, the turncoat Democrat and his best friend in the Senate. But with the base of the Republican Party subsumed by a Christian right that detested the senator, his advisers urged him to choose the untested, virtually unknown Alaskan governor to bring the faithful back to him. Their gamble paid off--at least in the short-term. Tom Minnery of the Christian right outfit Focus on the Family recalled, "People were on their seats applauding cheering, yelling.... that room was electrified."
Before her nomination, the provincial Palin had traveled outside the country only once and demonstrated little, if any, intellectual curiosity. During the campaign, she was flummoxed when CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric simply asked what magazines she read. Yet the fact that she had such a limited understanding of the world actually recommended her to the Republican base.
The gun-toting, snowmobile-cruising former beauty queen became an instant cultural icon. Little understood by those outside this culture was her religious worldview, cultivated during the twenty years she spent worshipping at the Wasilla Assembly of God, a right-wing Pentecostal church in her hometown north of Anchorage. When I visited the church in October 2008, a pastor from Kenya, Bishop Thomas Muthee, was at the podium comparing Palin to Queen Esther, the biblical queen who used her wiles to intercede for her people.
Three years earlier, in 2005, Muthee had anointed Palin during a public ceremony at the Wasilla Assembly of God, laying his hand on her forehead while praying to protect her "against all forms of witchcraft." The bishop claimed that he had personally battled a witch in his hometown of Kiambu, Kenya, driving the evildoer from the town and thereby ending an epidemic of crime and licentiousness. The episode was later revealed as a farce by a reporter from Women's eNews who traveled to Kiambu and found the supposed witch, a local healer named Mama Jane, still living happily in her compound. In palling around with Muthee, whom she credited with helping propel her into the governor's mansion by anointing her, Palin revealed herself as an authentic religious zealot.
Once Palin was nominated, her 16-year-old daughter, Bristol (named for Bristol Bay, Alaska), became the subject of ferocious media scrutiny. She had, it turned out, been impregnated by Levi Johnston, a local 18-year-old jock who identified himself on his MySpace page as "a f**kin' redneck." To media outsiders, Bristol's out-of-wedlock pregnancy was particularly startling, given Palin's advocacy of abstinence-only education. In the eyes of many liberals, Palin had been revealed as but another family-values hypocrite, but to members of the Christian right, she was something quite different--a glamorized version of themselves.
The Culture of Personal Crisis
Palin's daughter's drama caught vividly a culture of personal crisis that defines so many evangelical communities across the country. That culture is described in a landmark congressionally funded study of adolescent behavior, Add Health, revealing that white evangelical women like Bristol Palin lose their virginity, on average, at age 16--earlier, that is, than any group except black Protestants.Another recent study by sociologists Peter Bearman and Hannah Bruckner notes that over half of evangelical girls who have pledged to maintain their virginity until marriage wind up having sex before marriage, and with a man other than their future husband. Bearman and Bruckner also disclose that communities with the highest population of girls who attend so-called purity balls, where they vow chastity until marriage before their fathers in a prom-like religious ceremony, also have some of the country's highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases. In Lubbock, Texas, where abstinence education has been mandated since 1995, the rate of gonorrhea is now double the national average, while teen pregnancy has spiked to the highest levels in the state.
"So many families deal with the same issues Sarah Palin is dealing with, so we really can relate to what she is going through," Grace Van Diest, a middle-aged Alaskan delegate from Wasilla, told me on the floor of the 2008 Republican National Convention. Van Diest then described how each of her daughters went on "a date with their dad" to discuss their pledge to "keep themselves pure until marriage."Palin consolidated her bond with the movement in another very personal way. She cradled her new son Trig, born with Downs Syndrome, before the klieg lights. Her husband Todd had chosen the name believing it was Norse for "strength." ("Trygg" actually means "safe" or "reliable" in Norwegian.) Palin's decision to carry the baby to term excited many evangelicals and anti-abortion activists, including James Dobson, who wrote a letter congratulating her for having what he called "that little Downs Syndrome baby." "What a way to emphasize your pro-life leanings there!" he exclaimed during a radio broadcast in which he endorsed the McCain-Palin ticket, even though he had denounced McCain as a "liberal" only weeks before.
After the market collapsed in the fall of 2008 and the McCain campaign ran off the rails, Palin untethered herself--as her book title has it, she went "rogue"--ignoring McCain's rules on attacking Obama. Instead, she lashed out at candidate Obama in her own distinctive way. "This is a man who launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist," she insisted. "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America." With these two lines, apparently uttered without the permission of McCain or his top aides, Palin opened up a deep schism within the campaign, while unleashing a flood of emotions from the depths of the Party faithful.
By "going rogue," Palin instinctively and craftily propelled her ambitions beyond Election Day, and so anointed herself as the movement's magical helper in the Obama era.
Elevated by yesterday's man, Palin now represents her party's future--and the greatest danger it faces. Her intimate bond with the Republican grassroots has made her the indispensable woman, even if she provokes a visceral sense of revulsion from many independents and moderates. Other Republican frontrunners like former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty have a debilitating problem to face in any race for the presidency: they are viewed as inauthentic candidates by the movement--cardboard men in suits who are only pantomiming appeals to cultural resentment.Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister who understands the nuances of evangelical culture, nonetheless bears the burden of being a 2008 primary loser. At that time, the former governor of Arkansas had a clear field when it came to the religious right, but was unable to expand beyond his Southern bastions of support.
Palin is so well positioned as the darling of the movement that any criticism of her would be experienced by believers as a personal attack on them. In this way, their identification with her through the politics of personal crisis is complete. Any Republican primary challenger assailing Palin will be seen as victimizing her, as channeling the attacks of the liberal elites, and possibly as having a secret liberal agenda. On the other hand, to embrace her is to risk losing the great American center.
We like our Sarah Palin, she is like us, she is us. Wasilla is us.
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Should any dispute the theme of the item, there is this, a Crabgrass comment (anonymously left), this post.
Anonymous said...
Open your eyes! The ladies are drawing huge crowds. Hard working americans have had a it with your elite liberal BS!
7:44 PM
That elite liberal is the devil theme, as the article explored. A few months ago, Carrie Prejean could not have extended that kind of never compromise with the elite liberal manipulators message any better.
"It did cost me my crown," Prejean continued. "It is a very touchy subject and [Hilton] is a homosexual, and I see where he was coming from and I see the audience would've wanted me to be more politically correct. But I was raised in a way that you can never compromise your beliefs and your opinions for anything."
"I feel like I won," she said. "I feel like I'm the winner. I really do."
Somehow I am reminded of the opening lines of Sinatra singing It Was a Very Good Year.
When I was seventeen
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for small town girls
And soft summer nights
We'd hide from the lights
On the village green
When I was seventeen
These conservatives. They are something.
__________UPDATE__________
Dogpatch farts. See comment. Thanks to Ms. Prejean for taking time to comment.
________FURTHER UPDATE__________
Our own uber-aggressive GOP harpy, Michele Bachmann, pulls the same poor little me victimization game with her Dogpatch constituency - even saying, "Palinize," a newly invented Bachmannistani word:
“Don’t let them Palinize me!’ cries the subject line of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s email to supporters today. Laying claim to the Sean Hannity–bestowed title of “second most hated Republican woman,” Bachmann makes a pitch for cash: “With Governor Palin taking a well-deserved step out of the spotlight, it appears that I may be absorbing even more of the liberals’ scorn. And, I’d really appreciate your support so that I can defend myself against their attacks.”
Hat tip to MinnIndependent, and Aubrey Immelman, respectively here and here, for the insight - two divas are playing the identical claiming game -- victimizing me is victimizing my Dogpatch constituency, and we all should be outraged, shocked, shocked, so send me cash. I credit each of the two online resources for the insight, but I first saw the item on Immelman's website.
We could debate whether the major message is victimization, Palinization, or send me money; but I say the third factor cuts more weight with Michele Bachmann, (as best as I can see things while not being privy to the murky cobwebbed area between the lady's ears, and while being indisposed to believe her if she says, "Not so").
_______FURTHER UPDATE__________
Bradblog carries an interesting blog-essay by Frank Schaeffer,"Moral Cowards vs. The American Taliban;" this link. The theme is fairly straightforward, and a percent of the people would either denounce it before finishing it, or otherwise go into denial. It does hand a bunch of people a moral question, and ducking and denouncing is NOT answering the question.