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The GOP's Palin Food Fight: Why Now?
GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin discussed her knowledge of Russia and foreign policy last fall with CBS News anchor Katie Couric.
You have to hand it to Sarah Palin. For a sideshow, she's very good at being the center of attention. Even when she doesn't want to be.
She had a few big controversies earlier this year -- her on-again/off-again headlining of the big Republican congressional fundraiser, the soap opera around her pregnant teenage daughter, the usual Alaska stuff -- but she's hit the jackpot this week with a huge food fight among big name Republicans. What's unexamined is this question: Why now?
Vanity Fair ran a long article a few days ago detailing various criticisms of Palin by her former colleagues in the John McCain campaign. But while of great interest to folks who don't like Palin, with some nice detail, it's all familiar material.
Palin's confused first national press conference, held after last November's election.
But that didn't stop Palin's great admirer, neoconservative commentator Bill Kristol, from launching an attack, both in his own writing and in a Politico story, on former John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger campaign director Steve Schmidt, whom he decided to hold responsible for the article. Which is a little strange, as there's really not a shortage of McCainiacs to diss Palin, whose performance as the Arizona senator's running mate was simply disastrous.
So why Kristol's hot reaction? Oddly for a purported intellectual, Kristol is a huge booster of the determinedly anti-intellectual Palin. And Kristol's great friend and fellow neocon Randy Scheuneman, who was McCain's controversial chief foreign policy advisor, is an enemy of Schmidt.
This is a fight between some neocons who still want to promote Palin and their discredited geopolitical agenda against some Republican would-be modernizers and McCain backers who blame Palin for blowing their slim chance against Barack Obama.
Palin's high water mark accepting the Republican nomination for Vice President of the United States.
In the aftermath of the Vanity Fair piece on Palin, in which ranking John McCain aides talked about how difficult she was to deal with, Politico ran a story prompted by the post-VF piece battle between commentator Kristol and Schmidt, who managed Schwarzenegger's landslide re-election and, after working for months without pay as McCain rebuilt his campaign, took it over last summer. The story is long and complex, but worth checking out. What Politico, which is really a conservative publication, doesn't get into is why Kristol launched the attack.
Kristol is upset by two things. One, another blow to the notion of Palin as presidential timber, something he has promoted against all the weight of evidence to the contrary. Two, he hates Schmidt's diminution of longtime Kristol friend Randy Scheuneman, who was McCain's chief foreign policy advisor in the campaign and, more importantly, a longtime neocon advocate who was also the paid lobbyist for the government of Georgia.
Scheuneman's enthusiasm about Georgia may well have prompted that country's president, Mikhail Saakashvili, to foolishly invade the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, thus providing Russia with its pretext to crush the Georgian military and dramatically reassert its dominant role in Russia's periphery. With his paid lobbyist at the side of the Republican nominee for president, Saakashvili probably thought the Republican White House would backstop his idiotic move.
Indeed, McCain promptly declared: "We are all Georgians now!" To which most Americans, as I predicted here on the Huffington Post, said: "Say what?"
The McCain campaign did its best to spin up Palin's thin background in this campaign video.
Once she was picked, Scheuneman became a huge advocate of Palin, who was on foreign policy essentially a neocon tool, having no inherent views or knowledge of her own ("I can see Russia from my house," in Tina Fey's deadly parody). He was suspected by Schmidt of leaking to Kristol and others in their circle of right-wing commentators on Fox News and elsewhere, to the extent that Schmidt ordered an in-house search of staff e-mail.
It's fascinating that Kristol -- who is still very influential in Republican circles, notwithstanding the fact that he's virtually always wrong -- and his allies are so concerned about continuing to promote Palin. After all, Barack Obama's fondest wish in his re-election campaign, almost certainly, would be to run against her.
But Kristol, Scheuneman (who became Palin's greatest champion in the McCain campaign) and other neocons are looking for a horse, their other nags having retired or turned up lame. Palin is lame, too, but she has celebrity and a big standing with the party's grassroots right-wing base.
Schmidt, who helped push the pick as one of a series of Hail Mary passes to keep McCain highly competitive with Obama, which worked for awhile, figures prominently in the Vanity Fair account. Among other things, it recounts a not unfamiliar story of how he had to drop most everything for three days in order to prep her for her debate with Joe Biden. And how most of her other early advocates in the campaign found her impossibly difficult to work with.
Now CBS News has come up with some other internal McCain campaign e-mails. In them, Palin is revealed not only as a dissembler on her husband Todd's membership in the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party but also as someone with poor political judgment, wanting the campaign to deny the obvious about which the press no longer really cared, which would have swung McCain wildly off-message shortly before the election.
Before being picked for the national ticket, Palin talked up "Drill, drill, drill" as the answer for America's energy future in this interview with pundit Larry Kudlow.
It's all a bit sad, really.
My immediate take here on the Huffington Post was that the Palin pick was a mistake.
That continued to be my take when she briefly seemed to be taking off. I'd spent a few hours looking into her as a possible McCain running mate, which amounted to nothing more than reading several articles about her, watching video footage of her, and recalling Wasilla, which I've actually been to. She struck me as something of a female Elmer Gantry.
Immediately after her big convention speech, which had Team McCain toasting one another and TV anchors wowed, I wrote: "I think in the end Palin is a sideshow, a base play too problematic and extreme to appeal to independents and moderates, a tyro whose politics actually undercuts the positioning John McCain needs to win the election."
She's still a sideshow. But she is a sideshow who transfixes the Republican Party. In large part because she is a willing tool for what remains of a discredited neoconservative tendency -- it was never a movement, because it has no popular base of its own -- that still clings to influence on the right.
You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes ... www.newwestnotes.com.
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In the newest episode of the "Thrilla from Wasilla," Sarah Palin shocks the world by actually quitting her Alaska governorship. As she rambles through an incoherent speech, given in the afternoon of a holiday weekend so no one will even notice, (wink, wink) she desperately tries to make cogent sense of how great it is for Alaska that she is quitting. Uh, yeah.
But in her quest for the brass ring, the future presidential hopeful forgets that despite her base, no governor in history has ever won the presidency when they've chosen to quit their office after two years.
That won't stop Palin, however. Millions of distraught Americans will pay dearly for just a glimpse of her as she goes on a speaking/book tour. In addition, the media continues the fight to woo Palin. Fox News appears in the lead, offering a seven figure contract to Palin as Sean Hannity drools all over his notes while considering the possibilities.
Another fine example of how truth is stranger than fiction.
See William Bradley's Profile
She's a piece of work, no doubt about that ...
Even more the sideshow than before.
Breaking News: 12:45pm today 7/3/09
Sarah Palin is stepping down as governor at the end of July, after just 30 months on the job.
What this is all about on both ends of the political spectrum is who is truly representative of the DixiePubs (my new name for the Republican Party). It seems that the Democrats and the DixiePubs both agree that Palin, at most, and Sanford, at least, are perfectly representative of what the DixiePubs have become. The only difference is that Democrats see them as pathologically hypocritical, clue-less and deceitful (and, in the case of Palin, extraordinarily ignorant) while the DixiePubs see them as incredibly repentant (Sanford) and undeniably Christian (Palin) . . . perfect candidates for future offices in their twisted, little minds.
The Dems want to keep them on the front burner because they and their cohorts are no longer in power, so we don't have to fear the declaration of a phony, trillion-dollar war, the total deregulation of the financial industry, elevating their particular god to the Supreme Leader of America, or the institution of "intelligent" design and abstinence-only curriculum in our classrooms.
The DixiePubs have become the perfect example of what a political party shouldn't be; keep them around for laughs with the likes of Sanford and Palin and the other hierarchical hypocrites as their leaders.
With them around, this country doesn't need the likes of H.L. Mencken, Hunter Thompson or Lenny Bruce to humorously chronicle their every ridiculous move . . . they are entertaining just the way they are.
No, but the US certainly could use a real-left opposition party to keep the Blue Dogs from much influence.
I have to agree.
See William Bradley's Profile
You mean in the parliamentary system that does not exist.
You do know that the Blue Dogs are a distinct minority in the Democratic Party.
Who win seats that liberals couldn't possibly win.
Bree Palin has some interesting info about the Palin circus:
http://breepalin.blogspot.com/
Projection?
>>>> The reason it's coming up was outlined in another article yesterday on a different blog: Enough is enough.
The reason it's coming up was outlined in another article yesterday on a different blog: Enough is enough.
The VF article was pathetic, and I chuckle to see you're not even suggesting it was fresh material. Rehashing the same stuff over and over is stupid, but the post-partum detail? That put it over the top.
It was time for the leaks to be discussed, explored, and to uncover the real motives going on here.
Palin's interview with Katie Couric still makes me laugh, when she talks about her foreign policy experience by being able to see Russia, etc, etc. This is her Dan Quayle moment that will prevent her from holding any other political office other than Guv of her fair state of AK.
How on earth does it take 7 minutes, 53 seconds of video to cover the 'highlights' of anything Sarah Palin has ever said? In her whole life?
See William Bradley's Profile
I'm presenting her high water mark, the convention speech, which tested very well.
Immediately...the next day...after her "infamous" RN convention speech, I became totally physically and financially involved and immersed in the Obama-Biden campaign. I've not let up.
This is the first time Politico's been called exactly what it is, a conservative publication. For the life of me I don't know why they get so much attention. They are known for taking any and every Drudge headline and reporting it as truth. Try watching Morning Joe. When Politico reporters come on they are always working on some "developing scandal" in the Obama administration.There is one reporter, John Simon who regularly appears on Hardball. Simon has a huge thing for Mrs. Palin. He
constantly defends her ineptitude. He thinks she's cleverly fooling everyone and in 2012 will emerge as a very solid opponent of President Obama. I guess she turns him on. When you see what John Simon looks like it's easy to understand why she (or any woman) is his fantasy.
See William Bradley's Profile
It's pretty obviously conservative.
Politico was heavily reliant on Drudge to get launched.
The more Palin stays in the news, the stupider she looks.
Very true. Since the VF article, a superbly written, factual and as objective expose', her reputation, which I didn't think could get worse, has tbeen taken to an even more disastrous level. Everything thing that we have all thought about Palin, the level to which she has stuped for her own agrandizement has been proven, by this article, that she has hit an all time low.
It is so fun to watch to see Palin get just what she deserves..
She sure kept those Photo Shop people busy last week though.
They had a LOT of FUN!
That's for sure.
"This is a fight between some neocons... against some Republican would-be modernizers and McCain backers"
"Would-be modernizers and McCain backers"?
Talk about oxymorons!
Little sympathy here for the alleged "moderate" Repubes who gleefully turned their party over to wild-eyed ideologues, religious fanatics and a cabal of war criminals enabled by the ultimate "useful idjut", Junior Bush... and aggressively supported them in their obscene misdeeds, all because they were "their" guys.
May they all enjoy the ride down the outflow pipe of history.
See William Bradley's Profile
I'm sure you prefer all Republicans to be easily lampooned caricatures. As do quite a few Republicans with regard to Dems ...
Isn't it the two-party way?
Clearly, the quality of public dialog is in the gutter. Our leaders are easily lampooned because they are the product of a culture in decline. In a corporatist system that rewards sociopathic behavior, sociopaths and their flunkies end up running things. How else can you explain the last eight years?
Palin's conservative supporters are like the people who sit with their ears close to a police scanner.
When they hear about a barn fire, they rush to the scene to watch.
Palin's conservative opponents are like the arsonist who starts the fire.
From where I sit, it looks like Palin's got a real hotshot publicist who considers any exposure good exposure. I'd love to see Huffpo show some journalistic chops and ignore this narcissistic ninny for a few weeks. There'd be a lot of grateful readers.
Real news, plz!
See William Bradley's Profile
From where you sit, you're not reading. I haven't written about Palin months. A big fight in the Republican Party over her is news.
Nailed It!!
One snap!
There's a lot of Bill Kristol being quoted up there. Has Biil Kritsol EVER been correct on any topic EVER?
Kristol's record is even more embarrassing than his "idiot-without-the-savant" colleague George Will. He's perpetually backed the losing horse. I've lost count of the number of reasons he put forward for invading Iraq, the number of reasons he had for us torturing people, the number of reasons he had for deregulating banks, etc. etc. What Michael Jackson did for the reputation of pop celebrities Bill Kristol did for policy wonks.
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