Sarah Palin says the damndest things.
Last Sunday, in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox, she predicted that President Barack Obama would not be re-elected. But she quickly added a caveat.
The obvious caveat would be the state of the economy. If President Obama succeeds in fixing the dismal economy he inherited from President Bush, he will almost surely be re-elected. After all, it is the sputtering economy that is the source of his political problems -- with frustration about the economy producing anger and unrest on both the right and left.
So Republicans, like Palin, are right to fearfully watch those economic numbers closely. If Obama can create jobs, he should be home free.
But that is not what came into Palin's mind when she predicted what might be a game changer in 2012 (and prevent her from challenging the by-then invincible Obama).
Palin told Wallace: "Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decided really to come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do. That changes the dynamics in what we can assume is going to happen between now and three years."
Wallace, taken aback, asked Palin if she was suggesting that Obama would play the "war card" to win.
She said she wasn't. "I'm not suggesting that. I'm saying, if he did, things would dramatically change...."
In other words: I'm just saying.
But that only applies to the "war card" part. Palin actually believes that the surest way for a president to secure popular support is to "declare war on Iran" and to "do whatever he can to support Israel."
Could this be the common sense wisdom that Palin gets from her plain, down-to-earth, huntin' and fishin' neighbors in Alaska? Not likely.
There is little to no popular support for a third Middle Eastern war -- even in Alaska. As for Israel, it is not even a voting issue for the American Jewish community, let alone the other 98% of Americans. Besides, pretty much everyone who pays attention to Israel knows that this administration has been, if anything, overly reluctant to tell Israel to do anything it doesn't want to do. Obama already fully backs Israel and says so at every opportunity.
Where does she get this stuff?
Well, in this case, it's pretty obvious. On foreign policy, she is now the creature of the neoconservatives -- the only people in America who believe that going to war with Iran would change American misery over the economy into exuberance over the opportunity to fight another war with Muslims.
She is the blank slate upon which William Kristol (a fervent Palin supporter) and his buddies can re-inscribe the disastrous policies that were in place under the previous administration. (Actually, by the end, they didn't like George W. Bush either. Just before leaving office Bush rejected Vice President Cheney's repeated plea that he permit the Israeli air force to fly over Iraq to bomb Iran. They clearly expect Palin to be more enthusiastic about the idea).
Palin herself may not understand precisely how she is being used by the neocons.
In fact, when Wallace asked her where she picked up her idea that Obama could win re-election by going to war with Iran, she said she got it from "reading a Pat Buchanan column the other day."
But, of course, Buchanan wrote no such thing. Buchanan is an isolationist, hostile to Israel (and not too friendly to Jews in general) and opposes US interventions in the Middle East. He would be the last person to advocate either another Middle East war or embracing Benjamin Netanyahu even tighter.
There was, however, a Buchanan connection. He actually wrote a column that rebutted the idea Palin endorsed on Fox.
Buchanan was reacting to a column that appeared in the right wing Jerusalem Post and was written by arch-neocon Daniel Pipes. Pipes, whose specialty is Muslim- and Arab-baiting and demanding that the United States back far right Israeli policies. It was called "How To Save The Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran." Buchanan vehemently rejected Pipes' nutty proposal.
Palin was just confused. She read, or someone told her about the Pipes plan, and perhaps that Buchanan hated it, and she somehow came to think that it was Buchanan's idea.
The neocons may be over-programming her. But she is not going to notice. All she probably notices is that suddenly there is a whole group of New York and Washington intellectuals who don't despise her the way most intellectuals do.
On the contrary, they love her. Jennifer Rubin, of Commentary, in fact wrote a whole denunciation of intellectuals (specifically Jews) who can't stomach Palin because of her right wing politics and her sheer ignorance of policy. She wrote that they will never warm to Palin.
"Palin's anti-elitism and her embrace of social conservatism, which are now integral to her persona, will in all likelihood continue to make her unpopular with the great majority of Jews. She is not about to change her appearance, her stance on abortion, or her disdain for media elites. And Jews are not about to cast aside their preference for those leaders whom they perceive as intellectually worthy -- and socially compatible," Rubin writes.
The rest of the column is a faux-populist screed against Jews and other educated types who, unlike real Americans, don't hunt, engage in "iron dog snowmobiling" and "for whom intellectual rigor has been a defining characteristic and a pathway to success."
In other words, these airy intellectuals like their presidents to be smart and other Americans don't. (I am not making this up. In their love for "real" Americans, the Ivy League neocons essentially compliment them for being morons! Disgusting).
Anyway, it's pretty clear that the Commentary neocon crowd has clearly got its candidate for 2012. They know she is no genius but they are pretty sure that she will go to war with Iran and back Israel's right to do whatever it wants whenever it wants.
I don't believe Sarah Palin will become president but if, God forbid, she does, I expect that the neocons would be disappointed.
Sure, she will mouth the lines they hand her now. But, as untutored as she is, she is no dummy. And she does not like being handled. She would likely "go rogue" on Kristol, Pipes and the Commentary company just as she did on the McCain campaign.
After all, someone -- Todd, Bristol, Track or whoever -- would be bound to tell her that the neocons do not exactly put American interests first. She does. She may be wrong -- in fact, she's almost always wrong -- but she loves this country and that means she is unlikely to knowingly send Americans off to die to serve an ideology that has a long, bloody record of failure.
Nonetheless, pay attention. The neocons are desperate for a third bite of the apple. Palin is their ticket. But, if she flags, there is always Huckabee or one of the other right wingers. Neocons may be chicken hawks but, when it comes to involving America in Middle East wars, they never say die.