Palin puts pitchforks before party

Palin puts pitchforks before party
By Jacob Weisberg
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: September 21 2010 20:29 | Last updated: September 21 2010 20:29
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/aa01c0c8-c5b5-11df-ab48-00144feab49a.html


The primaries have ended with a clear winner: Sarah Palin. In seven Senate contests, the Tea Party candidates she championed defeated more moderate, better funded and experienced Republicans. Having positioned herself at the head of this decentralised, populist movement, the former Alaska governor has become a bigger object of fascination – and a greater threat to the political status quo – than ever.

Ms Palin, who spent last weekend at a gathering of rightwing activists in the first-to-vote state of Iowa, now looks in every respect like an unannounced presidential candidate set for running in 2012 as an anti-establishment outsider. Having installed a television studio at her home in Alaska, she shuns “lamestream” media and speaks directly to followers via Fox News. Having mastered Twitter and Facebook she does not need to leave her moose-hunting grounds to make her presence felt on an hourly basis.

How seriously Ms Palin will be taken if she does run depends in part on whether the Tea Party looks, after the November election, more like the salvation or the ruination of the Republican party. These fevered activists present conservatives with a wildly energetic base. They also provide the kind of clear philosophy lacking in recent years – uncompromising fundamentalism about capitalism and minimal government. The successful 1994 “contract with America”, when Newt Gingrich led Republicans to a mid-term triumph with an anti-government platform, provides another positive precedent. An updated “contract with America” for 2010 is to be published by Republican congressional leaders tomorrow.

The contrary Republican view is clear in the revulsion of party elders, from moderates such as Colin Powell to conservatives such as Karl Rove and Mr Gingrich. These latter two had harsh words for Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party winner in Delaware, before Ms Palin bludgeoned them into line. Mr Rove’s complaint was that Ms O’Donnell’s victory cost the Grand Old Party any chance of a Senate majority. The broader worry is that Tea Party candidates are fanatical, politically unskilled and too bizarre to win. The further they pull the party, the harder it is to appeal to the independent voters who decide elections.

An unpromising antecedent for the present moment is Pat Buchanan’s fiery challenge to the first President Bush in 1992. Like Ms Palin, Mr Buchanan immensely enjoyed the attention he got as he rallied the “peasants with pitchforks”. Like Ms Palin, he was unconcerned with the damage his spree might do to his party. This disregard for the larger cause and the longer term also characterised Mr Gingrich’s cadres, who wildly overplayed their hand after winning in 1994. Caught up in their own rhetoric, they assumed that shutting down the federal government would be a popular move.

If anything, this year’s class is more extreme. The first notable Tea Party winner, Rand Paul of Kentucky, is so pure in his libertarianism that he felt compelled to object to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned private-sector racial segregation. Following close behind was Sharron Angle of Nevada, who has gestured in the direction of armed rebellion if elections fail to restrain the federal government. As for Ms O’Donnell, she is after this week known only for crusading against masturbation, failing to pay her taxes and her claim to have “dabbled into witchcraft”.

Democrats are torn between the hope that these figures will lose, causing Republicans to fall short of controlling Congress, and the hope that they will win and become the face of their party. A similar logic applies to Ms Palin. Democrats would love nothing more than for her to capture the Republican nomination in 2012, on the theory that she is unelectable and has the ability (not possessed by President Barack Obama) to re-energise the disenchanted liberal base.

What almost certainly will not come out of the coming election is any new opportunity for bipartisan co-operation. Centrist Republicans are terrified of being “primaried” if they seek compromise with Mr Obama. Instead, they will try to prove their bona fides to the Tea Party through obstructionism and, if they attain a majority, the kind of open-ended congressional investigations that poisoned Bill Clinton’s time in office. With Tea Party leaders inside Congress as well as banging against the gates, the forecast in Washington is for continued confrontation and gridlock.



The writer is chairman of The Slate Group and the author of ‘Palinisms: The Accidental Wit & Wisdom of Sarah Palin’