In case you haven’t noticed it, Sarah Palin has taken to threatening the Republican Party that the Tea Party movement will not tolerate any squishiness on the essential Tea Party small government message. The consequence if the GOP strays? The Tea Party will consider turning itself into a full-fledged Third Party movement for the 2012 election cycle.
In Nevada, where she was campaigning for Senate candidate Sharron Angle, Palin said:
“Some in the GOP — it’s their last shot. It’s their last chance. We will lose faith, and we will be disappointed and disenchanted from them if they start straying from the bedrock principles that can grow our economy. if they start straying, then why not a 3rd party? That’s what people are going to start asking.”
Palin is on a tour to promote Tea Partyism and boost Tea Party-backed candidates like Angle over the top. Interviewed by CNN on the same tour, Palin said:
“Heaven forbid the GOP machine strays from this message. If so, the GOP is through.”
If you want to know more about that message, or if you would just like to see Palin at her “Mama Grizzly” best when being asked friendly questions by a Fox reporter, the Palin-Nevada-Fox interview is viewable here.
In case you don’t click through but are fond of Palinisms, in this interview, she praises the individuality of Tea Partiers, saying they are “not a bunch of sheeple.” She also describes the panic among liberals when they see the Tea Partiers coming with their “happy, productive, common sense” message, saying “it gets ’em all wee-wee’d up.”
Yesterday I heard her say something about the message being “really simple” and thought to myself, “Of course it is, so simple people can understand it.”
This headline could just as well be “Palin realizes she has no chance of winning the Republican nomination”
Coincidentally, in this AMs Wall Street Journal, there’s an article on how some GOP House members are planning to avoid some of the mistakes of 1994. There’s talk that they might even be willing to – sit down before reading further – c-c-c-compromise with the Obama adminsitration. That is not Sarah Palin’s GOP.
She is a dynamo, that Sarah!
She’s like that EveReady bunny, she keeps going and going and going …
“With a midterm election date set, McCain torments himself with the thought of the monster’s threat to be with him on election night. The voting goes off as planned. While the Senator makes sure he covers all possible entrances that the monster could use to get into the voting chamber, the monster steals into the GOP’s room and strangles her.
John now wants revenge and chases the monster through Europe and Russia. He nearly catches the monster near the Arctic Circle when Robert Walton discovers him. McCain, now near death, is taken aboard Walton’s ship to recover from exhaustion and exposure.
The monster appears out of the mists and ice to visit his foe one last time. The monster enters the cabin of the ship and tells Walton his side of the story. Victor dies, and the monster tells Walton that he will burn his own funeral pyre. The monster then disappears in the waves and darkness, never to be seen again.”
With just a few changes, that’s the Cliff Notes ending of Frankenstien. I wonder how this story will end?
Palin is quite astute. She is in the politainment industry, not politics, and she understands that.
@Sheila – ” … so simple people can understand it.”
Of course it’s simple. You either believe in freedom or you don’t.
Let me remind folks that Palin is a conservative, not a republican. Like most conservatives she ends up voting for the republican candidate because they usually are the one in the race who believes in smaller government and more freedom. But she has a history of shaking up republican good ol’ boys in Alaska where she purged the energy commission of corrupt republican members and is in the process of vanquishing the establishment republican Murkowski family from the political scene.
So she’s giving the GOP a chance to be this nation’s conservative party. And if they’re not interested in that label, she’ll create a new party. Because after all, there are more self-described conservatives in this country than there are self-described republicans.
//Of course it’s simple. You either believe in freedom or you don’t.
Ha ha, that’s a good one Dennis.
“…there are more self-described conservatives in this country than there are self-described republicans.”
Typically, I disagree with Mr. Tester about almost everything, and that hasn’t changed, but he’s absolutely correct in the above statement – the exception that proves the rule, so to speak.
How can that be?
Because the operative term in his last sentence in #6 is “self-described,” and that makes all the difference. The vast majority of “self-described” conservatives are not, in fact, conservative. Some are merely angry, occasionally with plenty of justification, more often, they’re describing themselves as “conservative” simply because life isn’t going as they’d planned, and “government,” as a kind of blanket term, makes a convenient whipping boy. In both instances, the sorts of policies – when they’re coherent enough to actually suggest policies – being advocated are both reactionary, going back to “the good ol’ days” that never really existed, and hostile to the concept of “conserving,” whether what’s being conserved is the environment or 3 generations of sacrifices by their fellow citizens.
The poster girl for this syndrome is Sarah Palin, who Richard Schulze has accurately characterized as being both astute and in the “politainment business.” While she definitely is shaking up the good ol’ boys in the Republican (and Democratic) parties, which is not entirely a bad thing, Sarah Palin wouldn’t recognize genuine conservatism if it hit her between those fashionably-framed eyes, nor would most of her enthusiastic followers. What Palin DOES recognize is her own self-interest. If she were actually interested in government, she would have finished at least one term in that statewide office she apparently campaigned for, but once the national spotlight arrived, even Mrs. Palin could see that she could not only be paid huge amounts of money just to appear in front of fawning crowds, but that her simple (and largely false and/or inaccurate) message could be spread much more rapidly if she didn’t have to bother with the kinds of rules and restraints with which officeholders typically have to deal – knowing what she was talking about being merely one fairly obvious example.
Palin is one of the latest demagogues in a long American tradition of demogogues. Mrs. Palin and Mrs. Bachmann are a lot alike in that regard.
Similarly, Mr. Tester’s either-or view of “freedom” is demagoguery at its most common. Government and policy questions are virtually never the sort of “either-or” choice that he suggests, and typically fall somewhere on a political spectrum with anarchy at one end and authoritarian dictatorship at the other. What I regard as freedom, he might regard as oppression of the most egregious kind, and vice-versa.
We may, in fact, be witnessing a generation-long realignment of political partisanship in the United States, and Palin may well play a significant part in that, though it’s a little early to pass judgment, but Mrs. Palin doesn’t appear to be in a position to dictate roles to national political parties. She doesn’t get to decide whether a political party is “conservative” or not, except in the context of herself and her more vocal and loyal supporters. So far, at least, those folks do not, in fact, constitute a majority of even the current version of the Republican Party.
Dennis Tester says:
“Let me remind folks that Palin is a conservative, not a republican.”
Oh, Dennis, she’s neither. Palin is an opportunist and a huckster, nothing more.
These meanderings remind me of the birth of the Republican party from the bowels of the dying Whig party.
The Whigs in the North who wanted more aggresive action against slavery grew more and more impatient with their party, but could not countenance joining “the Democracy” as Jefferson’s party was then known.
In the end, they rode the rising tide against slavery instigated by the Dred Scott decision and the Democracy’s move to spread slavery into the territories and (ultimately) into all states, formed their own party supporting their views, and took the country in a storm in 1860. It had taken less than eight years. The Whig party faded into history, having misread the omens.
A similar movement may be happening here.
Or they may just be Bull Mooses.