Palin

This article is divided into three sections: her 2012 prospects, her challenges, and her extraordinary relationship with accountability.

Will she run?

Palin’s baggage

Palin and accountability

Will she run?

Signs that say she will run are fairly strong:

A Huckabee-free poll showed her two points behind the frontrunner Romney, and a week later she had pulled into a tie. So does she pull into the lead in June? The hardcore tea-drinking party base still loves her, and the other GOP candidates are really weak. She can raise money and she can draw a crowd.

She is releasing her self-serving movie/infomercial in Iowa; the producer said that the film would catapult her into the front ranks of candidates. She took a Middle East trip which she could use to burnish her flimsy foreign-policy credentials. She said she has the fire in the belly several times.

Running really doesn’t cost her anything except a year of effort. If she gets in, and the race doesn’t turn out to her advantage, she can always quit.

Another sign she's running: think back to April, when angry union members and tea party people were holding rallies in Wisconsin. Palin, whose political skills include capitalizing on ready-made crowds, came and riled everyone up. She began the speech trying to defend Scott Walker, and ended it by smearing Obama, calling him a coward, screeching “The 2012 election begins here….It starts here! It starts now! …Mr. President, game on!”

But in the middle of that speech, Palin went after the Republican leaders in Congress, for making a deal with Democrats on the budget. She went after “the GOP establishment”, in a way that could be interpreted as an attack on the testosterone-impaired country-club Republicans running for President, men like Romney: she promised to take on the party establishment, admonishing them to fight, with this ringing quote -- “Maybe I should ask some of the Badger women’s hockey team—those champions—maybe I should ask them if we should be suggesting to GOP leaders they need to learn how to fight like a girl!” So Palin has declared war not only on Democrats but also on Republicans who even consider negotiation and compromise, rather than war to the knife. And she hinted that if the GOP wants a leader who will give them that sort of "take no prisoners" attitude, that leader may a have a uterus in her pants.

Among the signs that say she's running, I am counting the bus tour, which incidentally is probably illegal unless it is a campaign tour, financed as it is by her PAC. Her tour is visiting key primary states. Republicans are ridiculing her, and she is returning the favor by dropping into their districts without even the courtesy of giving them a heads-up. She is deliberately provoking the other candidates, particularly Romney, by hogging the cameras.

The press, wary of being conned by another non-candidacy like Trump's, are expressing doubts about her presidential viability, and she is returning fire by refusing to provide an itinerary, forcing them to endanger life and limb chasing her like paparazzi: across the countryside her bus is speeding, running lights, narrowly missing other vehicles all across the northeast, a metaphor for her entire career. The media's addiction to All Things Palin is actually deepened by her unfailing stream of factual malaprops: in a matter of a day or two she completely rewrote the history of Ellis Island as an anti-immigrant tale, and rewrote Paul Revere’s ride as a pro-gun initiative.

She has angered veterans by hijacking their rally. She has angered her own fans by limiting her availability. She has even irritated her road-weary daughter. I don’t see how she goes this far out on a limb, and then stops later in the summer and says “ naah, never mind, not running”. In such a case, her other options, playing the party playmaker or media player, just don’t work: she would have burned too many people. She can’t burn that many bridges behind her, and drop this many "I'm running" hints, unless she has a clear path in front of her, toward a race for the nomination. Trump has a career independent of his political ambitions, so he can afford to tease us and then run away: Palin doesn't have that luxury.

An even bigger sign she's running: an hour before Romney made his official announcement, Palin popped up in Romney’s hometown, slamming him for launching Romneycare in Massachusetts, rejecting his claim that state-level mandates are okay, claiming the policy could be his fatal flaw, challenging him to explain himself further, and insisting that the tea party wants small government. And insisting that she wasn’t trying to upstage his announcement. And she's doing this to the governor who, as head of the RGA, broke the law to pour money into her gubernatorial campaign. At the very least, she’s in the race to stop Romney.

This business with Romney is worth keeping an eye on. She said recently that she does indeed intend to chat with Republican politicians, but only the ones who meet her tea-party standards. It could be that her success criteria are either (a) making a credible run for the nomination herself, and/or (b) seeing to it that the tea party maintains the upper hand in plotting the course forward for the party and choosing the 2012 ticket. 

Another argument for running: unlike the other candidates, she doesn’t need to win the White House, in order to get enough attention and cred to go back to her nonpolitical career. But her nonpolitical career would likely be weak without a presidential run. She would probably not be a major player in the party without a White House run because she is, if anything, antagonizing party leaders, and has no credibility in policy. And being a provocative rightwing media star is shaky as a long-term plan: Anne Coulter, Laura Schlessinger and Michelle Malkin flamed out because they felt compelled to push the envelope further and further until the nation decided that what had been provocation was now mere irritation; Glenn Beck slid down the same slippery slope as well, and the only reason Limbaugh hasn’t followed them all the slide into oblivion is that his network owns 1200 stations and gives away his show for a pittance.

There is a neat scene in Citizen Kane with Kane’s friend, played by Joseph Cotten. Earlier in the movie, Kane had been caught cheating on his wife, and newspaper headlines announced his affair with a “singer”, with the word in quotation marks, implying that she was no singer at all. This ended Kane’s political career. Kane, dumped by his wife, married the “singer”, and then tried to save face by producing a gigantic opera, with his new wife “singing” the lead, even though she really stunk. It was a disaster. Finally a reporter asks Cotten why Kane put his wife in a position in which she was obviously going to be humiliated publicly. Cotten said that Kane wanted to take the quote marks off the word ”singer”, to rehabilitate his wife’s reputation, and by extension his own.

And this is why Palin might run.

Palin’s campaign as a “candidate” in the 2008 election was such a catastrophe, that there is no way she can leave the stage for good, and be a punch line for the next 40 years. So she wants to run again in 2012, to take the quotation marks off the word “candidate”. Even though she is doomed to be humiliated again, just as Kane’s wife was.

Signs that suggest she will take a pass are not totally convincing:

Preparation. She is quietly building a bit of a network in Iowa, but she has made little effort until now to visit the early primary states, or make preparations there, or recruit donors or staffers. But that may not mean much: she has her own notion of launching a career without following the normal rules or touching all the bases, which has political professionals watching in bewilderment. Palin thinks rules are for other people, and her own allies admit she's not a political strategist.

Money: she would give up financial opportunities if she ran, but she could go right back to the money well after the race, assuming she lost, and make even more money.

Family: the protestations that she is worried about her family's privacy sound absurd in light of the way she has exploited her family already, to include taking them on the bus tours. Todd Palin himself ridiculed this argument: "This family has been tested. These kids grew up around the mayor of small town. Local politics is in your face every day. It's not like you get on a plane and fly to D.C. or Juneau." At best she'll play the privacy card if she needs a face-saving way to quit the race.

Fox doesn’t seem to think she’s running, but how many times has Fox gotten things wrong?

She is actually the youngest contender, so she can wait. It seems that we’ve been hearing her name since the Third Crusade, but she’s only 47. Obama is 49. Huntsman, Pawlenty, Santorum and Bachmann are in their fifties. Romney, Gingrich and Cain have few chances left because they’re in their sixties, and Ron Paul is in his seventies. But does she want to wait, and let her name fade from our memories?

All that said, as I mentioned, the normal rules don’t seem to apply to her, and trying to predict her behavior using the rules of logic is like trying to sail a boat across the Atlantic using a rectal thermometer to navigate -- pretty much the wrong tool for the job. As she marches through the summer, watch to see if she does things that only a genuine candidate would do, as opposed to someone trying to attract publicity or to participate in the election in some other capacity like fundraising. If she does run, she could damage the GOP cause by driving the GOP presidential field to the right, and by driving up Democratic donations.

If she is not the GOP nominee, will she run a third-party candidacy, to attack a nominee like Romney from the right? Wait for 2016? Stay on the sidelines as kingmaker, endorser (at the latest possible moment), fundraiser, talking head, rather than face the embarrassment of an ugly electoral loss? One alternative to a White House run: Palin has visited Arizona many times and may have bought a house there; Bristol lives there too. Instead of going for the White House she could go after Jon Kyl’s Senate seat. Or she could use an Arizona house as a base from which to campaign for president -- much more practical than Alaska.

Palin’s baggage

Normally in posts like this, I use write a long version of the story and put it under Details, and then write a short handy version and stick it here under Summary. With Palin, that was impossible. When I toted up all of her statements betraying total cluelessness on national policy, her far far rightwing positions, her incompetence as an executive, her endless ethical violations and abuse of power, her ugly thuglike political tactics, her mistreatment of her own supporters and employees, her habit of running away as soon as she faces scrutiny from the media or anyone else, her many many lies -- that version of the Palin saga ran on for pages, and I have not posted that on the site. The long section you see under here? That was the short version. If you really want to get the full picture regarding Planet Palin, you need to just dive right in: there are really no short-cuts. If she actually wins the nomination, perhaps I will whip out the really long version.

Sarah Palin is positive that she is ready to be commander in chief, despite repeatedly betraying a dangerous level of ignorance on national and world affairs. Her one exposure to real economics came in one of the five cow colleges she attended, where she got a D and gave up. She is ignorant of the world of money, as she betrayed with her answer on the Freddie Mac question.

As an executive she is so weak that even the post of mayor of the tiny town of Wasilla, Alaska, which her predecessors had handled themselves, so overtaxed her that she had to hire a city manager. That, and her tactics, almost led to a recall by the voters.

Even the Republican leader of the Alaska Senate said she was unready for the governor’s job, let alone the presidency. The governor’s job is a breeze for a competent executive, since most of the state is owned and run by Washington, and all the governor needs to do is dole out the federal pork and oil money. But even with those advantages and with her habit of stealing pension money and jacking up taxes on consumers, she couldn’t get control of the budget. She went through police chiefs one after the other, finally settling on a guy who had to be fired immediately because he was a sexual predator: sloppy vetting. She wrecked a series of local and state projects, wasting millions. Alaskans were angry because she was so busy showing off on the national stage that she was ignoring local issues like schools and energy problems.

She violated per diem laws, tax laws, small business laws, privacy laws, ethics laws; she has obstructed justice, and may have perjured herself. She used tax money for personal and political purposes. Her behavior has already been condemned by a legislative investigation and by a sitting judge.

She brought an unprecedented level of nastiness to local and national politics. She betrayed the Wasilla politician who helped her get her start. She used Ted Stevens as political patron and then threw him under the bus. She lobbied for earmarks and pork and then claimed to oppose them, blindsiding her voters; she also screwed over her constituents on sales taxes and on the bridge to nowhere. She screwed over McCain, defying him publicly on issues, badmouthing him behind his back, and blaming his campaign for the 2008 loss. She repeatedly terrorized and fired employees suspected of insufficient loyalty, and sacked people who dared to question her opinions. She and her husband repeatedly abused her power to terrorize family enemies and political opponents. She tried to fire a librarian just because she wouldn’t go along with her book-banning crusade. She was slapped down for trying to illegally pack the City Council with her supporters. She fought ideas that weren't generated by her or her loyalists. She was caught on tape laughing hysterically as the Alaskan Senate President, a cancer survivor, was called a cancer and a bitch. Her diva-like behavior, micromanagement and harassment led to incredible personnel turnover. She publicly humiliated her own daughter to save her own reputation, used her office to persecute her own brother-in-law, and ran a political smear campaign against her own mother-in-law.

Her support among moderates and independents, the people who pick all the presidents, is toxically low, because she is a right-wing extremist. She campaigned and raised money for Pat Buchanan. She belongs to an extremist church which wants to cure homosexuality, and sat patiently as her preacher said Jews deserve to die because they are unbelievers. She wants a Constitutional amendment overturning Roe and opposes abortion even in cases of rape. She opposes sex education, stem cell research, equal treatment for same-sex couples; ironically she cut funding for a program to help teen mothers! She wants creationism taught in our schools and tried to fire an opponent of book-banning.

She’s to the right of Bush on the environment: she even sued Bush regarding environmental protection. Her energy policy is to the right of Exxon; she thinks global warming is a hoax. Her bombs-away foreign policy is a neocon’s dream. She favors regressive taxes which hurt the middle class, and opposes fixing the health care system. She supports a violent Alaskan secession party that hates America.

Her only real political skill is to look right at the camera and say something completely dishonest or hypocritical, without blinking. For example, her implication that she was mayor when Obama was a community organizer was hogwash: Obama was an organizer before he even went to law school, while Palin was busy flunking out of her third or fourth cow college. Already other GOP leaders are getting sick of the Sarah Palin show, and she is getting into more scraps with the media.


After the 2008 election, things didn’t improve for her. After making herself a laughingstock during the campaign, and exposing herself as dangerously clueless on policy, one would think she would try to burnish her credentials as a competent executive. Well, she didn’t really get it done. Palin, with a billion-dollar deficit in Alaska, was calling for big government projects she couldn’t afford. She thought she would enhance her tea-party cred by grandstanding and rejecting part of the federal stimulus money, right after seeking the money; this backfired so badly that Alaska’s Republicans and Democrats all condemned the move and insisted she was hurting Alaska to help herself politically. They were particularly incensed at her rejection of the money for schools.

Meanwhile thousands of people in rural Alaska faced freezing or starving to death. Some were surviving on nuts, berrries and squirrels like prehistoric man. Palin and her government couldn’t even figure out how to declare a state of emergency. Even with all the federal pork and oil subsidies, they will need even more help from the federal government. Just think, she wants to be president and bring all this joy to the whole country.

Also the corruption in the House of Palin never seemed to stop. Palin, hard on the heels of getting caught violating state ethics laws, was nailed again, this time for not paying taxes on the per diem money she illegally misappropriated. Undeterred, she also charged the state of Alaska per diem for her trips to do interviews on Fox News, as though that was part of her official business. Two of Palin’s aides faced new ethics charges, for doing political business on the taxpayer’s dime. Her husband was busted for contempt. And this is just what she’s been caught her doing, so far.
When she suddenly resigned from the governor’s office many Republicans said it would be impossible for her to run for the White House. But what many people missed, was the catastrophic mess she left in Alaska: when she quit she left so many empty chairs in the state leadership that she almost had to resume office in order to avoid a constitutional crisis. The attorney general who was also serving as lieutenant governor quit under a cloud of scandal, as did the next two men in line, and one or two candidates who didn’t get confirmed.

She has still been trying to fight the good fight for the Republicans, starting the whole death-panel attack against Obama’s health plan, claiming Obama wants to cut off the old and the sick from health care and to establish single-payer health coverage, and criticizing the President while abroad, in China, which neatly enough is exactly what her rightwing allies condemned the Dixie Chicks for.
But it is never a long wait before she embarrasses herself, wearing a miniskirt to an event honoring war dead, or publicly ridiculing knowledge of the Constitution. “In these volatile times when we are a nation at war, now more than ever is when we need a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor lecturing us from a lectern.”

First, Obama does fine as commander in chief. Second, has he been lecturing us on the Constitution? Third, after eight years of treating the Constitution as a “damn piece of paper”, the GOP has gone a step further, actually ridiculing knowledge of the Constitution and the law. We don’t need a president who knows the law: we need a man who can blow stuff up like Bush! Yee haw! That’s the new GOP platform, expressed by a frontrunner for the Presidency. And these are the same people who keep screeching that it’s Obama who’s the terrible danger to the Constitution! One day they love the Constitution so much they’d rather kill Congressmen than endanger it; the next day the Constitution is one big joke.

Perhaps Palin is still smarting from the embarrassment of flunking out of one tiny cow college after another, before finally scraping by with a journalism degree in Idaho. This, while Obama graduated magna from some little Podunk school called Harvard Law. I cain’t understand the Constitution, so of course it cain’t be important!

Also, even her base, the family-values Republicans, has been watching the Palin family saga in horror. We already know Sarah values her career more than her family, from when she publicly humiliated her daughter Bristol with the revelation about the pregnancy, just to save Sarah’s reputation; also it is likely that she forced Bristol to go through the farce of pretending to be engaged to Levi the Redneck, just to send the right political signal during the election. When Bristol flipped off millions of Sarah’s evangelical fans by admitting that the abstinence strategy for teenagers is stupid, and then evangelicals responded by attacking Bristol, Sarah refused to defend her own daughter: she’s too terrified of losing the rightwing base. Likewise when Levi Johnston had the nerve to say something less than complimentary about the Palins, her allies claimed Johnston committed incest with his sister: this girl who never done nuthin’ to nobody became a laughingstock, chewed up and spit out by the Palins for political gain.

Or this incident: "Babies and children are off limits!" A blogger ran a picture of Palin holding a "baby" whose head actually belongs to one of her big political supporters. Because the original photo consisted of Palin and her son Trig, Palin threw a hissy, insisting that kids are off-limits. Hmm….Palin has been shamelessly exploiting her kids ever since she got the nomination last summer. She exploited Trig for political purposes, and repeatedly exposed her daughter Bristol to public ridicule without even bothering to defend her daughter from attacks by Palin's own allies, the religious right. So, sorry, but you can't have it both ways. Either kids are part of the process, or not. Make up your mind.

 

Palin and accountability

There are more and more signs that she doesn’t want to face the accountability that goes with running for president. She attacks the media endlessly, and at her appearances she does all she can to avoid grownup questions from the grownup media: having questions prescreened, banning reporters entirely, banning cameras and recorders so that even non-reporters can’t post her inanities on the web for the comic enjoyment of all. Not only does Palin have no skill in fielding unscreened questions on policy issues, she isn't even going to try to learn.

Palin generally flees the press these days, and when she does field questions, hilarity often ensues, and not just in her goofy reimagining of the lives of the Founding Fathers. Here's Palin on the Cold War:  “We tried buying off the Kremlin with technologies in the 1970s. That policy was a component of “detente,” and the hope was that if we would share our technologies with them, they would become more peaceful. Things, of course, didn’t work out that way. The Kremlin took western technologies and embarked on a massive military building program. History teaches that peace comes from American military strength. And a central component of that has always been technological superiority. Why would President Obama even dream of giving this away?”

An Alaska reporter had a great item on Palin’s unfailing attempts to blame her crimes and follies on others: on her brother-in-law, on her police chief, on a wardrobe malfunction, on people who hate Jesus, on Katie Couric, on Charlie Gibson, on the RNC, on Levi Johnston, on McCain, on Tina Fey, on a cameraman, on Ashley Judd, on Senate Democrats. It’s never her fault.

If she were in the White House, she said, the "department of law" would protect her from baseless ethical allegations. "I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out," she said....There is no "Department of Law" at the White House. The bigger issue is that in Alaska she abused her power to attack real or imagined enemies; now we know if she gets the White House she will use powers to go after critics.

Even her allies have become disgruntled about her habit of running out on commitments to major events. She bailed on the Conservative PAC conference and even the NRA. Even Republicans ridiculed her for running away from her commitment to go to the conference of the National Governors Association. And of course her governorship.

Recent events have done little to help her cause. New reports about life behind the scenes on Planet Palin are truly unflattering. Apparently Palin has acquired a reputation for breaking commitments to attend events; according to one aide she went through at least ten schedulers because making excuses for her was just too onerous. A Palin aide admitted that Palin would be a disaster in national office, in completely over her head; he says she allowed her staffers to do her homework on the actual policy issues, she regularly used political power to destroy family critics, and she treated even her supporters like servants. Working for Palin, the aide smeared one of Palin’s cranky neighbors, faked pro-Palin letters to newspapers, and tried to rig on-line opinion polls in Palin’s favor. During all this, Fox News was forced to deny that their chief had called Palin an idiot.