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Friday, November 7, 2008
Silk boxer shorts? Spray tanners?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You know, this is so far over the top that it’s bizarre. I’d honestly like to have some sympathy for Sarah Palin as a naive but ambitious person who was plucked out of obscurity and placed suddenly in the harsh glare of the national spotlight. You don’t have to want her as president or vice president to feel bad for someone who is thrown into shark-infested waters and told to swim.
She was so naive that she didn’t have a clue about how naive she was, and that’s not her fault.
But this is really excessive. Says the Washington Post:
“On top of the $150,000 first outlined in Federal Election Commission filings, Palin spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on additional clothing, makeup and jewelry for herself and her family, including $40,000 in luxury goods for her husband, Todd, our colleague Michael Shear reports. The campaign was charged for silk boxer shorts, spray tanners and 13 suitcases to carry all the designer clothes, according to two GOP insiders.
“The shopping continued after the convention in Minneapolis, it continued all around the country,” one source said. “She was still receiving shipments of custom-designed underpinnings up to her ‘Saturday Night Live’ performance” in October. Sources said expenses were put on the personal credit cards of low-level Palin staffers and discovered when they asked party officials for reimbursement.”
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The president-elect’s press conference
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President-elect Obama’s first post-election press conference went well. He set the right tone, deferred to President Bush appropriately and looked and sounded very much like the guy who’s going to be in charge.
He was somber and straightforward about the economy, pressing hard for passage of a stimulus package to soften the recession’s impact on jobs. He came across as confident, composed and competent.
Your mileage may vary.
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This isn’t going to be pretty….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WASHINGTON (AP) — Employers slashed 240,000 jobs in October, sending the unemployment rate soaring to 6.5 percent, its highest level since March 1994, the Labor Department reported Friday.
The agency also sharply revised September’s jobless figures, saying that the preliminary estimate of 159,000 jobs lost that month was far off, and there were 284,000 workers tossed into the ranks of the unemployed that month. It revised August estimates of 73,000 job losses to 127,000.
The revisions are as significant as the higher-than-expected October losses because they suggest that the economy was suffering a steep drop even before the financial crisis exploded into a global problem in September. Many of the September job losses preceded the financial meltdown.
With numbers like that, and with significant job losses even before the financial meltdown …. well, it’s hard to tell just how bad this could get. Clearly we’re in for hundreds of thousands if not millions of additional layoffs before we can hope to turn it around, and those are Americans with children to feed and mortgages to pay and hospital bills to worry about.
Retail sales fell as well, particularly at the upper end. Nordstrom, for example, reported that its same-store sales fell 15.7 percent in October. Something tells me Santa’s sleigh will be a little light this year.
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The Obama administration takes shape
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President-elect Barack Obama’s first personnel decision, naming U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, is both smart and a little dangerous, a description you could also apply to Emanuel himself.
Obama knows Emanuel and trusts him, and nobody ever questioned Emanuel’s intelligence or work ethic. But he also has a reputation for doing whatever it takes to achieve what he wants, which can be real trouble in a job as powerful as chief of staff.
On the other hand, one of Obama’s biggest challenges as president will be exerting discipline on a Democratic Congress. President Bush refused to perform that executive function, allowing congressional Republicans free rein, to the detriment of himself and Congress as well.
Emanuel should prove helpful in keeping the congressional Dems in line.
Typically in transitions, names are leaked for publicity or symbolic reasons — rumors of Colin Powell being offered a Cabinet post and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being named to head the Environmental Protection Agency probably fit into that category.
Kennedy’s appointment would be a disaster. He has been very effective as an environmental activist, but the EPA doesn’t need an activist as its administrator, and Obama knows it. Business and industry want and deserve a fair hearing at EPA, and they aren’t likely to feel they’re getting one if Kennedy is at the helm.
On the other hand, the suggestion that Obama keep Robert Gates as secretary of defense deserves serious consideration. Gates has done an excellent job for the American people in trying to repair the damage done to U.S. policy and to the U.S. military under Rumsfeld, and that experience at unwinding the mistakes of others could be invaluable for President Obama.
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What is the future of the GOP?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Before they turn their attention back to the Democrats, Republicans have some scores to settle within their own movement. It’s not going to be pretty.
For example, Michelle Malkin, Erick Erickson and others are organizing a blacklist of those Republicans who say bad things about the sainted martyr of the cause, Sarah Palin. I guess they’re not too worried by reports that Palin didn’t even know that Africa was a continent. I can see their point, in a way: It’s not as if Palin could SEE Africa from Alaska, so how was she to know?
Says Erickson:
“We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others…. We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.
It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.”
That seems to be a natural instinct among many Republicans when they lose. The immediate reaction is to want to purify the party, cast out the unbelievers, so that their movement might be more worthy of the role that history has prepared for them. They believe that by making their party smaller and more conservative, they will get bigger, a sort of quantum politics I confess I cannot follow.
Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker has already been cast into the wilderness for daring to speak her mind about Palin.
“The picture is this,” says Parker. “Anyone who dares express an opinion that runs counter to the party line will be silenced. That doesn’t sound American to me, but Stalin would approve. Readers have every right to reject my opinion. But when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one’s own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk. (I hear you, Dixie Chicks.)”
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: The GOP base has become more and more alienated from the modern American mainstream. In fact, that alienation defines the GOP base, as Palin’s sainthood makes clear. It is more important to the GOP to have a candidate who personifies their sense of alienation than to have a candidate who knows what Africa is.
So how do you make a party defined by its rejection of the mainstream attractive to that same mainstream? By making it more ideologically inflexible? By casting out those who advocate a change? Yes, say people like Rush Limbaugh and others.
So I propose a counterpoint to Operation Leper. I think we need a list of all the conservative figures who believe that the route to political salvation is political suicide, who argue that Republicans need to march in lockstep to the right and leap off the cliffs like so many lemmings to the sea.
We can call it Operation Leaper.
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