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Saturday, October 25, 2008
Quote of the day: Palin going rogue
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
According to John King of CNN, under the headline “’Palin’s going rogue,’ McCain aide says”:
A second McCain source says she appears to be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.
“She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” said this McCain adviser. “She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.
“Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.”
I think it’s over. And it’s not ending pretty. Oh no. Not pretty at all.
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Sarah Palin and the Southern Strategy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If you average the five most recent presidential polls taken in Georgia, John McCain is up by only 3.6 points on Barack Obama, which makes it conceivable but still unlikely that the state will turn blue in 2008.
That fits in nicely with the premise of Harold Meyerson in American Prospect, who focuses somewhat on Virginia and more intently on North Carolina to test his thesis that this election could kill the GOP’s longtime Southern Strategy.
Certainly, if Virginia and North Carolina both go Democratic in a year in which the ticket is headed by a black man, the Southern Strategy is indeed bankrupt. Losing Georgia would be the coup de grace, and would actually be a very good thing for the Republican Party, and thus for the country.
If this election ends as current trends indicate, the GOP is about to be banished to the political wilderness. The amount of time it is forced to stay there depends on how the party handles its exile. If most of its moderate members go down to defeat, leaving it a core of deeply conservative officeholders concentrated in the South, the party could turn even more insular in defeat, and even more strongly in the grip of its evangelical base. A regional party simmering in its own bitterness would do no one any good, and would give Democrats a dangerously free hand in Washington for a long time.
However, losing Virginia, North Carolina and even Georgia would make it pretty apparent that such a strategy would be hopeless, and a new approach is needed. (Indiana, for purposes of this analysis, could also be considered a Southern state, and it too could turn blue for the first time in decades.) Losses in those areas would make it clear that the party needs a different message, that the failures of ‘08 were not merely a case of picking the wrong messenger in John McCain, as some on the right will try to claim.
Sarah Palin is another matter entirely. If the election doesn’t turn around — and that “if” gets smaller with each passing day — the GOP will break at least temporarily into two separate groups, and Palin will be the symbol and in some ways the cause of that break. She remains much beloved by the party base, and in truth has improved as a campaigner. But the polling data is quite clear that she has been poison at the box office, as they say in show biz. Palin’s selection electrified the base but drove off millions of moderates and independents.
The situation was dramatized this week when conservative legal scholar Charles Fried, the soIicitor general under Ronald Reagan, a revered figure among Republican intellectuals and a prominent campaign adviser to McCain, announced he had voted for Obama. The main reason he cited “is the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis.”
In a sense, then, the post-election GOP will consist of a Palin wing clinging to the Southern Strategy and all its cultural baggage, and an anti-Palin wing demanding a new strategy and a new look at how the party defines itself.
That is the battleground on which the GOP’s future will be decided.
UPDATE: I see where Politico is reporting that Palin/anti-Palin split already apparent within the McCain campaign itself.
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