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Intraparty contempt has been most conspicuous in some Republicans' treatment of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. In a recent Palin hit piece in Vanity Fair, Todd S. Purdum quoted several Republican strategists and advisers from Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign... Former McCain adviser John Weaver dismissed Mrs. Palin's presidential prospects, saying, "She is the darling of a certain element" of the Republican Party. McLame himself probably dislikes Palin. |
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Replace Giuliani with Romney, and the same thing is happening today.
As a Libertarian, I don’t loathe Conservatives at all
Libertarians and Conservatives have the same view on how the law apply to social issues, States decides it unless its in the Constituion
Rinos on the other hand has no business being in the party. Not only are they socially liberal, they’re also for big government
They can loathe me until Hell freezes over, the feeling is mutual. If they want my vote, however, they’d best start paying attention to my interests.
More droning about the same issue as always. How to make conservatives more liberal at a time when it is being demonstated that more and more people want to be conservative. No sale here. Why would I or anyone want to try to be liberal lite? Let the liberals be liberal and lets get reasonable adults to the table who can say no.
Conservative Republicans must ORGANIZE and drive the Chrissie Whitmans and Lewis Eisenbergs OUT of the GOP and into the Democrat Party where they belong.
Here’s an idea:
How about all these baby-killer country-club RINOs repent in sack cloth and ashes, and confess that killing babies is: evil, barbaric, uncivilized, pagan, demonic, unAmerican, utterly incompatible with the Declaration and the Constitution, and suicidal for the United States.
Once they have repented, they won’t be running around sneering contemptuously at the “low brow” “oogedy-boogedy” Evangelicals, and the Party will be unified.
Interestingly, my remarks presaged the author's insights about "eye rolling" etc.
Since the Obama administration has veared left as far as some of us have predicted, I think our enemy will be our best conciliator between social and fiscal conservatives. In other words, the threat to the republic posed by a continuation of Obama rule is so grave that I believe that social and fiscal conservatives, hardliners and rinos, will bury the hatchet long enough and deep enough to effect decent party unity if only through the election.
If Sarah Palin makes a run, the fundamental cleft of the party will be harder to bridge and the Rinos will have to come to terms with her nomination or leave. If Mitt Romney makes a successful bid, his candidacy will be swallowed easier by the right than Sarah Palin's will be by the left. In either case, these candidates must make their cultural obeisance is to the other side. Sarah Palin must do what we have been telling her to do since before the election, she absolutely must get serious about her persona and acquire gravitas and television presence. Romney absolutely must not pussyfoot on any key conservative issue. He has a special problem with his healthcare history in Massachusetts. But if John McCain could get the endorsement of his party, Romney certainly can. Remember, this is being said in the context of an electorate on the right desperate to save the Republic from Barack Obama.
Here is a portion of the vanity to which I alluded in which emphasis has been subsequently supplied:
I believe that the big battle in the party will not be between conservatives and moderates but between social conservatives and fiscal conservatives who are primarily libertarian. Both flavors of conservatives find common ground in strong defense. Fiscal conservatives are generally not as enthusiastic about Second Amendment rights, but the issue is not a dealbreaker. Social conservatives are almost universally fiscal conservatives but not all fiscal conservatives share social conservatives concerns about abortion and the ancillary issue of the morning after pill, education, religion in the public square, homosexual union, stem cell research, and pornography, marital fidelity as a prerequisite to public service, and evolution.
I consider myself to be a social conservative with a pesky libertarian reflex. In other words I am ferociously opposed to abortion but I am less exercised about what homosexuals are doing to each other in private. I am very concerned about the war being waged against Christians by our own governments but I'm not very exercised about adult pornography. I recite all of this because I think the way I resolved my apparent dilemma is the way everybody should do it: look for the victim and protect him. The classic arguments in support of legalizing alcohol, drugs, prostitution and gambling all point to the "absence" of a victim so the traditional conservative bias towards individual liberty weighs very heavily. But I sure see a victim in partial-birth abortion so I don't give a damn about the mother's convenience. Indeed, I see no reason to grant exceptions to prohibitions against abortion for incest or rape because those circumstances do not justify victimizing innocents, that is, to kill babies. Life of the mother exception, to the contrary, makes sense to me because one can identify the mother now as a victim. So if all conservatives would only just do as I do, (you know, be as reasonable as Henry Higgins and I) which is to weigh the balance in behalf of an identifiable victim but otherwise to respect individual liberty, we would find much overlapping common ground upon which to build long-lasting compromise.
If social conservatives would accept formulations of public morality the organizing principle of which is the protection of an identifiable victim rather than the vindication of a moral precept, fiscal conservatives and libertarians would be much more comfortable in the party. Fiscal conservatives, for their part, must go to bat for Christians when they are embattled by the secularists who would rob them of their faith through the arm of government. Fiscal conservatives owe Christian conservatives one more consideration, they must stop their smug condescension and their eye rolling whenever Christians express their faith in public. Consider for example the execrable figure of the son of William F. Buckley Jr. abandoning the McCain/Palin ticket for ill disguised abhorrence of Palin's faith. This is probably the last kind of bigotry that is socially acceptable in America but it must no longer be acceptable among conservatives. Buckley claims that he is a "small government conservative" but I claim that no matter how small his government, he is no conservative at all but something quite alien to us.
If the conservative movement is to be salvaged, this dichotomy will have to be resolved either along lines that I suggest or some other way. The alternative is a further splintering of the party and that would be very, very unfortunate.
I guess that this thread pretty much proves the writers point.
If Barack Obama has been the most remarkable phenomenon of the recent political scene, Sarah Palin must be second. The emotional responses to each-- especially by the media and the intelligentsia -- go beyond anything that can be explained by the usual political differences of opinion on issues of the day.
That liberals would be thrilled by another liberal is not surprising. But there are conservative Republicans who voted for Barack Obama, and other conservatives who may not have voted for him, but who are quick to see in various pragmatic moves of his since taking office an indication that he is not an extremist.
Anyone familiar with history knows that Hitler and Stalin were pragmatic. After years of denouncing each other, they signed the Nazi-Soviet pact under which they became allies for a couple of years before going to war against one another.
Pragmatism tells you nothing about extremism. But the conservative intellectuals who seize upon President Obama's pragmatism to give him the benefit of the doubt are obviously bending over backward for some reason.
With Governor Palin, it is just the opposite. The conservative intelligentsia who react against her have remarkably little to say that will stand up to scrutiny. People who actually dealt with her, before she became a national figure, have expressed how much they were impressed by her intelligence.
Governor Palin's "inexperience" is a talking point that might have some plausibility if it were not for the fact that Barack Obama has far less experience in actually making policies than Sarah Palin has. Joe Biden has had decades of experience in being both consistently wrong and consistently a source of asinine statements.
Governor Palin's candidacy for the vice presidency was what galvanized grass roots Republicans in a way that John McCain never did. But there was something about her that turned even some conservative intellectuals against her and provoked visceral anger and hatred from liberal intellectuals.
Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, "He's not one of us."
The trim, erect and impeccably dressed Alger Hiss, with his Ivy League and New Deal pedigree, clearly was "one of us." As it turned out, he was also a liar and a spy for the Soviet Union. Not only did a jury decide that at the time, the opening of the secret files of the Soviet Union in its last days added more evidence of his guilt.
The Hiss-Chambers confrontation of more than half a century ago produced the same kind of visceral polarization that Governor Sarah Palin provokes today.
Before the first trial of Alger Hiss began, reporters who gathered at the courthouse informally sounded each other out as to which of them they believed, before any evidence had been presented. Most believed that Hiss was telling the truth and that it was Chambers who was lying.
More important, those reporters who believed that Chambers was telling the truth were immediately ostracized. None of this could have been based on the evidence for either side, for that evidence had not yet been presented in court.
For decades after Hiss was convicted and sent to federal prison, much of the media and the intelligentsia defended him. To this day, there is an Alger Hiss chair at Bard College.
Why did it matter so much to so many people which of two previously little-known men was telling the truth? Because what was on trial was not one man but a whole vision of the world and a way of life.
Governor Sarah Palin is both a challenge and an affront to that vision and that way of life-- an overdue challenge, much as Chambers' challenge was overdue.
Whether Governor Palin runs for national office again is something that only time will tell. But the Republicans need some candidate who is neither one of the country club Republicans nor-- worse yet-- the sort of person who appeals to the intelligentsia.
To summarize baseball legend Reggie Jackson: nobody boos a nobody. That is definitely true in the case of Governor Sarah Palin. I don’t think I am going out on a limb here when I speculate that individuals who repeatedly attack her anonymously view her as a threat. And that includes members of the media hell-bent tearing down young Republican up-and-comers as well as some in Governor Palin’s own party — a party desperately in need of redefining — who are motivated, for whatever reason, to try and crush their rivals.
The most recent and grossly unfair attack came from Vanity Fair magazine. The writer clearly had an unshakable point of view from the start and talked only to those who would criticize. For example, he personally asked me at event preceding the White House Correspondents Dinner if I would talk to him about Governor Palin. I agreed. He didn’t call. He didn’t email. He never once tried to get my take. I also know he never contacted campaign manager Rick Davis, or John McCain.
I have known many political leaders over four decades including all Republican presidents and VPs. I have come to know Sarah Palin over the past year and can state unequivocally that she is smart, curious, hard working, charming, and effective. She also has something her detractors clearly lack – a sense of honor and loyalty.
I know this is petty, but it reminds me of the 2004 presidential election where it was commonplace and accepted in much of the mainstream media to call President Bush stupid and Senator Kerry smart and insightful. At the end of the day, when Senator Kerry finally released his college transcripts, wouldn’t you know: he did quite a bit worse than President Bush.
I have seen Sarah up close with leading heavyweights, and have seen her hold her own and then some. At the dinner at my home referenced in the article, she engaged comfortably and deeply with people ranging from Alan Greenspan to Madeleine Albright to Mitch McConnell. She asked for a foreign policy discussion on her June 7 trip to Washington, and I saw her engage in an informed and spirited manner with Frank Carlucci.
Governor Palin has many admirers and defenders out there who will not allow her to be branded by jealous rivals with their own agenda and the elitists in the national media. I am not sure who the unnamed Vanity Fair sources are, but without question they lack chivalry and have acted in a craven manner. They also lack the facts. I am ashamed of my former campaign colleagues, whoever they are.
1. Palin is great on life issues. She has solid conservative stands on the issues across the board. When she parts from the country clubbers, it is a good bet that she is right and they are wrong.
2. She was a terrible candidate. Listen to the Couric interviews.
Palin is only a good public speaker when the text is prepared in advance. Impromptu she is frequently a disaster. If she runs for national office, we are likely to get killed.
I hope Sarah Palin runs for President and wins, but because I don't have the psychic abilities Palin's critics seem to have, I don't know what the future holds for Sarah Palin. I don't know if she's running, since she hasn't officially announced yet, or how successful she'll be if she does run. To me it's still way to early. I don't know how she'll do in the GOP primary debates or who else will be running for the GOP nomination which, I imagine, will determine who does become the nominee. But I'm sure those with great unlimited wisdom such as yourselves will have no problem answering my questions.
And my last question. Why do Palin's critics here at FR act like they're smarter than Sarah Palin and all her supporters combined, and look down their noses at them like elitist snobs on the left do? Again since Palin's critics think they're God's gift to the conservative movement and are better than everyone who disagrees with them, they should have no problem answering this question as well.
