Monday, July 13, 2009

Frank Rich tells it like it is about Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin is about Sarah Palin. For anyone to think that she quit her post as Governor of Alaska, for Alaska is living in a bubble. Once she is officially done in a week or so, she will proudly march into the lower 48, grab her cash and never think about Alaska, AGAIN. That is what is going to happen, but Frank Rich puts it out there about Sarah Palin and her "Americanism".

The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. Yes, she is of the religious right, even if she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage. But family-values politics, now more devalued than the dollar by the philandering of ostentatiously Christian Republican politicians, can only take her so far. The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.

That resentment is in part about race, of course. When Palin referred to Alaska as “a microcosm of America” during the 2008 campaign, it was in defiance of the statistical reality that her state’s tiny black and Hispanic populations are unrepresentative of her nation. She stood for the “real America,” she insisted, and the identity of the unreal America didn’t have to be stated explicitly for audiences to catch her drift. Her convention speech’s signature line was a deftly coded putdown of her presumably shiftless big-city opponent: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” (Funny how this wisdom has been forgotten by her supporters now that she has abandoned her own actual responsibilities in public office.)

I point out these two paragraphs because as I watched Palin in 2008's Election, I never understood how she could honestly say that Alaska was a microcosm of America, when in fact it is not. It has the fewest African-Americans and Latino voters, which is what the Republicans needed in the lower 48 to win, which they failed to get. I also did not get her thing about "real America", because the folks she needed to speak to like the "real Americans in cities and suburbs" in this country rejected her speak and voted for Obama/Biden. So, in other words, she just did not get much, at all.

Well, yes she did, she got the 25% of the hard right winged base of the Republican Patty, but again that won't win you the White House in the end. So, since she is not the Governor of Alaska, SOON, don't expect anymore apologies from the likes of David Letterman who has hammered her ever since she submitted her verbal resignation. And I mean he has not been NICE to Governor Palin, which goes back to politics and picking the battles you can win. In the end, let's just call it the way it is, she is a fraud and is the only excitement to a very dated party that needs rejuvenation. And if she is all they have to offer, they are in a very bad way for a very long time.

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