Heiress to His Holy Teflon
To the 30% or so of Americans who think Palin is qualified to be president, not only is Palin equal to the task of running this sadly fucked up land, she can do no wrong. She’s become a religious icon, a goddess. No, it’s better than that: She’s become Reaganesque.
Palin has assumed His Holy Teflon, a powerful shield that deflects all criticism and transforms acts that would be cause for outrage when perpetrated by lesser mortals (like running up deficits, say) into an occasion for pom-pom waving and starburst emissions when committed by the object of devotion.
Take wingnut blogger Dan Riehl (please!), who less than a month ago had this to say about President Obama’s media push-back strategy:
Obama Thinks All News Networks Are Dumb
Think about how tragically misguided and dumb this is, though it is only a reflection of the administration’s thoughts about the population as a whole. The media networks are simply not smart enough to get it for themselves. They should listen to anadministration that allegedly knows better and cut off Fox News.
Are they crazy? What country have they been living in, or do they want to create might be the better question. Talking down to the entire media like this is not going to win them any friends. They are laying the ground work for their own utter collapse by taking this approach.
Dumb, dumb, dumb Obama! You can’t take on the media like that! But when the Frozen Cheesecake Goddess goes after the media—less than a month later!—it’s the most brilliant, Reagan-y thing ever:
Palin Media Strategy: Reagan 2.0
Sarah Palin seems to be spoiling for a fight with the media in her latest Facebook posting. There are going to be people, assuming political consultants are people, that are going to call this foolish. They’ll rely on conventional, read old, wisdom that says you don’t pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel. But does that alleged wisdom still apply?
Reagan didn’t fight with the media. The usual descriptor for what he did is, he went over the media’s head directly to the American people. Is Sarah Palin really doing anything different, except for having Facebook, blogs and a great many other New Media resources today to which Reagan didn’t have access? Just imagine how even more effective his communication strategy would have been if he had?
I’m no Reagan fan; in fact, until GWB came along and set an entirely new benchmark, I thought Reagan was the worst president of my lifetime, which includes Nixon. But even I can’t imagine Reagan taking to Facebook to post things like this:
The book tour starts this week, and I look forward to it! I’m most looking forward to meeting many of you, shaking your hands, and telling you,“Thanks for loving America.” I’ll give you a scoop here and tell you what’s on the book’s Dedication Page – it’s dedicated to you – Patriots – who love the U.S.A. as much as I do.
[snip]
And I can’t wait to see you! God bless the fight for freedom! Keep up the great work, Patriots who love this country.
To be sure, Reagan pushed the very same exceptionalism buttons: “It’s morning in America,” and “shining city upon a hill,” etc. He got elected by vilifying subsections of the citizenry to flatter his target audience, hence the mythical “welfare queens.”
But at his best, Reagan conveyed the sense that he wanted to appeal to all Americans, even as he busily pushed piles of corporate welfare to one segment and mounded heaping shovelfuls of misery on others. There was at least the pretense of unity.
Not so with Palin. On Planet Palin, there are “pro-America areas of this great nation,” i.e., the places she intends to visit on her book tour, and “Patriots who love this country,” the people who will turn out to buy her book there.
If it was us vs. them during the run-up to the election, it’s only become more so since then, with the entire non-teabagger portion of the electorate having joined “them.” In one extraordinary passage leaked from her book, Palin gives a shout-out to “fair and balanced media folks”—among them certifiably nutso, racist, birfer wingnuts like Malkin, Limbaugh and Beck:
To some media professionals whom I admire because you don’t let anyone tell you to sit down and shut up, please keep making the idiots’ heads spin. Thanks for not taking our Freedom of the Press for granted, you bold and patriotic, fair and balanced media folks. Keep calling it like you see it: Amanda, Andrew, Ann, Bill(s), Bob, Cal, Dennis, Dick, Eddie, Fred, Glenn, Greta, Hugh, Joey, John, Jonah, Larry, Laura, Lou, Mark, Mary, Michael, Michelle, R.A.M., Rich, Rush, S.E., Sean, Tammy, Walter…. And there are more. I join you in standing up for what is right. Remember that as your voice is heard and your spine is stiffened, the spines of others are stiffened, too.
Spines aren’t the only things being stiffened here, and Palin knows it. She may be incurious, uninformed and wholly unqualified to get within 1,000 yards of the White House, but she’s not without an Aimee Semple McPherson-like ability to manipulate the masses and a natural political cunning.
Talk show host or Holy Reagan’s Ghost?
Relatively tame conservative David Brooks dismissed the Starburst Effect this weekend thusly:
“She’s a joke. I can’t take her seriously. “The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the republican nomination, believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters are not going to elect a talk show host.”
But is that how Palin sees herself? Does she want to be Glenn Beck? Or Ronald Reagan on steroids? It’s hard to tell. On the one hand, having recently lost an election by a fairly hefty margin, she must know that it’s impossible to win a nationwide contest by appealing to a narrow demographic, which is what she’s doing now.
But on the other hand, she seems to blame the loss on overly cautious handlers who didn’t let her be herself, and she appears to take all the credit for what success the McCain campaign did enjoy.
We’ve laughed here about the silly, toothless teabaggers and their infinite, impotent rage. This is the subset of people who swore until the bitter end that GWB was a great president, and they are the same people who form the core of Palin’s fan boy club today. Fortunately, it’s a small percentage of the total electorate.
But external events have a way of altering circumstances quickly and in unexpected ways. With the free-floating volatility occasioned by current financial and geopolitical turmoil, it’s impossible to know what the situation will be like a couple of years down the road.
Seemingly sane, civilized countries have gone feral within living memory. Under the right circumstances, “the joke” could quickly become no laughing matter. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
Posted by Betty Cracker on 11/16/09 at 09:32 AM • Permalink
Categories: Politics • Nutters • Sarah Palin •
Share this post: 
