Could Sarah Palin Be Right?

I haven't said this in a while and I'm afraid that some of you might have forgotten it: Sarah Palin is an idiot. Yes, she's savvy, but that's an entirely different animal than smart. If you ask her a question that requires either knowledge or thought, she responds with a wink and an incomprehensible platitude.

Nor is she conservative. As a matter of fact, I defy any of you to list five conservative things that she's ever said or done. Instituting a windfall profits tax on the oil companies and distributing the proceeds to every man, woman and child in Alaska at $1,300 increments, while Alaska continues to receive nearly five dollars from Washington for every dollar it sends there is a lot of things, but conservative isn't one of them.

A couple of weeks ago, two of Palin's moron proteges, Joe Miller and Christine O'Donnell, caused quite a shitstorm when they refused to answer whether she's qualified to be president or not.

Miller later said that the former governor is constitutionally qualified, but that isn't saying a whole lot. All that means is that she's a born citizen that has attained the age of thirty-five and has been a resident of the United States for fourteen years. That would make well over half of all Americans qualified for the presidency. The only people in that demographic specifically disqualified are Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and they wouldn't have been prior to February 27, 1951. Of Course Sarah Palin is qualified to be president, but by that metric, so is Charles Manson.

Governor Palin is a plausible candidate in most people's minds for exactly two reasons: She's good on television and a lot of people want to fuck her. And after the Clinton, second Bush and Obama presidencies, I can't say that that's necessarily unfair or unusual. Americans don't elect statesmen or heads of state anymore, they elect game show hosts - and that's only when they're lucky.

That said, Palin made what might be her first good point in 26 months yesterday and Steve Schmidt didn't even write it down for her.

"We know that the impact is going to be even greater, come November 3, because people then will be focused on the 2012 election, and the need then for an even more aggressive movement to stop what President Obama is doing to this country."

(...)

"Some in the GOP -- it's their last shot. It's their last chance. We will lose faith, and we will be disappointed and disenchanted from them if they start straying from the bedrock principles.... if they start straying, then why not a 3rd party?"

That sort of undercuts the premise that Palin will be running for the Republican nomination any time soon, unless she's planning on a blackmail strategy in the primaries. But I think that she's fundamentally right, while still managing to be wrong, which is impressive when you think about it.

There is going to be a third party or an independent president soon. Maybe as soon as 2016. But it ain't going to be a Tea Party president.

As I've said before, wave elections and populism are temporary things and neither has a history of long-term consequences. The last time it did was in 1932 and that only lasted for 20 years, with the Democrats managing to lose Congress in 1946. Lyndon Johnson won by a landslide and had massive coattails in 1964 and was ruined by '68. The GOP won a huge wave election in 1994 and managed to reelect Bill Clinton just two years later.

Well, the Tea Partiers that have essentially overrun the Republican Party and scare the survivors into submission are well to the "right" of the Class of '94 freshmen and they don't know as much about history or politics. They're also exposing themselves as dangerously dumb social conservatives with economic ideas almost as insane as Obama's. I've already predicted that Obama is going to roll right over them in 2012 and the GOP will tear itself apart in the process.

This has been going on for a long time in the American conservative movement, and I think that the final, fatal fracture in it is upon us.

It began in the 50's, with the growth of McCarthy and the John Birch Society. The only reason that they didn't overwhelm the party outright was because the nationally revered figure of Dwight Eisenhower stopped them. He was the face of the Republican party to most Americans. Ike also outmaneuvered the Birchers legislatively, by having the Democrats pass most of his agenda. That isn't possible now because of the death of congressional bipartisanship.

After Eisenhower's retirement and the defeat of Nixon to Kennedy, the right of the party took control of the party and nominated Barry Goldwater, who was destroyed by Johnson in 1964. That defeat marked the rise of the Reagan wing of the party, which was held back for far longer than than anyone currently wants to admit.

Reagan, however, was a professional politician and understood that party unity was an important and necessary exercise. First he invited his mortal enemy, Former President Ford, to run with him in 1980 and when that failed, he nominated George H.W Bush. During his presidency, Reagan made all the right rhetorical noises to his base, but he did very little for them in concrete terms. In fact, he repeatedly raised taxes and signed arms reduction treaties with the hated Soviets.

When Reagan left office, the "right" turned on the senior Bush and, with an assist from Ross Perot, elected Bill Clinton. They then moved further and further to the right until they stopped being conservative at all. Supply-side economics (which was first attempted by the Kennedy administration) and religious right ideology are not historically conservative ideas, but they came to define the GOP by the time George W. Bush was elected and continue to to this day. They are revolutionary ideas, and a "conservative revolution" is an oxymoron and always has been.

It's surprising just how little of Bush 43's platform the Tea movement has actually repudiated. They were against the bailouts, but have no realistic idea what they would have done if they were in office. They still encourage foreign adventurism and in some cases think that Bush didn't go far enough. And their stated positions on spending cuts and the economy (as opposed to the wishful thinking of their supporters) won't even pay for the extension of any of the Bush tax cuts, let alone reduce the deficit or the size of government.

Let's assume that they win control of the House in a few weeks. If they're serious (which I don't think that they are) and don't get played by the Republican leadership (which I think that they will), they'll either grow the deficit or shut down the government. However, that won't be enough to destroy them before the 2012 primaries, where they'll line up behind a candidate so unacceptable to traditional conservatives that it will split the party and reelect Obama, such as happened in '64.

The only problem then is that there isn't a figure like Eisenhower or Reagan out there to pick up the pieces and reunify the traditionalists with the revolutionaries. In this, Sarah Palin's right: There will be a third party, it just won't be her or the Tea movement heading it.

During his second term, President Nixon spoke frequently to his staff about starting his own third party that consisted of conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans and had John Connally as its 1976 nominee. There are several reasons that wasn't practical then, Watergate foremost among them, but that isn't true now.

The primary system in both parties has essentially wiped out moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans, leaving the fringes on both sides pretending to be mainstream. Voters really haven't felt that they've had any place else to go, mostly because they haven't. Some of the more conservative Democrats became Republicans after 1980 and 1994, but many of them either lost in Republican primaries or retired.

Other than Perot in 1992, there hasn't been a serious challenge to what the parties have become, but that could change quickly. Both the Bush administration and the Tea Party movement have increasingly alienated traditional foreign policy and fiscal conservatives, who are still a large part of the Republican coalition. Conservative Democrats are furious at the direction of the Obama administration, which isn't likely to change much after November but will only improve its communications strategy and have the Teapublicans to run against.

After 2012, when it becomes clear that neither can govern effectively, both will almost certainly be looking for an alternative. And that's where you'll see an independent rise and very possibly win. It could either be a self-financing candidate like Michael Bloomberg or a revered military figure like David Petreaus, but the opening will be there and the Citizens United decision that Republicans now think is a godsend for them provides endless financing opportunities.

As Perot demonstrated 18 years ago, ballot access isn't an issue when you have money and real grassroots support. When you have the right candidate, a party can easily be built around him or her, which is sort of how the Republican Party came to power in the first place.

Before you ask, the right candidate could also split the Republican Party and still win. Harry Truman did something very similar within the Democratic party in 1948, when his foreign policy and commitment to desegregation created the candidacies of Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace. The Democrats were split three ways, and Truman still beat the Dewey Republicans handily, defying all kinds of conventional wisdom.

In my opinion, the circumstances for that happening with a traditional conservative candidate are coming into focus as I write this. I'll grant you that there are number of variables involved for it to happen, but there's a better chance of it now than there ever has been.

If I were Sarah Palin, I'd be careful what I wish for.