[Palin] stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind. Palin gives this movement a major party brand and political plausibility that its open-throated media auxiliary, exemplified by Glenn Beck, cannot. She loves the spotlight, can raise millions of dollars and has no discernible reason to go fishing now except for self-promotional photo ops.
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 . . .
Why Rich has chosen to identify this trend with Palin is hard to say. This has been the Republican Party for decades. Karl Rove recognized the political limits of the GOP's Paranoid Style and tried to reach out to the Latino electorate with some real succes under George Bush. But the base of the GOP would have none of it. And this rejection will go into overdrive next week in the confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. As far as I know. Sarah Palin has never commented on Judge Sotomayor. Which makes Rich's reach top Palin jarring and forced. Indeed, he writes:
The latest flashpoint for this kind of animus is the near-certain elevation to the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings arrive this week. Prominent Palinists were fast to demean Sotomayor as a dim-witted affirmative-action baby. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, the Palinist hymnal, labeled Sotomayor “not the smartest” and suggested that Princeton awards academic honors on a curve. Karl Rove said, “I’m not really certain how intellectually strong she would be.” Those maligning the long and accomplished career of an Ivy League-educated judge do believe in affirmative-action — but only for white people like Palin, whom they boosted for vice president despite her minimal achievements and knowledge of policy, the written word or even geography.
(Emphasis supplied.) Ummm, Fred Barnes was what he was long before the arrival of Sarah Palin. Rich pretends that Palin invented the GOP Paranoid Style. It is a bizarre argument. Indeed why Rich has decided to write about Palin at all on this issue is not at all clear. He even argues that the Palins are country club Republicans:
The politics of resentment are impervious to facts. Palinists regard their star as an icon of working-class America even though the Palins’ combined reported income ($211,000) puts them in the top 3.6 percent of American households.
The one thing you can not say about the Palins is that they are country club Republicans. Indeed, the resistance in the GOP to Palin comes from the few country club Republicans that wield any influence (see Will, George.) Rich's column seems a chain of strange and unconnected attacks. He lost the most important point in his column - the issue of how the GOP Paranoid Style will play politically this coming week in the Sotomayor hearings.
Rich should have used Jeff Sessions as his foil. In the end, Rich descends into amnesia anf hypocrisy as he brings up Hillary Clinton:
The Palinists’ bogus beefs about double standards reached farcical proportions at Fox News on the sleepy pre-Fourth Friday afternoon when word of her abdication hit the East. The fill-in anchor demanded that his token Democratic stooge name another female politician who had suffered such “disgraceful attacks” as Palin. When the obvious answer arrived — Hillary Clinton — the Fox host angrily protested that Clinton had never been attacked in “a sexual way” or “about her children.”
Americans have short memories, but it’s hardly ancient history that conservative magazines portrayed Hillary Clinton as both a dominatrix cracking a whip and a broomstick-riding witch. Or that Rush Limbaugh held up a picture of Chelsea Clinton on television to identify the “White House dog.” Or that Palin’s running mate, John McCain, told a sexual joke linking Hillary and Chelsea and Janet Reno. Yet the same conservative commentariat that vilified both Clintons 24/7 now whines that Palin is receiving “the kind of mauling” that the media “always reserve for conservative Republicans.” So said The Wall Street Journal editorial page last week. You’d never guess that The Journal had published six innuendo-laden books on real and imagined Clinton scandals, or that the Clintons had been a leading target of both Letterman and Leno monologues, not to mention many liberal editorial pages (including that of The Times), for much of a decade.
(Emphasis supplied.) Rich must think we have no memories of his own trashing of Bill Clinton and his own sexist and misogynistic work against Hillary Clinton in the 2008 election. Who does Rich think he is fooling?
For those of you who do have short memories, Here is a link to a google of Bob Somerby's work on Frank Rich. Rich takes us for, in Somerby's word, rubes. Like Andrew Sullivan, Rich wants us to forget what he did in the past. I won't.
Speaking for me only
