Sarah Palin Is JFK

[candycorn]

The former governor of Alaska is teasing presidential prognosticators for the second consecutive cycle. As it relates to the 2016 election, Sarah Palin is in “serious” consideration. I’m speaking on this from a road less traveled and would like to hear from others: I’m a Palin Democrat. I discounted the hype and supported in the intraparty battle of 2008 the senator from New York; she’s nowadays the former secretary of state and may achieve as much as two-thirds support on that fateful day in November next year.

On the level of personality, I admired, but often fell out of love, with the former secretary of state. I spent the near entirety of year prior to the actual vote oscillating. I was charmed by her during a June debate and busied myself with two anti-Hillary books written by two of my favorite political commentators with whom I sometimes have great ideological differences: “Rewriting History” by Clinton White House alumnus Dick Morris and “No One Left to Lie To,” the late Christopher Hitchens’ treatise on America’s de Gaulle. In the end, I decided upon her. My eyes were consumed with water when I learned of her emotional meltdown in New Hampshire; I then felt invigorated by her shock triumph in that state’s contest, having been convinced she’d only achieve a decent second place finish like her husband’s sixteen years prior; I took the public transportation to the polls early ahead of the actual Super Tuesday ballot. I threatened to my family to register support for the senator from Arizona because of what I perceived to be brazen disrespect: the nasty attempts to hound her from the race, that is. John Heilemann of New York Magazine accomplished a great send-up of her in June. “Hillary Clinton, Superstar,” graced the cover the magazine a couple of weeks after the suspension of her efforts. All of this, predicated upon personality. A black kid reared in Savannah, Georgia, in and out of foster care, no less, I saw her finally as a black woman wrapped in white skin and her opponent and the victor—his race, notwithstanding—an odious villain applauded by an effete peanut gallery.

The next year the incomparable Webster Griffin Tarpley informs me with the start of his weekly radio program that our first Muslim president is in fact a muscular gladiator from finance capital and perhaps the end of this civilization. The cover of Dr. Tarpley’s attempted takedown of this movement in October 2008 suggests he is Dr. Brzezinski’s demon seed. (It brings to mind James Bonds’ A View to a Kill, the 1985 film starring Roger Moore. He’s Max Zorin.) The book is “Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography,” and on the cover the president is featured on the back of a collapsed donkey with President Carter’s national security advisor controlling him like a puppeteer with a vampire’s fangs. Dr. Tarpley doesn’t go this far, and perhaps much of this possibility is a state secret and he’s subject a gag order enforced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but for the present writer the political science is clear: 1) There’s a liberal lawyer, my top preference that can be set up to appear ideologically impure—and morally, as well, in the case of her husband—like the former secretary of state; 2) There’s the conservative lawyer, that can stand in the gap as an emergency compromise should finance capital defeat the liberal in the Democratic primary; and 3) the corporate lawyer, the root and soot of the establishment. In retrospect, it’s not the reactionary oilman from West Texas, but the demagogic black man from the South Side of Chicago. Over and over again this is the case. Grover Cleveland of New York, who’s the sheriff of Buffalo County and very briefly the governor, marks the start of the tendency. Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey and Harry Truman of Missouri; Jimmy Carter of Georgia, who sponsors Barry Obama of “Chicago,” with Mrs. Obama waiting in the wings despite the White House’s public posture.

If you’re the corporate influence, it behooves them, we finally know, to conquer the Democratic coalition. If the reactionary politics is the method to keep the establishment’s tax burden down, they’ve got to go to the South, they have to attend church and appear religious and there’s a limit upon what’s possible in terms of political science. If you take Genghis Khan of Wall Street and wrap him with black flesh and give him a genial smile and a liberal speech, it’s more successful and this is how one achieves policy victories that stand the test of decades. In retrospect, the Republicans in the White House are but caretakers. The last president is perhaps as anti-war or relatively benign as his predecessor, Mr. Clinton, about conquest in Iraq. He’s goaded in any event by his chief intelligence ministry that bears responsibility for the killing of the president, historically, and can maneuver around the chief executive to achieve geopolitical strife. It may well be the case that absent congressional approval and President Bush’s prosecution of the effort, the Iraq adventure is costlier and bloodier. It’s a thought. So, it’s not the White House Information Group under the auspices of an omnipotent vice president or the Project for a New American Century or the United States Senate. The war emanates from the Council on Foreign Relations. It emanates from the Carter administration in 1979. When the corporate influence takes over your party, it becomes more than fine to vote Republican. Not until March of last year did this become clear to the present writer. I voted for the president out of party loyalty not yet aware of what he was in the general election after the theft of the nomination from my preference. Four years later I had recently relocated to Florida and missed the vote as a consequence. At the time, I would have still cast a ballot in favor of the president. But again, this is folly. It’s not enough to oppose finance capital in the Democratic primary, it is okay, seven years ago, to vote for his opponent, a conservative war man. Four years later it’s appropriate to switch allegiance and support his opponent, a conservative businessman. The superlative is the former governor of Alaska. Before heaping scorn because she doesn’t know this or may not know that—no man has ever parted her legs but her husband, so let’s not ever get rude, Joe McGinniss—it’s possible the Carter administration with Firehouse Barry in mind simply fell on its sword so that the president would possess the ability to mechanically lift the election from anyone. We lost nothing.

The former governor of Alaska is useful. It’s surface and untrue to assign credit for the triumph of the reactionary Republicans halfway through the first term of the Clinton administration to the establishment. Complaining of the moral malaise represented by Susan Smith gets you relatively nowhere. The Contract with America, produced by the minority leader who goes on to become the House speaker, gets you some press on cable news and money articles in the National Review. The ideological heft came from the commentator Pat Buchanan. Mr. Buchanan had had a history of challenging the 41st president for the nomination in his re-election year and although his famous speech at the convention is widely recalled for his lamenting “the homosexual agenda,” Mr. Buchanan is most famous and effective for his opposition to free trade that’s anything but and the geopolitical aims of what he calls the War Party. If put to the test, Mr. Buchanan, not the minority leader who eventually becomes the first Republican speaker in a few generations, can be counted as a solid vote against the North American Free Trade Agreement that originates in the Bush administration and heralded as well, and to the point of success, by his Democratic successor. It has the effect of casting the ordinarily reactionary Republicans as opposed to the elite ensconced in Wall Street and the City of London. They appear as outsiders, and that’s how you pivot. If banished to the wilderness, it’s how you beat expectations and triumph. The former governor of Alaska, with aspirations higher than Mr. Buchanan, is the new. The former governor of Massachusetts is the only alternative in the way of serious movement leader and asset capable of the presidency. Here’s the talk: The former governor of Florida; the governor of New Jersey and the retired four-star general forced to resign his last civilian post as head of the Central Intelligence Agency are political actors from the chamber of commerce. If the president desired a third term and were to dismiss the vice president and seek instead a bipartisan Washington consensus, any of those three men would answer the call. Whoever the former governor of Alaska is, she did not shirk but answered the senator from Arizona’s request that she join his effort. The former governor of Massachusetts four years later would have benefitted from the same heft, but was left instead with the congressman from Wisconsin, a lightweight and backbencher would was supposed to have been the senator from Wisconsin by then in the place of the extraordinarily random self-financer who defeated the longtime Democratic senator four years ago. Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal is everyone’s gesture, having endorsed the president over the senator from Arizona during his first run. In terms of political science, if you sold your soul to President Obama, you’re out of politics. The next president is certain to be the former secretary of state, who, again, could collect as much as two-thirds of the vote. She’s like de Gaulle. But it’s not too soon to ponder: After eight years of a caretaker presidency—the problems and consequences attendant to re-electing this president are that systemic—what about Sarah Palin for president? I challenge you to think that far ahead.

What about Sarah Palin? You wrote in (what I assume) is serious tone so I will respond in kind. Palin is too small a person for the job. She quit her then-current job as governor for no legitimate reason. Her repeated mis-steps in the 2008 election are the stuff of legend at this point as to where the former Ms. Teen South Carolina Catie Upton is the only one envious of her poise and mastery of geopolitics. But what is most troubling about Governor Palin is what she has done post-career. Serious politicians head or sit on panels that address a public good; think of the Mitchell Commission investigating steroids in baseball or former Senator Al Simpson who was co-chair of The Simpson-Bowles commission. Or, probably most famous, Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean who were atop the investigation into 9/11. The ex-governor has done no serious work since leaving office.