The question today is whether the Palins deserve the attention they get in American media. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they get in the news. Why?
There’s one very big reason why Sarah Palin, and to a lesser extent other members of the Palin family, have become such political lightning rods: They’re a farce. If SNL or Bill Maher wanted to think up a skit to poke fun at the conservatives in the USA, they couldn’t have done better. It’s like the Alaska-Washington DC version of “The Beverly Hillbillies“, except instead of striking oil some old guy who had already sold out his beliefs in order to get reelected to the Senate finds himself in the race for the US Presidency and realizes that he has absolutely no chance of winning it except for the political equivalent of the Hail Mary pass. He throws this giant political football up to Wasila and hits an ex beauty queen in the head with it. After talking for 15 minutes they decide that their maverick team is exactly what America needs to reinvigorate the political DNA of the conservative party, re-instill those core American beliefs that made us such a great nation, and capture the spirit and imagination of people who have been wronged, lied to, and cheated by big government lefties.
Only it doesn’t quite work out. After Mama Hillbilly moves in next door, the rich old white guy soon realizes that she could become a huge liability. She’s not very smart – although she does show some media savvy – and she brings with her Papa Hillbilly, Daughters Hillbilly, Baby Hillbilly, and even Boyfriend Hillbilly. The old jalopy is rocking the American Dream and BOOM!, now there’s Still Unwed Pregnant Teen Daughter Hillbilly about to pop out GrandBaby Hillbilly, and Mama Hillbilly has to get Boyfriend Hillbilly to become Son-in-Law Hillbilly until at least the elections are over. Which The Mavericks lose, but in the meantime new wardrobes are purchased, the allure of the camera lens and spotlight becomes even more appreciated, and a grand time is had by all (Cue laugh track, a post-election divorce between Postpartum Daughter Hillbilly and Son-in-Law Hillbilly, and a subsequent Ex-Son-in-Law Hillbilly feature in Playgirl.).
That’s the funny part. What’s not funny is the pure gusto with which Sarah Palin and her family have abused the trust of the very constituents that they claim to support and represent. Sarah Palin left office early in Alaska and embarked on a lucrative career as political personality/commentator/pundit/gadfly. She was certainly having a rough time of it as Governor of Alaska, but she could have stuck that out. Instead, though, she struck while the fire was hot and could make money for herself while still claiming to be for all the people who supported her as a politician. Other Palins got odd jobs as a professional snowmobile racer, being themselves in a reality TV show, performing as a celebrity on a TV dancing show, or as the richly-paid face of a particularly non-active charity.
They all have the right to do this, of course – I think that most people would agree with me on that. What is irksome is the sanctimonious drivel that gets spouted in the name of making a buck. It is patently obvious by now that the Palins are not in this to make America a better place. They are in it for money. If Sarah Palin really was concerned about righting the wrongs of the political system, she would have stayed in it and fought the good fight. If Bristol’s main focus was really to help stop teen pregnancy, she would have volunteered her time and maybe even donated her Dancing with the Stars fees.
But none of this prevents many conservatives from revering Sarah Palin as the embodiment of all that is good, right, and proper about conservative political views. To ignore the political force that is Sarah Palin is not only to ignore the person, but also to ignore where this comes from and why the people who like Sarah Palin can ignore the self-serving money-hungry personality that she has become.
It’s important to note that we’re used to our politicians doing this once they leave office, and Sarah Palin has certainly left office. What is different is that when famous politicians leave office in the USA, they usually leave the political limelight. Ms. Palin hasn’t done this. What she has done is redefine what a politician is, and in this new definition you don’t need to hold actual office to be able to help form and direct political opinion. That’s at least one reason why she is a force as well as the farce described above.
Even the leaders of her own party don’t quite seem to know what to do with her. They vacillate between praise at her ability to bring attention and focus on the Republican Party, and dressing her down (Usually more quietly, this one…) for damaging the image of the party and impairing its chances in the 2012 Presidential Election. Within the Tea Party faction of the GOP, however, Ms. Palin is still seen as a prime contender to lead the party in 2012. The Republican leadership can’t ignore this block and hope to win, so for now they keep up the vacillation and try to work out a solution.
A very telling exchange between Rick Santorum and Ms. Palin in mid-February shows the way that Republicans are tippy-toeing around the issue as well as how sensitive Sarah Palin is to how her image is perceived, even when that perception is is coming from within her own party. In response to a question about Ms. Palin’s decision to not attend CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Santorum said “I have a feeling that she has some demands on her time, and a lot of them have financial benefit attached to them.” He also went on to comment on the demands on her time from being a mother with children. The response was swift and typically Palin in the passive-aggressive way it was made. The most succinct quote from her response? “I will not call him the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. I’ll let his wife call him that instead.”
Of course, this made me think of the Anais Nin quote “We don’t see thing as they are, we see them as we are.”
All joking aside, Anais Nin’s insight is applicable to the Palin farce or force question. Strongly liberal voters tend to see the Palins as a farce. They discount her long-term impact on the American political scene and focus instead on the disingenuousness of Sarah Palin’s supposed beliefs in conservative political values even as she rakes in money because she left her political career behind. Tea Party voters see her in exactly the opposite light, as someone who was pushed out of office by underhanded political attacks and who is staying a public personality only out of a desire to remain a public servant. The GOP, stuck between a rock and a hard place, is waffling between its desire to hold on to those conservative Tea Party voters while also viewing Sarah Palin as a threat to the unity and integrity of the conservative voting block in the United States.
In between are many, such as myself, who look at the whole thing as a passing, but dangerous phase in American politics, where Sarah Palin and her family are at the same time entertaining and frightening. What I believe is critical to understand is that the Tea Party country conservatives who back Ms. Palin so strongly are doing so because the current political parties have somehow alienated them. Whether this alienation is due to class, economic, education, or religious differences, I’ll leave for another time — mainly because I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that movements like this do not spring fully-formed, but develop and mature over time. They also do not occur randomly and for no reason. Sarah Palin’s supporters are angry about something and they want a change. Whether they get that change from Sarah Palin or not remains to be seen, but even if they don’t, the anger will remain until it is addressed. That makes Sarah Palin a force as well as a farce, and while I will continue to enjoy her entertainment value, I won’t treat the angry voters behind her with such a light heart. They scare the GOP, and if they scare the GOP they should scare everyone further to the center and left as well.
This post came about as the result of a Facebook exchange. You can see the original exchange here.
Reminds me of the Forrest Gump quote “Stupid is as Stupid does”.
Except now, we can apply this notion to a growing ‘constituency of the naive’ (Palinistas) who live in a world of False Consciousness where a self proclaimed Hockey-Mom of no intellectual depth and questionable character is an attractive choice to lead the free world. Truth is indeed stranger (and more frightening) than fiction.
Lest we stand by idly while the sheep continue to be mobilized to choose the shepherd, the rest of us must become more politically involved.
Jim: Great phrase –> “constituency of the naive”! I may have to borrow that as some point…
Peter,
Tripped over your blog looking for information on how you were faring after the disaster and I must say, I am greatly impressed. My dad Howard, was your Grandfather Milo’s brother. I named my son after your Grandfather, who along with your Grandmother Lois, were two of my favorite people of all time. I can’t begin to tell you how proud they would be of you. Enjoy your observations. Keep up the great work. Hope I get to meet you someday!
Scott Opdahl
The Woodlands, Texas
Peter – really enjoyed the post. My running partner and I have been debating the Palin phenomenon on our long Saturday runs for a while now. I have several theories about her popularity, some of which you hit on. As much as people want to focus on her and her many flaws, the truth is that there are reasons why she resonates with so many people. Until we better understand and overcome those reasons she will continue to be a farce with force.
Thanks for the note, Melissa. I didn’t get into this in the post, but one of the things that I haven’t at all figured out yet is why the conservatives who support Palin so strongly refuse to acknowledge that she (As well as Newt Gingrich, btw…) have leveraged their previous political fame into brands that are now geared basically to making money off the hardcore supporters that made them famous in the first place. Newt will sell you anything (http://www.gingrichproductions.com/) a red-blooded conservative could desire, and Palin’s ex son-in-law, personal assistant, and various other people have written extensively about how her focus changed once she and McCain lost the presidential race and the offers started rolling in. It is clear that she left the Governorship to pursue these offers (As she has a right to do.), but her supporters don’t see this and I cannot for the life of me figure out why.
I think there are several issues at play here. First, there are plenty of examples both current and historical of folks being able to overlook the flaws and contradictions of their spokesperson or “hero” in their zeal for the cause. (just think of all the feminists who seemed to have little problem overlooking Bill Clinton’s well-known womanizing ways). The second issue has more to do with the whole tea party phenomenon. The people who are attracted to this movement are very difficult to characterize as a group. They don’t fit neatly into a box and while many may think little of Sarah Palin personally they are willing to accept her as their mouthpiece because she keeps their views in the press and gives the overall movement some political clout. They probably wouldn’t vote for her but they’re happy to have her on Fox news making a lot of noise. What are your thoughts on how the tea party movement managed to gain traction with the American public?
I think that you’re right about people overlooking flaws in the people they admire – It’s like not wanting to admit that you were wrong about something. I’ve seen it in everything from my own failure to see character problems in an employee that I otherwise admired and wanted to succeed, to one particular college friend who had an autographed photo of OJ Simpson on his desk and who to this day does not believe that OJ killed Nichole Brown. So be it, but one of my beliefs is that you have to take responsibility not only for yourself and your actions, but those of the people with whom you surround yourself. I’ve used that as a status update here on FB and wrote a blog entry about it at http://opdahls.com/2011/01/11/putting-the-crosshairs-on-dishonesty/.
As from where the Tea Party sprung, I want to say shattered economic dreams, but that’s too simple. I was actually watching when Rick Santelli at CNBC had his famous rant that started the whole “Tea Party” thing. You can see the video here (http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=1039849853), and at 2:10 is when the “Tea Party” idea was coined. His rant is about how he (and the traders around him) didn’t want to pay taxes that would be used to bail out people who were underwater on their mortgages. Personally, I agree with this – If you thought you could afford a $400K mortgage on $40K/year of income, call it economic Darwinism or call it what you will, but your bank account ought not to survive. I remember talking about the rant a few days later with a friend who called me a (direct quote) “cold-hearted bastard” for that opinion, but I believed it then and I believe it now. Had the Tea Party stayed with this idea of personal and fiscal responsibility, I would be a Tea Party member today.
What happened after that, however, was that as the Tea Party movement really started to coalesce, the outrage at the people, corporations, and government policies that had caused the problems was supplanted by a far stronger outrage at the government alone. It’s ironic to me that a movement that started out as such an outcry for people and corporations to take personal responsibility for their actions became one where much of this responsibility was placed on the government. (Even more ironic is the notion that by making government smaller and reducing oversight that somehow these sorts of problems will right themselves and not happen again, but that’s a different issue…)
I think, though, that more than anything the Tea Party is a constituency of disappointed people. They had plans, those plans got wrecked along the way, and now there is a suspicion that somehow the government is at fault. And it certainly was for some things, one of them, in my opinion, being that the government fostered the bad behavior Rick Santelli talked about by bailing out large industries in the past, particularly the S&L industry. This incurs something called “moral hazard”. If you haven’t heard the term before, it is used by economists to describe policies that reward risky behavior by making the costs of that behavior not equal to the rewards possible by doing whatever it is that is risky. In this case, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and a slew of other government entities engendered moral hazard over decades by enabling government-backed mortgages and tax benefits from purchasing homes. The financial industry then exacerbated the problem by repackaging these mortgages into financial instruments that were understood by very few people and that were rated by companies who were getting paid by the very companies that wanted good ratings. When the bottom fell out, the government stepped in to prevent most companies from going bankrupt. This was done for a lot of good reasons, but it also jacked up moral hazard so that it is even higher than it was before.
The focus on bad government, however, I think also comes from the election of a Democratic President while all this was happening. A vast majority of Tea Party members are Republicans, so for them this was just another example of things going bad. If you look at the polls, you also see that the percentage of white, male, older-than-45, and evangelical Christians is much higher than in the general population. What you don’t see are significant participation by minorities, non-Christians, or recent immigrants. The election of a black man with a strange name and a childhood spent overseas in a largely Islamic nation as the son of a poor single mother didn’t (doesn’t) jive with either their politics or their sense of what America is or should be.
One thing that you also see if you look at the polls is that Tea Party members have a higher-than-average level of education and a higher-than-average income. This isn’t likely due to them being inherently more intelligent or hard-working than other groups – or at least I haven’t seen any data that shows this. What is almost certainly the largest contributing factor is that minorities and immigrants play almost no role in the Tea Party. Because minorities and immigrants have lower overall levels of education and income, their absence raises the Tea Party average. Another way of looking at it is that since the Tea Party members are largely white and born in the USA, they benefitted from the US education system and from the very government policies described above that boosted the values of homes across the USA for decades.
And this is where I think you find the genesis of much of the Tea Party popularity. People had a really, really, really good life in the USA in the 20 years from 1988-2008. But it was a standard of living based on misguided government policy compounded by weak regulation of corporations and underwritten by the past experience of the financial industry that if they really, completely, just totally screwed up that the government would come in, wipe their bottoms, kiss them on the cheek and send them back to try again. The financial community was right, and they got saved. People who shouldn’t have bought their homes in the first place, lost them. And people who did all the right things found their home value shrinking daily, driving many of them underwater and reducing their sense of security, their real wealth, and their faith in the American Dream.
As I said above, if that were it and the Tea Party was fighting solely to prevent these kinds of excesses from happening again, they would find me an ardent supporter. The inconsistency of the Tea Party (And I’ll catch hell for this opinion.) is that most Tea Particans don’t want to fix things – They just want it to go back to the way it was before. As much as they scream about entitlements such as Medicare or the healthcare bill, what I believe that they are really screaming for is to protect their own entitlements, entitlements they feel – perhaps unconsciously, but nevertheless — they have because they were born here as white Christians. They were born in the USA and it was good. Something happened – they’re not sure what – and it isn’t good anymore. The Tea Party movement is a classic reactionary movement that wants to go back to a supposed better time, nothing more and nothing less. The problem is that they have no rational plan or roadmap to get there other than promoting the political equivalent of comfort food. That means fund the military to fight off the scary Muslims while defunding almost any kind of activity that has to do with sex education or abortion. It means lowering taxes on corporations (Remember, they’re richer than the average American…) while reducing spending on the fine arts. It means promoting Christianity over plurality. It means feeling good about themselves again.
To me, if it were logical it would be more bearable, but the dual rallying cries of “Small Government!” and “Debt Reduction!” have been empty of anything except indignation and hot air. In Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Kansas, the hardest core Tea Party states out there, with hard right Governors and legislatures, the overwhelming trend since the November, 2010 elections has been more debt and larger, more intrusive government (In Florida, all state employees must undergo drug tests at least once a quarter now. Oh, and the Governor owns a drug testing company.).
You’re right that you can’t put all Tea Party members into a neat box. I try very hard to keep an open mind and not stereotype, so I realize that there are many Tea Particans that don’t fit the description I have made. There are many ex-Tea Party supporters who recognize that the Tea Party got hijacked and are disgusted with what has happened, but there are many more current members that feel somehow that a return to ever more conservative behaviors will somehow bring back past glories or at least a better lifestyle and more secure feeling about where they fit into the American puzzle. I can’t see how this would ever work, but I’m not a Tea Party member and at this rate never will be.
Wow. I wasn’t expecting this to come out this fast or be this long – Must have been building up for some time…
Thanks for shirang. What a pleasure to read!
Wow is right! I’m sensing that was incredibly cathartic in an intellectual kind of way. Your analysis appears to be right on track from my vantage point. Although the founding members of the Tea Party may have had a good understanding of the financial mess that got us where we are and a simple desire to ensure that these wrongs were righted, the movement has been taken over by a completely different segment of the voting public. This is where Sarah Palin comes in. Initially (not in her current form) she represented the socially conservative, fiscally responsible, working class. This is a group of people who have felt under-respresented as the two major parties have moved ever-further toward their polar extremes. Republicans are seen as elitist old white men with deep ties to corporate America. They just don’t resonate with the middle classs. Democrats, while claiming to represent the working man, have moved so far to the left on social issues that many Christians struggle to support them. This means that the Tea Party was ripe for being hijacked because there was a whole group of folks just waiting for someone to represent them and Sarah Palin and others were more than happy to be their mouthpiece. Although the Tea Party may be dominated by white men, don’t count out the power of the homeschooling mom (an important variant on the soccer mom). These are the very people you described. They yearn for a “kinder, gentler” time when it seemed that working hard and living right were all that was needed to get ahead in life. It is an inherently enticing notion but, as you point out, it is unrealistic. Sadly, not all are as driven by good, sound logic as you are nor do they see the contradictions in there arguments (if we want the government to stay out of our lives, how do we justify supporting legislation that tells people what to do with their bodies, who to marry, etc?). And this is where we get back to the topic of contradictions. Just as I’m sure you were able to work through the “flawed but otherwise admirable employee scenario”, you are able to identify, own, and resolve contradictions in other aspects of your life as well (ie politics, economics, etc). Unfortunately, many people neither see nor wish to see the contradictions that are all around them. The discomfort it creates is just too great. So…they end up joining a movement that was never designed to represent them with a leader who bears little or no resemblance to them. Got to love the contradiction in that….
I agree with everything except that the left has moved further left. I, for one, don’t believe that my views have changed in the past 20 years, but I went from voting for George Bush Sr. to shuddering at the thought of putting Republicans into office now. The Republicans have shifted so far right that what was once centrist — Remember that uber-liberal hippy Bill Clinton? — is now fringe left-wing extremism. Moderates lost their voice, took it back when they elected President Obama (Who has been anything but a hardcore left-wing politician.), lost it when they lost confidence in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and are now just finding it again. Let’s hope that they keep it through the 2012 elections.
Keep in mind I live in Eugene, OR. The left is very far left here! Hence, being a moderate feels like you’re a right wing nut job. It’s all in your perspective :)