Palin as Tea Party leader
posted at 10:04 pm on February 3, 2010 by CK MacLeod
[ Tea Party ]
Big TV event this weekend (you may also have heard that there’s a football game of some kind being played that some people are interested in, but it’s the next day):
Fox News will broadcast Sarah Palin’s keynote address to the National Tea Party Convention live on Saturday night, allowing millions of viewers to see the main attraction of a gathering that was once criticized for barring the press.
The network, which pays Palin as a political analyst and is considered the favored network of conservatives, will carry Palin’s speech during Geraldo at Large in the 9 p.m. hour, a network spokeswoman told POLITICO.
Palin will also be making her first “Sunday show” appearance the next morning, also on Fox. As a separate media moment, the interview should be interesting on its own terms, just to see how Chris Wallace and company treat her on what amounts to her home turf, but the appearance is conditioned by and in effect part of the Tea Party foray, which Matthew Continetti at The Weekly Standard sees as part of Palin’s attempt to turn herself into the movement’s de facto leader:
Sarah Palin is clearly mounting a bid to lead the Tea Party. Last year, she endorsed Bill Hoffman’s Tea Party campaign against liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava and Democrat Bill Owens. This week, she endorsed Tea Party favorite Rand Paul in the Republican Senate primary in Kentucky. She will address a Tea Party convention in Nashville on Saturday; Fox News Channel will broadcast her speech live. In a USA Today column, Palin announces she will also appear at Tea Party functions in Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nevada (March), and Boston (April).
Continetti has been highly sympathetic to Palin – not least as the author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin - but he goes on to argue that this move “carries dangers,” and he questions whether a too fervent embrace of the Tea Partiers will increase Palin’s chances of combining the “pro-life, anti-big-government vote” with the “moderate suburbanites who voted Democratic in 2006 and 2008 but began to return to the GOP in 2009.”
Continetti leaves out the possibility that the project he thinks Palin is pursuing could fail or be seen to fail, and he also leaves out the upside of having a solid base of motivated supporters, whether for winning presidential primaries or for exercising critical influence. It’s also worth noting that Palin’s other recent moves – accepting her regular Fox gig, promising to campaign for John McCain – show her risking some movement “cred” in favor of establishing a more familiar, one might say normalized presence: less of a lightning rod, less easily painted as an extremist. We can still acknowledge that future coalition-building may remain a concern, especially since Palin still has a long way to go if she hopes to recover the voters who seemed to welcome her in September of 2008, yet who had deserted the McCain-Palin ticket by November, but this seems like a worry for a normal year and a normal candidacy. Any safe and traditional path to the presidency was ended for Palin soon after she accepted McCain’s offer.
Palin might not make sense as a GOP 2012 nominee except in the context of an abnormal election year – on the order of 1980, but even more so. Because, however, there’s a more than negligible chance that 2012 will be such a year, it would be a mistake to count Palin out, at all, or for that matter to presume that the Tea Party movement or some successor won’t be seen as fairly mainstream by 2012, a classic and timely radicalism of the center. If that’s the case, then, just as Democrats and others in 1980 didn’t finally turn to Reagan because they temporarily confused him with Rockefeller, those suburbanites won’t presumably be voting on whims and fleeting sentiments, or for a merely “moderate” change of course.
cross-adapted from Zombie Contentions
Blowback
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Why can’t she just run for VP with a better POTUS candidate?
Newt/Palin 2012. On 2nd thought, Newt would be burning down some democrats in need of a good revenge beating and that could get out of hand
Punditpawn on February 3, 2010 at 11:19 PM
The HillBuzz guys, Hillary Clinton Democrats, are behind Palin ALL THE WAY. They are going all out for her. There are plenty of PUMA’s who have not gone back to the fold. They consider themselves Reagan Democrats. Could be very interesting.
Jayrae on February 3, 2010 at 11:46 PM
Well, considering that McCain supposedly considered Lieberman – I don’t know how real that ever was – I don’t think you could completely exclude a repeat try under certain scenarios, but I don’t see how anyone could take it seriously before the primaries had run their course, and the same problems that made Reagan give up on picking Ford in 1980, and made Obama reluctant even to consider Hillary would probably arise again.
CK MacLeod on February 3, 2010 at 11:53 PM
There, Politico, fixed that for ya!
JamesLee on February 4, 2010 at 8:48 AM
I think any POTUS candidate would consider her a poison pill on the ticket for no other reason than McCain lost. She also may no longer be satisfied with being second fiddle.
Kafir on February 4, 2010 at 10:13 AM
I do like Sarah Palin, and have consistently supported her right to self determination.
However, Palin as “the” Tea Party Leader, even if de facto, won’t suffice for grass-roots independent conservatives given her endorsements for multiple and over-termed professional politicians, namely Sen.McCain and Gov.Perry, without first having given public (private as well?) consideration for stronger Tea Party supported candidates, as for Debra Medina for TX Gov. Beyond energy policies, what does Palin know about Texas issues that the next governor will decide? As candidate McCain’s VP, conservatives never got a straight answer from Palin regarding amnesty for illegal aliens, a MAJOR PROBLEM throughout the Southwest. Palin went the “compassionate” route with her response aligning with Bush/McCain. How does that position “lead the Tea Party”?
Speaking of the TX Gov. primaries, neither Perry nor Hutchison will win a primary majority vote. Read about Sen.Hutchison promoting what appears to be ACORN tactics to recruit from the farming community new voter registrants that don’t vote in primaries but “might” vote Republican in the general election, never mentioning citizenship. Hutchison knows she’ll get stomped in an April runoff, Texas showdown style.
Listen to the Perry and Hutchison criticisms of the other; and make note of Medina’s opposition to their lobbied self interests. Perry endorses the TX Corridor Toll Highway whereas Hutchison endorses a new railway system. Both of those projects would be constructed by outside interests, even foreign companies, removing all the cash flow from Texas. Both of those projects necessarily infringe on property rights. To date in Texas, no newly constructed rail system has begun functioning, though paid for and built (Leander Express with Capital Metro for example), and proposed fees to ride keep skyrocketing. Toll fees that are already exorbitant also keep inflating to use the same stretch of road, previously constructed highways that were not toll-roads.
Notice the big shots’ lame and belated campaign promises to attempt pirating Medina’s thunder. For example, since the last debate, Hutchison has begun advertising “a property owners bill of rights” that both ignores the latest public election votes putting into law the TX Constitution Amendments from the last TX Legislative Session, and comes no where close to matching Medina’s platform to eliminate property taxes in Texas (to be replaced by a consumer tax around 9% for state income). Neither Perry nor Hutchison had any idea regarding TX laws dealing with patient rights; they were dumb founded. Whereas, Medina (former hospital nurse, long standing county party chairperson) expounded in detail what is wrong, and what she will do from the governor’s office to influence the correction of patient’s rights legislation in Texas.
In Going Rogue, Palin acknowledged her tendency to endorse candidates she has worked with, whether or not those endorsements were fairly balanced all things considered. Palin can endorse whomever she wants, just as we all can. But if Palin is considered the “leader” of the Tea Party, then she must refrain from endorsing candidates who either eschew the Tea Party or else usurp the Tea Party to enable their own political corruption.
maverick muse on February 4, 2010 at 10:32 AM
Frankly if Palin were a man there would not be these continual suggestions from some quarters that Palin “settle” for a VP slot.
technopeasant on February 4, 2010 at 11:16 AM
technopeasant on February 4, 2010 at 11:16 AM
What he/she said.
And frankly, that also goes for this “Palin needs to do this, Palin needs to do that” talk as well. Palin doesn’t “need” to do ANYTHING, and talk of what she “needs” to do is patronizing.
Palin has “Straw-That-Stirs-The-Drink” political and media talent, and it’s high time conservatives start adjusting themselves toward that talent.
BradSchwartze on February 4, 2010 at 11:36 AM
I think Sarah Palin’s “path to the presidency” ran off a cliff when she broke faith with the voters of her state to pursue money and fame outside of Alaska.
This woman is about as presidential as belly lint, and it’s very sad to see our little country reduced to looking to the likes of this not terribly bright woman for leadership.
What happened to us?
happyfeet on February 4, 2010 at 5:30 PM
The Democratic Party started scraping the bottom of the barrel and employing people like you as Concern Trolls, that’s what happened to “you”.
Leave the rest of “us” out of your problems.
victor82 on February 5, 2010 at 6:21 PM
happyfeet, you really are a special kind of idiot. She did not break faith with Alaska voters to pursue money… You really should read her book so you may learn what was happening with all the FOIA requests that were going on. She actually did a great service to the state by leaving office, now those employed by the state may actually do the jobs they’re being paid to do rather than dealing with all the extra junk brought on by those with an axe to grind.
And to those that are supportive of Newt Gingrich in 2012, it should be pointed out that the former Speaker will turn 69 years old that year. Li lime the guy a lot but his time has passed. His age would be used against him just as it was against McCain, Dole and Reagan by the left. We don’t need to load our opposition’s weapons for them.
rmel80 on February 6, 2010 at 7:13 AM
My iPhone went a little haywire on me there, not sure how Li lime made it in there. It was supposed to say I like the guy a lot…
rmel80 on February 6, 2010 at 7:17 AM