Palin’s paths – to the wrong destinations

posted at 4:49 pm on February 11, 2010 by CK MacLeod
[ Politics ]   

Happy Birthday, Governor Palin!

Your post-Tea Party Nation publicity wave is still cresting, carrying your most ardent supporters and even some of your most determined enemies to new heights of exaggeration – hype piling high to the skies, it often seems. Apparently, you’re a genius who scrawled those notes on your hand knowing they’d be picked up, kerfuffled, and widely propagated. You may even be the embodiment of the Kabalistic Shekhinah, the human dwelling-place of divine joy (or something…):

Between right and left

the Bride approaches,

in holy jewels

and festive garments…

In this context, an ABC/WaPo poll putting your negatives very high, belief in your qualifications very low, is also a gift – pulling expectations back toward ground level, and preserving your underdog status even while David Broder urges us to take you seriously, or while Joe Klein for once puts the praise, however briefly and deceptively, above the usual fear-mongering and derision.

Chris Cillizza is also riding the “Palin surge,” but by arguing that it’s “overblown.” He points to that same poll and to the strengths of potential competitors, yet he may just be making the same mistake as leftwing data-cruncher and fellow Palinmania surfer Nate Silver – from the other direction. Both are asking and answering a question that no one in his or her right mind should be asking about a primary race two years away: What’s Palin’s “primary math” and best strategy to gain the GOP nomination in 2012? This question isn’t just premature: That anyone is even asking it makes for another birthday acclamation, but, all the same, it’s intrinsically malformed, since it attempts to envision a conventional race for the most unconventional major political figure of our time, one of the most unconventional we’ve seen.

Whether or not you think Cillizza, Silver, Broder, my Kabbalah-inspired colleague, or any other wave-rider including me is over- or underestimating Palin’s current and potential strengths, there’s something wrong with any analysis of Palin’s prospects that overlooks her main chance, her main justification for running, and quite possibly her main hope of accomplishing very much if somehow elected: The prospect of a “sweep the pieces off the board” election, not the traditional chess match. Even Broder’s comparison to past “outsider” candidates looks like faint praise indeed when you consider how little was accomplished by most of them. Even the outsider above all outsiders, Ronald Wilson Reagan, arguably achieved less in the realms of economics and domestic policy than Palin’s Tea Party revolutionaries – the Tea Party is first and foremost a revolutionary symbol – are demanding.

In anything short of a second American civil war, Silver’s analysis may still be somewhat useful, and Cillizza’s informed counter-insights suggestive, but, assuming continued or accelerated development roughly along current lines – Obama failing and flailing, Palin and the Tea Party on the rise, the center shifted decisively right and political energies even more decisively anti-business-as-usual – Palin’s path may look a lot different.  It would likely be pushed – by positive and, considering the likely reaction, negative influences and feedback – well away from any track marked out by ’08 exit polls, ’09 fundraising figures, and 2010 guesstimates.

Call this the “Perot Squared” scenario, or maybe “Twilight of the Liberal-Progressive Gods.” It’s understandable that a circle of mainstream and leftwing, and mainstream-leftwing observers would discount the likelihood of such a turn of events. There’s no way to tease it from the numbers or frame it in familiar terms (though they’ll try, and try, and try…). It would represent the extension, possibly the culmination, of a broad historical process, not a familiar repetition of the usual four-year cycle. Any arguably similar events taken from American or world history will be, to say the least, resistant to direct statistical or theoretical conversion.

In addition to seeming the safer bet, it’s got to be comforting to many to imagine that by 2012 American politics will have reverted to the recent historical norm, and such a presumption may also lend comfort to those Republicans who might prefer a more traditional candidate than the thrilla from Wasilla – though for the latter group it probably shouldn’t. Among other things, it tends to imply the likely re-election of the incumbent president.

In the meantime, the same factors that are forcing observers suddenly to take Palin seriously have to throw all of their calculations, their very modes of calculation, into doubt. She (or what she represents, not necessarily Palin herself as future contender) rises as they fall, and she doesn’t have to reach orbit to move a lot here on Earth.

cross-adapted from Zombie Contentions

Blowback