Filed under: Author - ACG,Culture,Politics | Tags: Elitism, Political symbols, Sarah Palin
One last time.
Earlier this year, Fox News – always the fair and balanced news source – ran an “Obama Watch,” wryly mocking the Senator’s delay in sitting for his promised interview with the network. Had they chosen to run a “Palin Watch,” documenting the Alaska Governor’s delay in giving her first formal press conference, the clock would just have stopped today. That’s right, folks – Saturday Night Live notwithstanding, seventy-six days after McCain chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate for the 2008 Presidential election, she finally met the press.
The message of Palin’s first conference, though, may confound those who, like me, closely followed her campaign rhetoric. Fresh on the heels of her speech to the Republican Governor’s Association, in which she urged Republicans not to “let obsessive, extreme partisanship [...] get in the way of doing what’s right,” Palin went so far as to indicate her pride and respect for her former opponent, the President-Elect: “this is a shining moment in American history. Sen. Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and for our country.”
Huh? Now, I’m no big-city lawyer, but Sarah Palin chastising other Republicans about “obsessive, extreme partisanship” makes about as much sense as screen doors on submarines (or, alternately, Cheney pontificating on the limits of presidential authority). This is the same woman who, after defining herself in terms of an artificial demographic, characterizing all unfavorable media coverage as an illegitimate run on First Amendment freedoms, and labeling her opponents unpatriotic terrorist-huggers who don’t inhabit the “real” America, professed her reluctance to “label” herself or others. Either I’m missing something huge, or Sarah Palin thinks she can paper over her shameful election performance in the space of one speech and one conference.
I expect it’s the latter. But I’m not sure how far a moderate reinvention could take the Alaska Maverick.
If Palin is to remake herself into a respectable candidate in time for 2012 – no small feat – she will have to focus on the strengths we heard about before McCain nominated her, rather than the weaknesses that she actually aired for all the world to see. Critically, there’s a fine line between successful populism in the American sense – the practice of inspiring and standing for “the common man” – and rabble rousing. Looking to her iconic, legendarily divisive RNC acceptance speech, where respectable conservative commentators see the former, the majority of the American people correctly sees the latter. That will have to go: not only in words, but also in deeds. After all, it is the rare American politician who attains the Presidency by taking the low, culture-war road to victory. For Republicans, as with Democrats, success curried by Bush-style partisanship is fleeting and, more importantly, the exception that proves the rule.
Ultimately, Palin’s embrace of culture-war politics may be less her fault, and more the Republican Party’s fault. The Bush years notoriously married the GOP to the religious right, and it’s quite obvious that the fundamentalist wing of the party intends to bind the GOP to respect the, ahem, sanctity of that marriage. If her thorough drubbing at the hands of the media and the electorate has managed to impress upon Palin the importance of bipartisanship and nuance, there’s little indication that the GOP has learned the same lesson. By re-inventing herself, truly the most she could hope for is to become a new John McCain, respected on both sides of the aisle for policy judgments and lauded by the electorate for “rising above” politics. But, today’s GOP does not respect such temperance: being John McCain only got John McCain so far.
Thus Palin faces Cassius’ question: is her fault in her stars (the GOP), or in herself? In Palin’s case, unlike McCain’s, the answer is by no means clear.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Culture,Politics | Tags: Barack Obama, Democracy, Democratic Party, Republican Party, Victory 2008
Epoch fail.
The Republican Party spent the last eight years aggrandizing the office of the Presidency, and telling anyone who would listen – especially incredulous courts – that no force, whether judicial or legislative, could restrain its power in certain key areas of policymaking. Ironically, the Bush Administration’s “go-it-alone” approach to lawmaking led to several cataclysmic policy defeats (the latest being Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. ___ (2008)), and as Bush prepares to leave office to the jeers of a wrongéd country, the theory of the “unitary executive” lies objectively dead at his feet.
Of course, little things like “facts” and “the law” have never stopped right-wing pundits (either on talk radio or the less-evolved areas of the internet) from insisting on the vitality of the unilateral, “imperial” presidency. No: it took the possibility of a Democrat in the Oval Office to do that.
As I predicted last week, elements of the conservative leadership – Andy Schlafly ((Schlafly classily took a metaphor out of context to imply that an Obama staffer thought of the President as a “ruler”: “Hopefully Obama will read about his limited powers in the Constitution before he tries to ‘rule.’”)) and Chuck Norris (!) ((Norris’ other substantive points, if you have the stomach to read more about him, are ably dissected by “Big Dumb Chimp,” here.)) – are hard at work rewriting their vision of the Presidency, casting it as the weaker of the coordinate branches, an office honor-bound to forge bipartisan solutions. Both call for moderation, and both couch their pleas in terms of objective, institutional norms: to Schlafly and Norris, either the Constitution, or some ethereal sense of executive honor, or possibly both, will affirmatively require Obama to govern from the center.
To a certain extent, I agree with their pleas for mercy. Just as Bush should have done, Obama would do well to govern from the center. Aside from the fact that partisan governance would only further wound an already bitterly divided nation, there’s a degree of honor in the magnanimous act of showing mercy to a defeated foe. So let me be clear: I, too, hope that Barack Obama will govern from the center.
But I flatly reject the idea that Obama can be bound by the right-wing of the Republican Party to spurn partisanship. We Democrats – indeed, we Democrats and moderates – have been forced for the better part of a decade to endure the sneering disregard of an administration that cared not for any ideas other than their own, that manipulated both science and the Constitution to fit their warped & tortured goals, and that openly scorned the few brave politicians who, in the depths of this partisan hell, had the guts to stand up to a truly overbearing President. To be lectured about the merits of bipartisanship and constitutional values by an ideology that subborns both to its own agenda is the pinnacle of farce. To the Republican Party, apparently, honor, cooperation, and unity are only significant in defeat. No: with a stunning electoral mandate unmatched since Clinton, and a popular mandate unmatched since Bush I, the most President-Elect Obama owes the Republican Party, pursuant to its own rubric of presidential power and constitutionalism, is a speedy death.
Perhaps the Republican Party now realizes that its own strained reading of the Constitution, and its own inability to actually put “country first” rather than “agenda first,” were in error. If that’s the case, I have yet to see any indication. The speed with which both John McCain and Sarah Palin played the same tired old culture war cards belies the idea that the GOP has really gotten over itself. Make no mistake, Obama should – and will – govern from the center. But it’s not because the Republican Party deserves any better than to be sidelined, marginalized, and branded “unpatriotic.” It’s because America deserves better than another eight years of partisan politics. Bipartisanship should matter more – not less – when your party is in power. The Republican Party would do well to learn as much.
And, to Chuck Norris: the next time you try to lecture the Democrats on the constitutional limits of presidential power, not even your roundhouse kick will save you. I’m coming for you with copies of Boumediene, Hamdi, Hamdan, Rasul, etc., all rolled up into one giant paper bat.
