In Ed Kilgore’s piece in the new issue of the Washington Monthly, he comes out of the box making a couple of astute points.
In late January a once-dominant figure in Republican politics suddenly began hinting at a presidential run and got a lot of negative feedback. It had to make Mitt Romney feel better.
Yes, 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin pointedly refused to take herself out of the running for 2016. There were few cheers. And in a first, when Palin subsequently gave a scatterbrained and embarrassingly juvenile speech at Representative Steve King’s Iowa Freedom Summit, conservatives were as scornful as liberals.
In part that’s because the ratio between her brief career of statewide public office in Alaska and her subsequent self-promoting isn’t improving. But in part it’s also because she’s proved to be eminently replaceable in Republican politics.
In Palin’s case, I like using the idea of a ratio between what she has actually accomplished politically and the quantity of exposure to her the American public has endured. It’s true, the ratio gets worse every day, and that does help explain why she gets more ludicrous over time. Thinking about Palin this way is a little deeper than just seeing her as a carnival act whose novelty has worn off.
And that’s important because Ed’s second point is that what was novel about Palin hasn’t gone away. It’s gone mainstream in the Republican Party. And no one demonstrates this better than the formerly happy warrior, Mike Huckabee.
It’s easy to forget the old Mike Huckabee from 2008 whose message Frank Rich called, “simply more uplifting—and, in the ethical rather than theological sense, more Christian—than that of rivals, whose main calling cards of fear, torture and nativism have become more strident with every debate. The fresh-faced politics of joy may be trumping the five-o’clock-shadow of Nixonian gloom and paranoia.”
The author of God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy bears little resemblance to the man who scolded Mitt Romney seven years ago for wanting to punish the children of undocumented workers by denying them in-state tuition in the University of Arkansas system.
Here’s Ed:
While nobody has written a full-fledged manifesto for conservative cultural resentment, Mike Huckabee’s new pre-campaign book is a significant step in the direction of full-spectrum cry for the vindication of Real Americans. It is telling that the politician who was widely admired outside the conservative movement during his 2008 run for being genial, modest, quick-witted, and “a conservative who’s not mad about it” has now released a long litany of fury at supposed liberal-elite condescension toward and malevolent designs against the Christian middle class of the Heartland.
In other words, Huckabee has written a book that could just as easily have written (or, more likely, ghostwritten) by Sarah Palin. He’s in on the grift.
The clever conceit of God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy is that Huckabee is explaining to powerful and arrogant elites of “Bubble-ville”—New York, Washington, and Los Angeles—the sturdy folk virtues and beliefs of “Bubba-ville,” by which he means the rest of the country, though it often sounds like just the Deep South as viewed by its older and more conservative white residents. But the book is clearly meant for “Bubbas,” and it is meant to make them very angry.
The old Huckabee is gone, replaced by this bitter and resentful scam-artist. Now the question is, how much “Palinism-without-Palin” will the 2016 presidential field ultimately produce?
It’s a good question. Check out the piece to see Ed’s answer.
This is the change in the majority of the TP/GOP party. They have morphed into full fledged angry people that hate so much they are dancing on the rim of insanity. In recent years it looks like they are going to immerse themselves fully into the insanity side of life. That is why these people are dangerous to any and all that do not share in their craziness. They religiously believe you are either in agreement with them or you are not to be tolerated. It is getting worse, far worse and needs to be controlled soon.
Beautiful. From one Spock to another.
Kilgore gives Palin way too much credit. The basic script she recites is old — as in 1930s old. Her novelty rested on her appearance: politically center to right men wanted to fuck her and their wimmen-folk wanted to look like her. The script can be endlessly reworded for the particular messenger. The cranky (usually southern) and obviously mean old white guy. Phyllis Schafly lacked “it.” Polished up for Agnew. Reagan didn’t it with a veneer of geniality. Newt lost his appeal with it as he aged, fattened, and dumped the second wife. GWB carried it with an “aw shucks shuffle.”
Which version of Huck is the real one — or are they all nothing more than new masks for different plays in time and space? Hucksters are like that.
Recall reports from AK in the immediate aftermath of her elevation by one brain-addled Republican that they’d never heard her speak like that before. If one were interested in checking out that assertion, reviewing her AK gubernatorial debate video and other speeches would be a good place to start. I suspect that she was handed a script in 2008 and her handlers quickly discovered that turning it into a schtick was an easy path to big bucks. Without her physical attributes, the seeming copycats are stuck shilling for votes, but wouldn’t today be much different if Palin had never been plopped down on the national stage.
” the idea of a ratio between what she has actually accomplished politically and the quantity of exposure to her the American public has endured. It’s true, the ratio gets worse every day, and that does help explain why she gets more ludicrous over time.”
I agree, the ratio is a useful concept. To bring it down to its essentials, Palin’s appeal was that she galvanized the RWNJs by embodying (and you may take that in more ways than one) their fantasies. But in reality (yes, Virginia, there is a reality) she accomplished nothing and it has been clear for quite a while that she is never going to accomplish anything.
So the trick would seem to be how to have some version of the Palinesque charisma along with the ability to do actual stuff politically.
Now at first glance this would seem quite feasible, since Palin, for all her tundra charm and ruthlessness, is not exactly the brightest bulb in the box. Surely there are more capable demagogues out there.
But then, Palin did not nominate herself. She got to be famous only with the backing of forces more rational and more powerful than she is. So her failure was also their failure.
Even the winning combination seems to work, nationally, for only 27% of the national electorate. Which means it doesn’t work for the other 77%. That ratio is not changing.
Scott Walker, for example, has galvanized conservatives but has also put policies into action. But that is within the borders of the state of Wisconsin, given the special conditions prevailing there And he is a product of the powerful and ruthless Koch Bros.
Republican heroes these days tend to have a short shelf life. Palin’s a great example, but what about Ted Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, even “geniuses” like Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Newt Gingrich. Where are they now? They blaze in the night sky for a moment like a corruscating fire, then fizzle out, to be immediately replaced by the next one.
I meant the other 73%.