Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:43 pm
Republicans are just starting to admit the danger their party is in, but they haven’t hit on the proper reasons yet.
In an effort to avoid looking inward, Republicans are blaming Sarah Palin for Donald Trump.
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Nicolle Wallace, a former senior adviser to McCain/Palin in their 2008 campaign, wrote a scathing piece at the New York Times – “Sarah Palin, Rage Whisperer”, in which she blames Palin for Trump, “Mr. Trump has now usurped and vastly expanded upon Ms. Palin’s constituency, but the connection between the two movements is undeniable.”
This tortured piece holds Palin responsible for wrapping herself in the rage of the voters, “Her legacy lies in her innate ability to wrap herself in the anger that those voters felt.” The gist of it is that Palin stoked rage and turned the Tea Party against the establishment and now they have Trump.
So let’s start off here. Sarah Palin isn’t new to the Republican Party and they picked her for a reason. To deny this seems disingenuous but perhaps it speaks more to the desperate levels of denial that intellectual Republicans will go to in order to avoid facing what has become of their party.
Republicans picked Palin because she spoke to the base and because she was allegedly what they call “pro-life”. She was a great image – fierce and beautiful while leading the great state of Alaska (she was actually the most socialist governor of all the states but I’m talking about her image not reality), and the party needed an image.
All politicians need an image to really resonate, but when you’re coming off of the party’s denial of their weapons of mass destruction lies that led to an invasion of a sovereign country that then contributed in large part to the power vacuum that gave rise to ISIL, well, it’s best to wrap yourself in the flag and lofty talk of freedom whilst ducking away from serious discussions that would require an ounce of intellectual honesty.
In the 2008 campaign, the GOP was hit with their denial of the financial crisis, which came to a head days after McCain promised everyone all was well, culminating in the Bush Great Recession. People lost their life savings and then were asked to bail out the rich. Who was pushing the Wall Street bailout? That was the Republican Party, when Bush was still in office. Bailing out too big to fail banks should have been a clue that the party was no longer the party of real capitalism. The Republican Party allowed itself to be trapped between its subservience to corporate money and the growing extremism of the far right. The tent was shrinking.
If it wasn’t small enough due to their mismanagement of the economy or Iraq, there was always the Republican ideology on display in the clustermuck that was the administration’s failed response to Katrina, remnants of which can be seen currently in Michigan under Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s response to the Flint water crisis.
I could go on, but Republicans know all of this already. They have just chosen to ignore it.
They were and are in the position of selling hate to cover for their denial of climate change and trickle down promises in subservience to corporations. Republicans must sell hate to people who don’t know they are being manipulated, or no one but the 2% will vote for them.
This is why they picked Sarah Palin. So to blame Sarah Palin, whose hatred they used and let harm innocent people, is the height of hypocrisy. Sarah Palin was but a symptom that something was very wrong with the Republican Party. I’ve been saying this since 2009, when I first started covering politics.
Liberals get annoyed by coverage of Sarah Palin, not understanding that she represents what the Republican Party has become. She is an excellent branding mechanism for what ails the GOP.
Ms. Wallace romanced the moment when Senator John McCain corrected a woman in his crowd who called now President Obama an “Arab”, saying, “This interaction will go down as one of the finest moments from one of the country’s finest men.” Really? President Obama says things like this on a weekly basis at the very least. Why is it that when a Republican manages to work up an ounce of political courage to stand up for reality members of the party swoon and cling?
Perhaps it’s because Republicans so rarely have a moment to celebrate integrity these days. But no, that was not the “one of the finest moments” of our country. It was a hideous shame that this correction was only made once, while high profile Republicans stoked the race fever at every turn.
Ms. Wallace has deluded herself into the conservative line of thought that Republican voters are angry for real reasons such as Republican failure to do enough to stop Obama. This is almost laughable from the outside, where it’s obvious that conservative anger keeps leap frogging from one issue to another, no matter if the issue is fabricated or not. These people are angry about Benghazi because the conservative media told them to be. When each fake scandal fizzles out, they move on, adding that failure to their pile of growing resentments. They are angry because that is who votes Republican these days. The resentful of change, the people who want to blame brown people and women for their own failures – the Archie Bunkers of this country. Republicans know this, as well. They’ve been using the Southern Strategy for decades. So to pretend they aren’t responsible for the resentment in their base is laughable.
They’re just angry that after all of these years, it gave birth to Donald Trump, who unlike Sarah Palin, can’t be put down so easily. Trump can’t be used and tossed aside as the party did with Palin. Trump has too much money and access. Trump was a celebrity before he was a Republican, instead of the way Palin did it. He owes Republicans nothing.
Wallace wrote of Trump:
That he would refine and recalibrate his proclamations in a general election or as president is a widely held assumption among the Republican establishment. It’s possible that this is the kind of false comfort that people on a sinking ship murmur to one another about how death by drowning really isn’t a bad way to go.
If Republicans have honed one specific skill in the last 30 years, it is the skill of burying their head in the sand and hoping math and logic aren’t real. Donald Trump is not going to suddenly change into a new person who values loyalty. See his wives.
Republicans could have stopped the hate when McCain and Palin lost in 2008, but they didn’t. Republicans used Sarah Palin’s hatred to try to kill Obamacare. Republicans didn’t condemn her violence-inciting rhetoric or her call to pull over the Obama bumper sticker car and confront them or her gun sites she posted over Democratic districts.
Republicans were silent then because Palin was doing their dirty work.
When Blood Libel outed Palin as an incredibly self-centered person with a persecution complex, the public began to hold their nose and Republicans began their slow walk away from Palin.
Did Republicans walk away from what Palin represented? No. Did they address the fundamental problem that they have never taken responsibility for Iraq, the financial crisis, or Katrina? No.
These are all things they need to do in order to win the White House without someone like Donald Trump.
Because everyone else is too smart to vote for a party of drunken frat boys who refuse to step up with an ounce of accountability and be a grown up. The only people the Republican Party can attract with its current platform of climate denial, hatred for immigrants, liberty-stomping for women, and troops in every country are people they can manipulate with rage.
There were a lot of hate mongers in-between Palin and Trump, but Republicans are conveniently ignoring this fact in order to place the blame for their party’s demise on Sarah Palin’s shoulders.
I am no Palin fan, but she is not responsible for Donald Trump. Where was the integrity to speak out against her when she was operating in service of the party’s agenda to kill healthcare reform?
The party can’t refuse to take responsibility for hatred they use and aim with deliberation and egg on when it suits them.
A platform so full of denial the only people who can fall for it are those whom it directly benefits and those who can be conned by rage or “faith” to vote on emotion.
Enter stage right, Donald Trump.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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