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 her home turf (Fox may soon be known as the Palin News Network), 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.”
I can acknowledge that future coalition-building may be a concern, but I’ve never been convinced that Palin herself would 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 there’s a more than negligible chance of such a turn of events, that means I wouldn’t count Palin out, at all – or presume that the Tea Party won’t be seen as mainstream by 2012, a classic “radicalism of the center” similar to Perotism. If that’s the case, then those moderate suburbanites won’t presumably be voting on a whim, or for a merely moderate change of course – just as Democrats in 1980 didn’t vote for Reagan because they temporarily confused him with Rockefeller.
Comments 18
Palin Entertainment and Sports Television maybe?
News not so mush
http://crazy-jokes.com/pictures/dogsmile.jpg
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:30 pm
A new factor just appeared re the 2012 race.
That fellow Scott Brown is a center right (maybe even middle of the road) guy who now has a favorable name among the hard right, the pro-life one issue folks and the Tea Party people. Plus he’s Mitt Romney without the Mormonism issue for the religious right. In three years he’ll be more experienced at the national level than President Obama was.
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:37 pm
@ Sully:
He’ll be too center for too many of the fundies and paste-eaters.
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:43 pm
@ fuster:
Don’t be so sure. They got behind McCain even before they got a taste of President Obama with a lock on congress. Brown is to the left of McCain by record in MA and he will have the luxury of just saying no for the next three years since the Dems will almost surely control the Senate for that period.
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:46 pm
@ Sully:
I’m not sure about anything in politics, but I thought that the fundies and paste-eaters really weren’t all that much behind McCain and that the Palin pick was partially to bring them into the campaign and out to the polls.
Is this incorrect, he asked sincerely?
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:52 pm
McCain at one time or another had ticked off prolifers, corporate officials, 2nd amendment activists, energy execs, et al, with his varied stances, Ironically Sarah had a history of upsettting the applecart
of the oligarchic Alaskan establishment, giving Exxon and the other majors, a big stinkeye. although not to the same degree. This is why
the local party didn’t give a big attaboy when she was picked, in the
same way that the Stalwarts didn’t really love TR in his native NY,
so you accidentally drifted into the truth, Sr, Rana
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:18 pm
@ fuster:
Palin was suposed to help McCain on multiple fronts. Before Palin’s stumbles and the whompin’ from the media, the strategy was working, too. I think the attacks did what they were supposed to do – paint her as culturally and ideologically unacceptable to moderates and especially to the liberal robot frog army – but it strengthened her bonds with the cultural right, turning her into even more of a heroine for them, but turning off the moderate-to-lib woman voters she was supposed to appeal to. Meanwhile, the reform and especially the energy messages got toadly wiped out by the financial crisis. Just look at the price of oil when McCain named her (ca. $108/bbl, with much higher prices a very recent memory) vs its price in November ’08 (ca. $50/bbl, and plummeting).
February 3rd, 2010 at 6:18 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Appreciate the response and would pester you further to ask if my idea that McCain was not warmly supported by the deeply-rooted right wing holds some water.
February 3rd, 2010 at 6:51 pm
I think we already explained that Sr. Frog, this is why most of the conservative pundits (Hannity, Limbaugh, Ingraham, Coulter, Beck, Bruce, etc) all rallied to a plain vanilla candidate like Romney out of
the contempt that they had for McCain. Interestingly, there was a similar instate dynamic for Sarah in her home state. She had resigned from the oil commission, as ethics officer, making an enemy of her boss, the party chief Ruedrich, She helped force out the Atty General who was doing private business from his office, she took on Governor Murkowski, for his giveway to the oil companies on the pipeline and on the PPT tax. Most of the material from the major book on her background, Kaylene Johnson’s bio, was compiled from
her local paper, which after Aug. 29th, turned her into public enemy# 1
February 3rd, 2010 at 7:09 pm
@ fuster:
More like actively hated by many on the far right, to this day, and likely to the end of all their days – explained by McCain’s general progressivism (TR’s his hero), cap&trade, campaign finance, Gang of 10, calling so cons “agents of intolerance,” and more – especially his role in the immigration debate. Many Sarahphiles were convinced he stood aside unforgivably when his campaign people were trashing her before and after the election. Many of the same people seem almost ready to abandon Sarah! over her decision to campaign for him against a further-right opponent in the R primary.
February 3rd, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Thank you both.
February 3rd, 2010 at 7:18 pm
army of frogs, indeed.
Al Gore if I want to!
February 3rd, 2010 at 7:24 pm
Yes, I don’t get it either CK, I’ve had my qualms with Sen. McCain before, frankly I don’t think he has earned her support. but that crazy Minuteman Simcox or quasi birther Hayworth, who is one to support
in this circumstance. Of course, if she had chosen not to support him,
other people would be calling her ungrateful, a diva, all those real
‘substantial’ terms from the end of the campaign
February 3rd, 2010 at 7:31 pm
@ narciso:
If this was Bolsheviks vs Mensheviks, and Palin had a chance to seize power with the former, then maybe there’d be an argument for sending McCain to the firing squad, but… this isn’t that. I think it’s actually a lay-up for her: She demonstrates her loyalty, shows she’s not a blind ideologue or captive of the far right, maintains her lines of communications with the RINO wing, and, like you say, it’s not like his opponents are Marco Rubio up-and-coming Mr Rights. Hayworth may have put his skeletons and some of his rhetoric behind him by the time McCain or Kyl retires, or maybe he can run for some other office. I don’t know anything about Simcox, but didn’t get the sense he was a serious candidate in anyone’s mind.
February 3rd, 2010 at 7:39 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
She’s no Bolshevik, dadgummit!
MS13 maybe
February 3rd, 2010 at 7:57 pm
I’m a strong supporter of Sarah Palin and was so many months before she was picked for McCain’s VP. On several blogs, I suggested her for McCain’s VP, doing so many months before he picked her and was shocked and utterly delighted when McCain choose her.
In the main, I agree with or at least do not find myself in conflict with her on most of the issues but perhaps even more importantly, I see her as an American Margaret Thatcher. She’s got the proverbial ‘right stuff’ and the worth of that cannot be overestimated. She can make the hard decisions without (ideology aside) Hillary’s nails-on-the-chalkboard abrasiveness.
Palin’s move to FOX is a political move, to over time, reintroduce Palin while simultaneously discrediting the MSM’s blatant misrepresentation of her. Palin is strongly pro-life, pro-military and a traditional American patriot type but on other issues she’s actually a moderate centrist. She places people and common sense ahead of conservative ideology, it’s not theory she’s interested in, it’s results. She’s not an intellectual but what is known as a ‘thinking (wo)man’s, (wo)man of action. In that, a Reagan type.
By 2011 I expect her approval ratings to be much higher.
I can accept her loyalty to McCain and while I disagree with some of his positions, his patriotism and independence and willingness to clearly state his position on the issues, earn my respect, if not my agreement.
I suspect that the Tea Party movement is going to heavily influence the Republican party and so will the (relatively) middle-of-the-road Scott Brown’s, who I also support and, see as having the ‘right stuff’ too.
Though I lean strongly conservative, I’ve always been an independent, perhaps that’s why I see that each side talks past the other because each side refuses to examine their own premises. And it’s that perspective that allows me to see how a Sarah Palin and a Scott Brown can both be accepted by conservatives and independents.
February 3rd, 2010 at 8:07 pm
@ fuster:
You’re right on this. I glossed over the fact that, although he would have gotten most of their votes anyway as the lesser of two evils (far lesser we know now); McCain gained enthusiastic support from the right only after he chose Palin.
February 3rd, 2010 at 8:31 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
McCain represents almost everything that’s wrong about Washington as a career. He hasn’t yet become a bloated or doddering caricature like Teddy Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Strom Thurmond or Chris Dodd; but he’s on his way.
That said, I would think it wrong for Sarah Palin not to support him because we live in the system we have and there is not a good alternative to him as a candidate. Also, it’s fitting that she should show some loyalty in return for his selection of her for the VP spot. It can be argued that he should have better managed his staff to her benefit; but he was in the midst of a rigorous campaign, and she is a big girl. It was reasonable for him to assume she could take care of herself vis a vis the staff.
February 3rd, 2010 at 8:44 pm
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