Beating Up on Sarah Palin

Beating Up on Sarah Palin


I’ll skip linking to the various conservative media outlets whacking Sarah Palin around. But it’s going on, it’s ugly and it’s pointless. Even more pointless are the columns claiming that liberals were right about Palin.

A few things

1. Palin isn’t running for president. She’s been around politics enough to know how it’s done and this isn’t how. After ’08, it would have been nice if she had committed to the governorship while making plans for 2012, but that didn’t happen. Instead she joined a conservative vanguard and helped push conservative populism.

It wasn’t enough, but it’s a whole lot more than we got from McCain, Romney, etc

The second tragedy of ’08 (besides Obama) was that the McCain team ruined a promising candidate through overexposure and lack of preparation.

2. Sarah Palin is the closest thing that conservatives have to a populist figure. That is someone who can connect to people who aren’t interested in politics and couldn’t name two candidates in a primary. There are a few Republican candidates who are good with audiences, e.g. Christie, Huckabee, Carson, but their politics are suspect.

And they don’t cross over into popular culture.

So when Matt Lewis writes that Palin dumbed down conservatism by “playing the victim card, engaging in identity politics, co-opting some of the cruder pop-culture references, and conflating redneck lowbrow culture with philosophical conservatism.”

He’s missing the point.

National politics isn’t about ideas, it’s about personalities and culture. And considering how tenuous the Republican hold is these days, “conflating redneck lowbrow culture with philosophical conservatism” is something it needs.

Palin’s approach doesn’t work on a national level. That well has been poisoned and she hasn’t done much to change that by appealing to a larger audience, but writing off what she has done is foolish. So is writing off her supporters.

We’re not going to win elections with philosophy. Ideally someone like Reagan can bridge the gap by putting philosophy into populist terms. We’re good at the philosophy, we’re bad at the populism part.

There’s plenty to learn from Sarah Palin. Both from where she succeeded and where she failed.

3. Preemptively protecting X by bashing Y is how we ended up with the mess in 2012 and Romney on the ticket. Taking a more objective perspective, instead of acting as bodyguards for our favorite candidate might produce better results. Especially since the conservative side of the ticket is fairly light anyway. The fighting is on the RINO side.


About Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.