Posted on 01/24/2011 11:43:09 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Now that the left's McCarthyite attack on Sarah Palin has subsided, she merely has to suffer the disdain of the intellectual elite. Even James Taranto, admitted high-school dropout, damns her with faint praise.
This is nothing new. The nostrils of the educated class have always twitched at populist conservative candidates for president. Voters of a certain age will remember the disdain for Candidate Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan? Of course Ronald Reagan. Back in the 1970s Ronald Reagan was a wild-eyed right-wing conservative who could never be elected president. So a young conservative like me, already a devotee of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, went to my local precinct caucus in Washington State in early 1980 as a Bush supporter. Bush was more electable, you see.
At the precinct caucus I discovered something that changed my mind. In the Bush corner with me was a nice older couple. But across the room were the unwashed folks in the Reagan corner. They looked like technicians and construction guys, and they looked like they ought to be Democrats. And there were a lot of them. Ah ha, I thought. Something is afoot in America. So I switched to the Reagan side in that caucus and lived happily ever after.
Here in are in 2011 and nothing has changed. The popular, populist candidate of the ordinary working stiff is Sarah Palin, and the educated classes just can't get their wine glasses around the idea of a Sarah Palin as president. Where's the experience, they wonder? Where's the well-rounded education in political philosophy? Where's the record as a successful administrator? Where's the Ivy League degree?
I once used to believe in all that malarkey, and I agree that all those things are important -- in the staff. The Germans figured this out two hundred years ago when they created the General Staff for their armed forces, complete with staff colleges. What are our modern policy analysts in their think tanks but the general staff of the nation's political forces?
The big idea of the general staff concept is to free the leader from the details so he can concentrate on the big picture and win the battle. In warfare, we have the commander and his chief of staff. Already at the Battle of Waterloo the Prussian army was led by Blücher, with chief of staff Gneisenau to do all the brainiac stuff. In politics, we have the candidate up front and his consultant in the back room.
Let us hear what the "creative destruction" guy, Joseph Schumpeter, has to say about candidates and elections in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. "Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them... viz., free competition among the would-be leaders for the vote of the electorate."
The name of the game is winning elections. This means that electoral politicians are like football players; they are best they can be at what they do. They are professionals, experts in winning elections. Schumpeter quotes an unnamed politician: "exactly as [businessmen] are dealing in oil so I am dealing in votes."
In 2012 Republicans will be nominating for president a professional politician to win an election. We cannot worry about administrative skills and legislative tactics and academic pedigrees. That comes later, in 2013. For now what matters is the skills of the professional politician: framing issues, sensing the mood of the people, moving the center, and telling the people what they want to hear, and doing it again and again.
We already know that Sarah Palin is No.1 when it comes to framing issues. Back in 2009, the summer of the "death panels," old warhorse Pat Buchanan neighed his appreciation of her skills when he wrote: "Of Sarah Palin it may be said, the lady knows how to frame an issue." No wonder. Palin has been a professional politician since 1992.
Here's another little nugget. In her first book, Going Rogue, Palin called herself a "common-sense conservative," and repeated the notion every second sentence as she traveled around the nation on her book tour. Last fall, as she promoted her second book, the leopard had changed its spots -- just a little. Now Palin was a "common-sense constitutional conservative." Who wouldn't prefer that to a ideological rule-by-czar liberal?
It just happens that Palin has a particular connection with the white working class, a large demographic that is up for grabs in 2012.
In the winter of 2011 President Obama is clearly tacking to the middle; he would be a fool not to. Already, his polls are improving. It will take the best politician, the best in America, to spoil his wind.
If there's a better conservative politician around than Sarah Palin, we'd better know his name by the summer of 2012.
It depend on the state of the economy on whether Obama will be reelected imho. If the economy is the same as it is now (illusionary), I think Obama will be reelected. The entire US economy is like a ponzi scheme at moment. As long as there are ppl willing to send in the money, the music will continue and everyone can pretend the economy is great
The best description I've heard is that we're in a "twinkie recovery" -- all artificial ingredients. Deficit spending, QE II, bailouts, crony capitalism, etc. etc.
Tonight, it will be converted into "investment". So much hokum.
I’m with Sarah
Palin 2012
Blah blah blah.
Even Reagan didn’t rile up the leftwing weenies the way Ms. Palin does.
And that’s good.
Supposedly, Obama thinks that he knows more about EVERY subject than his staff does. This is a sign of true arrogance.
As we discussed here some weeks ago, this is also why our legislators should not all be lawyers. Lawyers are good for the staff to get the details right--but we need some vision from business people, military people, and even working stiffs.
Something is definitely up...
Sarah’s facebook page gained over 12,000 new ‘fans’ in the last 18 hours.
Speculation on Palin blogs is it could be Huckabee’s announcement that he won’t enter the race until late summer IF THEN, and it’s possibly Huck supporters checking her out.
Or it could be due to her brilliant editorial in USA Today on Ronald Reagan that put Romney’s and Obama’s to shame.
That is a huge jump in support during an otherwise kind of quiet week.
Maybe it was the Rasmussen poll showing she isn’t as ‘unelectable’ as people have been saying...
These ideas are being discussed on the C4P blog.
Andrew Carnegie said he had only one real talent.
Being able to spot and recruit people who were smarter and more knowledgeable than he was.
This is the real reason the media could never stop covering Gov Palin. the demand for news about Palin is great and therefore that demand will be satisfied. If the LSM will not cover her negatively than the epro-palin people will win the war of ideas as that demand is met with positive media.
Now we just have endure disdain for Joe McCarthy from imbeciles like Christopher Chantrill.
And has been for the last fifteen years.
We've been inflating our national standard of living by inflating public and private debt, rather than by increasing real income.
Any President who intends to get us back to fiscal reality is going to have to say a lot of "No"'s:
No to Wall Street. No more federal support for asset bubble gambling schemes. Go back to your role of providing capital support for the real economy, the economy that produces goods and services.
No to entitlement beneficiaries. No more growth in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security beyond the level that current and future taxpayers are willing to support. No to tea party signs that say "Hands Off My Medicare!!"
No to Americans who think they can borrow their way to prosperity, or that being born in the USA is an entitlement to material success unless we can produce competitively with the rest of the world.
I'm not hearing any of this from Sarah Palin. So far her economic policy is mostly feel-good, painless solutions.
There are no feel-good, painless solutions. We are looking at a couple of decades of austerity, even if we adopt all the right policies today.
When she starts offering some Churchillian blood, toil, tears and sweat, I'll be on board.
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