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Saturday, September 06, 2008

Beyond the Palin

It is true that the Palin pick was a wild-card effort to mobilize the Republican Christianist zealot base to combat Obama's superior ground-game. I said "wild-card," which sounds all "mavericky," but it would be better to say "deal with the devil" inasmuch as the free-marketeers have been discredited for good and the Christianists have been consigned to the demographic wilderness for good -- and I do mean For Good.

Still, it is also true enough that the Palin gambit seems, at any rate for the moment, to have been mildly successful for McCain's purposes. I say "mildly successful" contrary to the impression of breathless pundits who represent the only constituency with a stake in keeping things close even when they aren't, because it doesn't look to me like the poll numbers or the money numbers really support all the breathlessness anyway.

The simple fact is that Obama has never been behind (the usual outliers here and there discounted) and isn't now and won't be at any time from now to the election, barring catastrophic vicissitudes. I mean, how many ways can you pretend that the way the winner is winning is really somehow a kind of losing through not winning "enough" or winning in the "right way" before you grasp that the winner really straightforwardly is the one who is winning?

Those who are panicking about all this Palin nonsense really need to get a grip. If the appeal to this Palin-esque base could have won the Republicans this election McCain would not have been the nominee of the party (and Katharine Harris would be a Senator instead of a punchline today -- exactly as Sarah Palin will be tomorrow).

Palin was chosen to halt the skid-shriek of an utter Democratic landslide. Too many traditional Red-States were purpling like bruises before our eyes, the Electoral College map was turning into an utter Goldwaterian nightmare for McCain (suspect and in any case irrelevant national polling notwithstanding).

Palin is an admission of defeat in 2008 and the first move of a Rovian effort to garner some come-back Congressional seats in 2010, or even possibly a fantasy of a replay of some Gingrichian-style counter-revolution to stall the momentum of what is looking like an emerging long-term Democratic majority.

I don't see that happening either. The democratic wing of the Democratic Party emerged from the Reagan era demoralized and too unsure in its principles, but ever more and ever better Democrats are emerging from the debased Bush era as fighting liberals.

We're at the turn of the tide. Palin is a side-show, a complete embarrassment. Keep your eyes on the ball. Obama most certainly is. And that is enormously encouraging.

1 comment:

Theodore Flames said...

Palin did her job--she reinvigorated the Republican base so that now McCain has a chance in Hell--which is something he didn't before. He still doesn't have much more than that, but he'll take what he can get.

As for Palin herself, she reminds me of a character from "The Handmaid's Tale." I'll let you guess which one.