new Sarah Palin book to enthuse over

you know, that special love crazed Evangelicals have for Jews

oddly, this "love" is rarely comforting to me.

Funny, that. 'Love 'em to death' doesn't really do it for me, either.

But as an evangelical isn't she also apocalyptic; the RW Israel lobby seems bent on rebuilding the temple, etc right? Or am I tin-foil hatting?

Does anyone here know why so many Catholics went screwy evangelical in the last half of the '70s?

― Exotic Flavors of the Midwest, available in corn, bacon, or beef (suzy), Sunday, November 21, 2010 1:01 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

just a matter of whos got the juice

Israel reference or no, I would be surprised if she could make it all the way to getting the Repub nom for the GE without being undone by some egregious gaffe (or series of them in all likelihood).

a recent poll showed that only half of republicans even thought she was fit to be president - shes shown no aptitude for cozying up to the gop establishment or building the kind of national organization necessary for a legit presidential run - shes got a rabid fan base and shes a media natural but her negatives as far as electoral politics goes are v v high - id be surprised if she did better than third in the gop primaries

Does anyone here know why so many Catholics went screwy evangelical in the last half of the '70s?

I'll give you a hint, it rhymes with "the portion"

Does anyone here know why so many Catholics went screwy evangelical in the last half of the '70s?

Perhaps they felt that the Vatican was not being politically aggressive enough on the abortion issue & so they jumped on board with the Francis Schaeffer-inspired movement that essentially served to found the Christian right and mobilized evangelicals into politics.

or maybe "Moe verses Glade"

yeah, i don't see her as a legitimate candidate. i'm not sure if her presence in the primaries would help or hurt democrats in terms of the eventual GOP nominee. i can see her either splitting the tea-party vote with someone, thereby helping a candidate who moved toward the center-right (which is where i expect people like rubio to be) or revving up the tea-party in ways that cast a negative light on those more moderate candidates, dooming them with the GOP's core constituents.

(xp)

I thought these people were just a bit impatient about the speed at which their Messiah was returning, but yeah, I can see abortion could also be a factor. However, it was not discussed as a reason; my mom always said they were all sad 700 Club types who thought they were getting a 'do-over' by being born-again, ie. the reasons were not external.

SP is apocalypse-minded and I maintain that believing in the end of world/Second Coming happening in one's own lifetime is a provable case of toxic narcissism in ANYONE. She already said something dodgy about Jews 'moving to Israel in the coming months and years' or similar, she's a Young Earth Dominionist, she 's in Seven Mountains prayer circles with some seriously loopy people, and LOOK, A WITCH DOCTOR.

I can understand the impulse to analyze her words for consistency, etc. like you would any politician, but I wouldn't bother. She's Nixon through and through; she will say anything at any given moment, and if it's egregiously inconsistent with her background or something she said five minutes ago, and you were to point that out, that just makes you part of the "gotcha" wing of the world that's out to get her. Her words are as completely empty of meaning as any politician I've ever encountered--even the Nixon analogy has limitations.

to be clear -- and i'm sure you're not saying otherwise -- nixon was a lot smarter than sarah palin.

nixon couldnt hang w/palin in todays reality - i feel like the really compelling thing abt her is how contemporary she is - she is totally of the moment while most politicians are as always attempting to triangulate the zeitgeist

that and of course how funny she talks

wait, you mean that she isn't worried about crossing-over to more moderate constituencies or appealing beyond her base? that i get.

how she talks isn't the key to her considerable charm. it's that she's hott (-ish).

to be clear -- and i'm sure you're not saying otherwise -- nixon was a lot smarter than sarah palin

Yes, absolutely--by a factor of 10,000. And there was meaning to Nixon's words, you just had to often unlock that meaning through the labyrinth of his grudges, schemes, and obsession with the past (i.e., an offhand remark in 1972 might find its meaning in some slight from a reporter 30 years ago).

the way she talks is so unctuous and fake, when i heard her for the first time in the first VP debate i was stunned that people actually thought she did well, let alone others who thought she won.

i feel like the really compelling thing abt her is how contemporary she is

Yes. Even though there are parallels to Nixon, Perot, and lots of other people from the past, she is, I believe, something completely new.

while i appreciate her high particularly for a politician attractiveness quotient, its her speech patterns what really do it for me

People thought whe did well in the Biden debate because the bar had been set somewhere down where the Chilean miners were.

fwiw, if she runs in 2012 (and i'm not sure she will), i think she'll be much better prepared than she was in 2008, and a more formidable candidate. it's just that she's also decided that she will ride this folksy thing as far as it will take her, which will hurt her chances considerably.

tr: she's (somewhat) less of a dummy than she appears to be.

Possibly...But it's like when someone says "I'm not as dumb as I look," and you have to force yourself not to say "That wouldn't be possible."

Frank Rich sez: The more condescending the attacks on her, the more she thrives.

yeah shes good at playing the victim but even rich has to insert this highly unlikely cavat into his completely media driven narrative Should Michael Bloomberg decide to spend billions on a quixotic run as a third-party spoiler, all bets on Obama are off. i mean being a media star is great but its not going to run yr ground operation or make people think reality tv is a presidential look

Nice piece.

or later Palin’s opponents will instead have to man up--as Palin might say--and actually summon the courage to take her on mano-a-maverick in broad daylight.

That's what I said yesterday upthread; that if Rubio or someone else can do this and survive (it tends to get called a "Sister Souljah" moment on the Democratic side, which is kind of unfair, seeing as Clinton was flexing his muscle on an obscure 18-year-old rapper), I think he or she would be in fantastic shape for a general election.

I find her far more patronizing of the Left than vice-versa.

the general election is like: is unemployment still around 10%, if so a republican wins, if not obama stays

hard to see unemployment falling that much before 2012. i do still think, regardless, obama is a very formidable candidate. but, rightly or wrongly, he owns the economy now, so . . .

btw, this part of rich's article:

It’s anti-elitism that most defines angry populism in this moment, and, as David Frum, another Bush alumnus (and Palin critic), has pointed out, populist rage on the right is aimed at the educated, not the wealthy. The Bushies and Noonans and dwindling retro-moderate Republicans are no less loathed by Palinistas and their Tea Party fellow travelers than is Obama’s Ivy League White House. When Palin mocks her G.O.P. establishment critics as tortured, paranoid, sleazy and a “good-old-boys club,” she pays no penalty for doing so. The more condescending the attacks on her, the more she thrives.

is 100% otm.

unemployment could easily be way down in a couple years, the fact that its not all ready is ~a bit of a mystery~

someone here (maybe on the rolling us economy thread) noted how many jobs have to be created each month, from here until 2012, to make the unemployment rate drop even 2%. it's a huge number. between that and the systemic problems with the economy, i don't feel so optimistic.

as to why it isn't already, i hope/assume that part of the answer is that many of the infrastructure projects weren't really so "shovel-ready" as advertised?

Stupid-and-proud-of-it white folks may seem like a huge demographic but... large enough to elect a President?

yeah shes good at playing the victim but even rich has to insert this highly unlikely cavat into his completely media driven narrative Should Michael Bloomberg decide to spend billions on a quixotic run as a third-party spoiler, all bets on Obama are off.

this is OTM. I don't think she would stand a chance in the GE w/o some extraneous factor, & Bloomberg would likely win over just as many old-guard repubs as middle-of-the-road dems.

Tho I agree w/ Rich that the nom is hers to lose (which she very well could once the spotlight narrows on first round primary candidates & the mudslinging begins).

eh, Frank Rich doesn't amuse me much these days. I wish he didn't devote so much attention to Palin, actually. Guys like Rich are for some reason shocked at the rise of someone like Palin; they're genuinely flummoxed.

I mean, it's almost redundant that Palin should get her own TV show -- she's been a reality show candidate since 2008.

i don't think he's flummoxed by palin's rise.

He definitely is -- check out the archives. So many column inches devoted to her. I'm as guilty as anyone of explicating her appeal, but something about Rich's posture -- a liberal pedantically explaining to other liberals who haven't the faintest intention of ever voting for her, let alone visiting a Red State -- bothers me.

I'm about to remove this much older acquaintance from my Facebook friends because every other post is CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT TODAY'S GOP IS DOING? and during the elections was genuinely appalled by Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle. It's like, "Where WERE you when Nixon and Reagan were in the White House?"

I don't think there's anything wrong with being flummoxed by Palin's rise. Her rise is very...flummoxing. Again, there are lots of historical precedents, but--even against a yardstick as recent as W.--she's something new.

But we tend to overstate her importance because we all read the same lib blogs. She'd be scarier if she commanded more than a fifty percent approval rating.

And that's where the disconnect, and the flummoxification (my very own "refudiation"), is: people like Rich trying to calibrate if it's possible for someone viewed as a joke by 50%+ of the country to make a credible run at the presidency.

sure it is, because the primaries are for the core constituency, unlike the general election (where both parties, each of which have roughly 50% of the country already in their corner, fight like mad over the 5 -- 10% of voters who are undecided/truly independent).

Israel reference or no, I would be surprised if she could make it all the way to getting the Repub nom for the GE without being undone by some egregious gaffe (or series of them in all likelihood).

See, this sort of sounds like common sense when dealing with Palin in the public sphere, yet so far she has shown an amazing ability to control the narrative about her. FAR more than Obama or the Dems or frankly any other politician I can think of. She can pull out the Lamestream Media card, the Sexism card, the Liberal Elites card, whenever she pulls a gaffe. It doesnt matter if it shows her to be a complete phony (for example the hand cheat sheet) objectively because she has the power to say "Oh, well, gosh, I'm just an ordinary folk, wink wink".

Her fanbase believes everything she says, and she provides them constantly with new content. The idea that a gaffe will discredit her, I think, is sort of a pipe dream that belongs in a world of facts and objectivity that simply doesn't exist in the US political climate today.

far she has shown an amazing ability to control the narrative about her. FAR more than Obama or the Dems or frankly any other politician I can think of

not so in the 2008 general election. more recently, she's taken shelter in friendly media environments, where it's easier to "control the narrative."

she provides them constantly with new content

This seems U&K for explaining the 10% or so of USAers who are her diehard fans. They are Palin consumers, and she needs to feed their hunger constantly or she'll be knocked out of their attention by some other media-generated stimulant.

xxp: does that ability really work outside of her base, tho? To get through the primaries (& I'm not necessarily arguing that she can't), she is going to have to convince the more moderate and traditional swaths of the repub base that she is electable. I could even see some of her steadfast apologists getting cold feet about that if she does anything too outlandish or if poll numbers suggest a bloodbath in the GE.