new Sarah Palin book to enthuse over

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.

she needs to feed their hunger constantly or she'll be knocked out of their attention by some other media-generated stimulant.

like tickle-me-elmo

She seems more like a Justin Bieber at this point than like a John Boehner.

Just for the hell of it:

http://www.glossynews.com/artman/uploads/palin-barracuda-lipstick.jpg

A conventional gaffe could not, I don't think, affect her in either the nomination process (for the reasons Adam B. points out above) or even a general (because I can't see that someone who would consider voting for her in the first place is suddenly going to go "I have to rethink this"). The only thing that could cause everything to fall apart would be either a meltdown similar to the one Andy Griffith has in A Face in the Crowd (one of many blueprints for Palin), or, courtesy someone in her own party, a "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" Joeseph Welch moment.

Except with her, it would be more a "Once and for all: you really are a moron, aren't you?" moment.

But, like Rich says, it's like if someone had accused Andrew Jackson of having no sense of decency.

And the chances of such a climactic impasse occurring once the gloves come off in the primaries & the candidates get to ripping each other apart? Not altogether unlikely, I would say.

xp

She seems more like a Justin Bieber at this point than like a John Boehner.

i am more dumbfounded by the popularity of justin bieber than i am by the popularity of sarah palin

really? Which aspects of "pre-teen girls go apeshit over young male singer w/ cherubic face & windswept hair" do you find curious?

the part where the object of those pre-teen girls' affections is justin bieber.

One thing about that dream moment where someone finally confronts her on her completely lack of credibility: pretty much everyone who's possibly running on the Republican side, from Romney and Rubio on down, has thus far treated her with deference and respect. Even allowing for the fact that the survival instinct takes over in a primary, some of these people are going to have a hard time suddenly turning on her.

If she found herself going head to head with Gingrich, I could see it happening. Not sure what the chances of that are, tho.

i do: 0.

Yeah, Jesus.. Looking over the list of other likely repubs, I think u guys might be right: just a bunch of wishy-washy softshell dudes for the most part.

Speaking of which: I ate mussels last night.

Looking over the list of other likely repubs

can't go by the list of likely-suspects.

I think our best hope is that she achieves so much media saturation (and really, with the Palin klan bombarding over cable and network TV these days, that could be fast approaching) and the public gets sick of her by the time she tried to run for prez. The success of her media blitz is really disconcerting to me and makes me more cynical than most of you. I believe the same country that voted for W twice would elect a Real Washington Outsider like Palin.

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.

me too. tho I had the exact same reaction to the Reagan Vs Carter debate in 1980 - therrrre you go again [shakes head] - and look what happened...

to be honest i hope she runs, loses in spectacular fashion, and thus disappears from the national stage forever. the worst case scenario is never actually running and milking her audience for all they're worth for the next 20 years a la talk radio types. but in either case since so much of her appeal is based on her being *kinda* hot (i dont see it) the most gratifying thing to see will be the ravages of age leaving nothing but a bitter crone!

frankly, im pretty optimistic that the sarah palin story will end in some gratifying way. at least at some point.

The party won't nominate her because they want to win in 2012.

i'll leave it to shakey to explain to you precisely how that story will end.

I think our best hope is that she achieves so much media saturation (and really, with the Palin klan bombarding over cable and network TV these days, that could be fast approaching) and the public gets sick of her by the time she tried to run for prez. The success of her media blitz is really disconcerting to me and makes me more cynical than most of you. I believe the same country that voted for W twice would elect a Real Washington Outsider like Palin.

really, i think our best hope is that she wins the GOP nomination. i just don't see it happening.

If she does run for President, it'll be mainly to stay in the public spotlight as an extension of the Sarah Palin Show, because she has a minuscule chance of winning the GE (though I'm given pause by the fact that the GOP performed as well as they did in 2010 despite high disapproval ratings), and because she won't want to be tied down by governing the country when she could be hunting wolves from helicopter. I.e. it's going to be hard for her to live down her abbreviated governorship.

Just to clarify a couple of things I said earlier.

When I say she's completely new, I mean the context for her is new. As an archetype, she's been around forever. (You could even apply that famous William Carlos Williams line to her, "the pure products of America go crazy.") But appearing square in the middle of Fox News and reality TV and Facebook/Twitter, that's what new. (Nixon in 2008 would have been done in by a trail of Facebook posts rather than reel-to-reel tape.)

When I said that Romney and the rest have treated her with deference and respect, what I meant was that they've pretended to treat her with deference and respect, for fear of incurring the Tea Party's wrath. Unguarded, I'm quite sure they're every bit as derisive of her as anybody on the other side (something that slips through now and again).

And if anybody does take her on from within her own party, ideally it would be a woman; if not, you know where she'll go with that. When Palin first appeared in 2008, Hillary was in a perfect position to cut her down at the knees. But, still angry at Obama's side, she accorded her the same arm's-length credibility as everybody who doesn't want to open up that door does.

Sullivan makes the connection explicit:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/11/palin-as-lonesome-rhodes.html

lawl http://www.tinadupuy.com/uncategorized/sarahpalinsenemylist

A few more thoughts--thought I'd move them over here rather than post on the Giffords thread.

There's so much money at stake in a presidential campaign, I don't think the Republicans would ever send someone into a general who had zero chance of winning. I'm not a conspiracy person, but I do think party machinery (whatever that might mean) keeps a close watch on who gets the nomination. They do so out of view--i.e., things like the apportioning of delegates. One thing I got from the Halperin book on the 2008 campaign was that, contrary to the accepted view at the time, Obama didn't come out of nowhere and, through the will of the electorate, defeat the party's first choice. Clinton had the support of half the party establishment at best--probably less, as there were people who declared for her publicly but privately wanted Obama. The point: the party no way wants Palin in a general, so there's no way she'll get the nomination.

The question to me is, will she run? I'm on the fence there. A lot of people say no, that she's smart enough to realize she won't win, and therefore won't want to damage her (I hate this word) "brand." I'm not so sure. One myth about Palin that developed along the way is that, no matter how clueless she seems, she has great political instincts. I don't know why people say this; I hear it all the time on CNN. She had great political instincts for exactly one night, the night she gave her speech at the convention. Since then, she's made one suicidal move after another, last week's video being the latest (and resigning the governship being the most damaging to her chances of ever conceivably running again for higher office). She has a fantastic instinct for making news, and making sure she's still a story long past the point where she should be, but that's not the same as political instinct.

The one motivation that I think could cause her to run would be spite--she knows it would gum up her party's chances in the next election, and clearly she's developing a chip on her shoulder to match the one Nixon had. Every time she gets criticized within her own party--they were even questioning her video on Fox's roundtable this past Sunday (even Kristol)--I think she just digs in deeper. So I could easily see her running out of spite--a giant "go fuck yourself" to the party that doesn't want her to, knowing that the 25 or 30% of the Republican voters she controls would create chaos for everyone else.

She's certainly going through the motions of preparing to run, whatever that's worth.

she is a force of nature. the earth will shake, and the nation's battle hymn will be rewritten in her honor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhMepzqJvIw&feature=player_embedded#!

(posted for you, alfred)

The motivation that I think could cause her to run would be threads like the ones on ILE.

c'mon, alfred, don't deny the feelings inside.

my hunch is that what's going on is that the Right is starting to fracture the way the Left has been fractured for a while now, and as such Palin is sort of the Right wing Nader.

The genius of the republican party has been their ability to contain and manipulate the contradictory aspects of their party (white resentment and anti-middle class policies only go together for so long...) so it's amazing it's lasted as long as it has.

the key to palin is her ability to force her competitors to come down to her level (of discourse, of support for the hardest of hard-right policies). if she runs, this will be an interesting dynamic in 2012. suffice it to say, tho, that the parade of establishment conservative pundits urging her not to run or dismissing her chances are only going to embolden palin's supporters, if not palin herself. they underestimate her in their own ranks at their peril. i think what's happening there is that they've opened pandora's box, and now they're struggling to close and lock it

Pandora's box, yes--I even think of her as that hideous creature that escapes from Walter Pidgeon's id in Forbidden Planet. (Dr. Morbius, if I remember correctly. Interesting name.)

Even though I hated a lot of what she was saying the night she accepted the nomination--escpecially the community-organizer derision--she was kind of likeable that night. She was like Hank Kingsley the night he got to guest-host on Larry Sanders; still a bit of an underdog. If you know Larry Sanders at all, you know what Hank was like the very next day.

she wasn't the least bit likeable! she seemed formidable, tho.

i mean, she was likeable to conservatives, i guess.

i bet the two who sang the hymn-to-sarah (above) liked her from the beginning.

Trust me when I say she's fingernails on a blackboard to me now. But that night--even though I hate to admit it--I did find her kind of likeable in an Edith Prickley sort of way.

i liked her in a naughty-librarian-turns-dominatrix sort of way.

That too, of course. And that ship also sailed long ago.

bite your tounge!

ilx-poster-turns-dominatrix

this ^^^^^^^^^ of course is a daily occurrence.

i'm trying to envisage how unbelievably torpid those battle hymn-ers must have been before they became emboldened.