Sarah Palin's Apt Return

Sara Benincasa's Palin impersonation is not as famous as Tina Fey's, but maybe more uncanny

When heard the news today that Sarah Palin was endorsing Trump, I chuckled a bit.  Does she actually matter anymore?  Would anyone's vote be swayed by her opinion?  After thinking about it, I realized that this moment is actually very important from a symbolic point of view.

Palin is effectively the prophet of Trump, his John the Baptist so to speak.  In 2008, when John McCain (to his everlasting credit) refused to question Barack Obama's American-ness or to play the guilt by association game, Sarah Palin jumped at the chance to do so.  All of her "maverick" talk of "real America" was the first sign that a large portion of the conservative base was thirsty for their leaders to engage in white identity politics.

Palin's discovery would be noted by the honchos of the conservative movement.  Once Obama took power, the Tea Party hordes were unleashed on a steady diet of "real American" identity politics.  Remember Glenn Beck's "we surround them" rhetoric?  Or the "makers versus takers" rallying cry that had at its core an anxiety that white people were going to have to give up their tax dollars to people of color?  (The same folks sounding this alarm also said things like "keep the government's hands off of my Medicare," so there were not principled Cato Institute libertarians, here.)  The Tea Party's biggest call to arms was the proclamation that they were going to "take our country back."  Who the "our" was and who it was being taken back from was never openly stated (as it never is in "post-racial" America) but the subtext was plain as day.

Palin herself was never able to be the leader of the masses that she helped inspire, most likely because she has always seemed more interested in celebrity than political power.  (No one interested in political power quits being governor halfway through their term.)  And so the Republican leadership managed to get an establishment candidate on the ballot on 2012 in the form of Romney, but also lost some Senate races due to the extremism (Todd "legitimate rape" Aken, anyone) of some of their Tea Party nominees.  Without a leader and frustrated by the party leadership's unwillingness to cater to the Tea Party or to go full blown nativist in their rhetoric, Trump managed to swoop in and capture the same people that had been shouting some, er, "interesting" things at Palin rallies in '08.

By endorsing Trump, Palin is not necessarily making a desperate grab at relevance, but perhaps to take credit for a politics that she helped unleash and that Trump has been able to appeal to with great success.  In fact, the last six years of American politics have been dominated by the demands of the Tea Party and their periodic hostage taking gambits via the debt ceiling and resolve to destroy immigration reform.  When the history of these times is written in future decades, I get the feeling that Palin's emergence in '08 will be well remembered.

The Deeper Meaning of Fox News Dumping Sarah Palin

How the mighty have fallen.  Sarah Palin, that inscrutable media grifter from the tundra has just lost her gig with Fox News.  She will no doubt soon find herself in that place so dreaded by celebrities and fame mongers: the "where are they now?" file.

The simple explanation for Fox's parting of ways with Palin would be that she passed her expiration date in a political scene where trends and personalities come and go with the seasons.  That might be true, but I see a deeper game at play.  This is actually part of a larger change in strategy on the part of the establishment of the Republican party, for whom Fox News acts as a mouthpiece, agitator, and propaganda arm.

If you remember, back in 2009, the Republicans reacted to president Obama's election and relative popularity with a campaign of massive obstruction, resistance, and paranoia.  They filibustered at truly unprecedented levels, they began making idle and constant comparisons between the president's policies and Nazism, and they unleashed the dogs of political war in the form of the Tea Party church and king mob.  Fox News threw down the gauntlet by giving a big platform to Glenn Beck, a paranoid ranter with the affect of a cult leader who soon found many ready acolytes.  For the first time in decades, the Republican party establishment let their Bircher id run riot with apocalyptic fury.  The gambit worked in turning out the votes and shifting momentum back in 2010.

The raison d'etre of the party was apparent all along, and even stated publicly by the likes of Mitch McConnell: to make Barack Obama a one term president.  After failing miserably in this quest, despite favorable economic conditions for an opposition challenge, it seems the party of no is having to re-strategize.  They have decided to put off the debt ceiling battle, they have relented on Sandy funding, and they are making some baby steps towards moderate compromise.

This is where Palin comes in.  She is the avatar of the "turn out the base" strategy, and pretty well pioneered it in the 2008 election, when she "went rogue" and shot her mouth off about "real Americans" and took the low road in her attacks on Obama.  She quickly gained a following in the conservative ranks, who had found a representative for their resentments against Barack Obama, as well as a symbol of all they claimed to stand for.  The enthusiastic response she received from the party faithful on the campaign trail made the party big-wigs realize the potential of "take my country back" populism, and certainly helped pave the way for the party's co-option of Beck and the Tea Party.

The last election seems to have shown the limitations of that strategy.  Nowadays the party pushes forward the likes of Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.  Much of this is to bolster facetious notions that the GOP is "young" and "diverse," but the new faces of the party are also more the old-school economic conservatives rather than the nationalistic rabble-rousers railing on behalf of "real America."  Republicans seem to think they can expand their appeal beyond older white people by dampening down the herrenvolk nationalism and playing up the Reaganite contempt for the downtrodden.  That, at the root, is why Sarah Palin is looking for a new gig.