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Today on Coffee and Markets we’re talking to Melissa Clouthier of LibertyPundits who shares her views on the political fallout from the Arizona shooting. We also discuss whether Congressional staff should be armed, and how the right should respond to the smears of old media.

We’re brought to you as always by Stephen Clouse and Associates. You can find our iTunes feed at CoffeeandMarkets.com. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

DC Examiner: Should Congressional Staff be Armed?
Marc Thiessen on the Outrage From the Left
Glenn Reynolds on the Politics of Blood Libel
Halperin: Pointing Out Smear Only Makes Things Worse
Poll: Americans Reject Democrat Spin on Rhetoric
Yousefzadeh: Short Memories Ignore Left’s Calls for Violence

One of the things few people seem to be mentioning when it comes to evaluating the 2012 field on the Republican side is the power of individuals to raise money and spend it wisely, which tends to be the hallmark of well-run campaigns.

The important thing is to understand that all this talk of dark horses and potential candidates is just that–talk–until any of these lesser names prove they can raise money. The power of Sarah Palin’s name is quite significant, of course–but that’s not necessarily the same as the power to gain money from followers who want to give it to you, as opposed to a candidate you’ve endorsed. Given that 2012 is going to easily lap 2008 in expenditures, we should be mindful of this power of the purse.

So please, keep the following numbers in mind. In 2010:

• Thune raised about $750k this cycle.
• Daniels raised about $1.4M.
• Huckabee raised roughly $1.8M.
• Pawlenty raised about $3.3M.
• Palin raised a little more than $3M for SarahPAC in 2010, about $5.4M since ’08.
• Romney raised almost twice as much as Palin, a bit more than $5M. He has raised roughly $8.8M total since the ’08 election.
• Gingrich raised more than $24M for American Solutions 527 in the 2010 cycle, and about $700K for his personal PAC.
• Perry raised nearly $38M, just for his personal campaign, from about 22,000 donors.
• Barbour raised a metric ton of cash — $9M in the first quarter, $19M in the second, and $31M in the third. Ultimately RGA raised more than $50M just this cycle, and could approach $70M if you look at the past 18 months. Haley’s personal PAC raised an additional $1M.

These are based on the numbers publicly available as of early October. Obviously, of all of these, only Perry was on the ballot. You could assign Palin more weight since she obviously did a ton to direct people to give to other candidates, but in terms of her personal cash haul, that’s a much smaller number than you might expect. Gingrich went by the ad strategy instead of donations to candidates, as is his wont, but he was the headliner for virtually all of their fundraising, and American Solutions is really defined as Gingrich, Inc. You could question how much credit is due to Barbour personally, since RGA was just promoting their candidates and he wasn’t the headliner a lot of the time (plus, a lot of money went to them that would’ve gone to the RNC), but still, his operation is incredibly impressive.

Candidates like Huckabee can always overperform their fundraising based on personal appeal and good operations, but that’s the exception which proves the rule–and without question, there is a need for a candidate who can match Obama’s warchest. While you can dither how much Gingrich and Barbour’s success indicates people’s dedication to them vs. dedication to their missions, the point is that Barbour, Perry, and Gingrich have fundraising operations which make their candidacies serious from the get-go if they run, despite any flaws they may have.

Update: It’s worth noting how much it effects your fundraising endeavors if you’re on the ballot and others aren’t. Michele Bachmann raised $13.4 million for her 2010 campaign, which means she raised more than Palin, Romney, Huckabee and Pawlenty combined in 2010, and roughly as much as Palin and Romney combined to raise since the 2008 cycle ended.

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Last week, The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein quoted Republican strategist Craig Shirley on an issue which is all the more significant as polls continue to indicate wide GOP electoral gains: the internal war over the future of the party which everyone expects to come after November.

“Assuming November goes as expected,” Shirley said, “the GOP will shortly thereafter descend into a brawl that will resemble the bar scene from ‘Star Wars’. One side will claim the election is a vindication of Bush’s big government conservatism while another side, the Reaganites, allied with the Tea Party movement, will more astutely see the results as a repudiation of both Bush’s and Obama’s embrace of big government.”

Shirley’s always been an astute observer of political trends, and those on the right would do well to observe two storylines playing out this week which provide lessons on what may come. The first is the current clash over the Republican primary in Delaware, and the second is the existing conflict over Rahm Emanuel’s leadership in Barack Obama’s White House.

The dominant battle on the right this year has been between grassroots fiscal conservatives, empowered by the Tea Party surge, and the existing Republican establishment. In the overwhelming number of primaries, the establishment has left the loser. In some cases, they’ve been shown the door politely. In others, such as Alaska — where sitting Senator Lisa Murkowski (who did not, on the surface, appear to be politically insane) is reportedly about to mount a statewide write-in campaign — they’ve been thrown out kicking and screaming. And adding insult to injury, in the case of Marco Rubio in Florida and Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, the establishment got to see their candidates of choice shed the Republican affiliation without a second’s thought.

This brings us to Delaware, where things get messier for the right. Some factions of the conservative grassroots have coalesced around Christine O’Donnell, who’s running against establishment Republican Mike Castle. But as opposed to situations where the divide is more clear-cut, grassroots conservatives seem genuinely divided about whether the Sarah Palin-endorsed O’Donnell deserves their support, even if they agree — despite the arguments of some — that Castle is a classic big government Republican.

Castle is hardly alone in this when you examine the list of Republican Senate nominees this cycle, which also includes Roy Blunt, Dan Coats, Mark Kirk and others who’ve clashed with conservatives in the past. This creates difficult tensions on the right between long-tenured conservative groups and Tea Partiers who are for the most part new to politics, and often have expectations which more pragmatic conservatives don’t view as politically practical. Many of these existing groups have gotten along rather well with the new activists despite their support for a long list of policies under George W. Bush — TARP topping that list — which the grassroots overwhelmingly rejects.

This circumstance has more than a little in common with the current “war among Dems,” as liberal Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent describes it. His view on the current discussion surrounding Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s expected departure sounds suprisingly similar to Shirley’s:

It’s the first hint of what’s to come after the Dems’ expected November bloodbath: An intra-party war among Dems over the real significance of the results, and over how Dems should recalibrate in response. And that battle isn’t going to be pretty.

Sargent goes on to urge the White House to ignore the “standard Beltway prism” and reject calls from the Beltway media — presumably not excepting his employer — to “dramatically scale back his ambitions, and engage in some genuine bipartisanship.” Yet those calls aren’t just being made externally, but from within, as when press secretary Robert Gibbs unloaded on the “professional left” last month, or in Center for American Progress and Obama transition-team leader John Podesta’s call for “soul-searching” and “changes” after November.

On both sides, we see similar elements and tensions at play which set the boundaries of the post-election conflict over direction and strategy. We see the active grassroots, which demands ideological purity and expects results; the ideologically motivated groups, which share many ideological goals with the grassroots, but think the grassroots demands too much, too fast from the political process; and the party establishment, which is profoundly distrusted on both sides. The major difference here is in the trendlines: the enthusiasm gap in favor of the right’s grassroots is at historic levels, and where the left’s base lacks the will or energy to reject their establishment at the moment in any form other than angry blogposts, the right’s establishment has been soundly chastised by an outpouring of unprecedented grassroots activity.

Of course if there’s one rule in politics, it’s that trendlines always continue, until they don’t. Simply because the right’s leadership has been punished for their profligate and irresponsible ways does not mean the lesson took. And simply because Obama’s Army turned out to be a glee club doesn’t mean those voters won’t come back in 2012. We’ll learn soon enough whether Shirley’s war or Sargent’s is the first to go nuclear.

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The rumors of Sarah Palin’s 2012 campaign are unceasing, and it’s possible there’s fire and not just smoke here. She’s demonstrated her power as an endorser in key primary states and across the country; she’s fundraised for everyone under the sun; she’s written one bestseller and is about to release another; and her celebrity star has been unceasing among the Tea Party set.

It remains my view that Palin would be incredibly foolhardy to run for president in 2012. She has a great gig now — no one is questioning her qualifications to be a national grassroots leader or talking head — where she’s making money and doesn’t have to take Q&A. Palin may well be overestimating her support — people give to her as donations to a martyr and as a way of sticking a thumb in the eye of the left. This doesn’t necessarily mean they want her to be president.

Yet let’s assume she does run in 2012 — who stands to benefit? In an odd way, of all the potential candidates, I think it’s Newt Gingrich who benefits the most.

It’s about the money, mostly. Gingrich may seem like old news to the insider class in Washington — David Paul Kuhn does a good job of explaining why — but he’s thriving as a fundraiser, with a set of supporters which overlaps the Tea Party set but is more traditionally conservative. His committed donor base at American Solutions overlaps with Palin’s, but to a lesser degree than Haley Barbour’s or Mitt Romney’s.

Gingrich, Barbour, and Palin are the proven national fundraisers in the race — Romney can still self-fund, and Pawlenty, Pence and Daniels have smaller national standings. So while Gingrich may be hurt, he may also benefit both by seeing some of his opponents suffer. There will be a mad scramble to become the coalescing force for anti-Palin sentiment on the right, and Gingrich’s brand of intellectual debating skill has a great deal of appeal for both an older set of Republicans, who view him as an icon, and a younger set, which has forgotten or never saw many of his failings as a legislative leader.

So you’re left with a contest of two divisive celebrities both with self-inflicted scars and both mustering preexisting national followings. Gingrich’s path for a nomination only works if he divides the support of social conservatives among other candidates (his baggage on this count being heaviest), something that I believe Palin would exacerbate — and in a field of governors, it diminishes his lack of executive experience to be pitted against someone whose tenure in office was so brief. The upshot is that I suspect a Palin candidacy would drive out Pence and Huckabee, force Romney and Pawlenty to the middle, shrink Daniels’ support to the non-Ron-Paul-minded libertarians, and steal away a host of donors who otherwise would’ve gone to Barbour. It pits Palin’s folksy quips against Gingrich’s history-drenched stemwinders. All this serves to help Gingrich’s standing, and cement him as the smart alternative to the Mighty She.

Of course, this list doesn’t include John Bolton. And that, my friends, could change everything.

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Via Ace, I see that the once well-respected blogger turned amateur gynecologist Andrew Sullivan has now turned his blog into an “Online Cry for Help.” His latest post:

Sadly Yes

I had a dream last night that I was lost in Sarah Palin’s garden. It was springtime, and there were bluebells everywhere. I suddenly realized where I was and tried to get out to the street. But there was just more garden …

While not a professional in this field, I would gladly analyze this dream, both for its wealth of Freudian imagery and the interesting fact that Sullivan does not refers to it as “dream” rather than a “nightmare” (perhaps yearning for subjugation to the mighty Palin uterus?). But I far prefer the poem Andrew emailed me randomly the other day.

I dreamt last night of floating
Naked, hairless, weightless
A warm darkness enveloped me
And in the distance, sound
The heartbeat of the world
I danced with the abandon
I normally reserve for early ABBA
It was heaven, but then
I heard it gash through my Eden
That shrill, fascistic soprano
“You betcha”
To my screams, I awoke

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The 2012 Republican Presidential nomination is already a matter of hot discussion in political circles, and after the November elections six months from now, the race for the White House will begin in earnest. So this month, The New Ledger ran the first edition of what we anticipate will be a monthly feature: a simple poll of 100 online influencers on the right. We asked leading voices from around the blogosphere, with writers from Redstate, National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, HotAir, Commentary, BigGovernment, individual bloggers, and others throughout the conservative/libertarian thinktank world to weigh in.

We have no way of telling who voted for whom, and the poll tags multiple votes. The results are below. If you would like to participate yourself and let your voice be heard in the survey, we’ll be publishing the results of that in the days ahead. You can participate here.

Online Influencers Survey: May 2010

We asked respondents two questions: first, to rank six different candidates for the 2012 Republican nomination we believe will run, and second, to select one choice from a longer list, including several dark horse candidates. Altogether, we believe this gives an accurate (and somewhat surprising) picture of what leading conservative/libertarian bloggers and thinkers believe about the 2012 stakes at this very early point.

Question 1. Please Rank the Following Candidates for the 2012 Republican Nomination in Order of Preference:

A few points of interest:

• Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana was the first place candidate, and has perhaps the most devoted following among the influencers, perhaps thanks to the fandom of National Review and other publications. An incredible 45% of influencers rank him as their first choice.
• Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty came in second in our poll, as the consensus candidate. Pawlenty was consistently the 3rd or 4th choice of each respondent, the fallback position from their initial preferences. Only one out of five respondents ranked him in their top two choices, but notably, he was never ranked 6th.
• Congressman Mike Pence, also of Indiana, was the last addition to our first six (and internally, his inclusion was subject to the most debate among our editorial staff). But he locks up the third spot with solid rankings.
• Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is next, with the highest vote total as the second candidate. But as we shall see, that support seems to be relatively weak — Barbour does not break through in any other slot.
• Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney may be feeling the sting of Obamacare or of his recent endorsement of Utah’s Bob Bennett; he came in fifth despite being seen as the silver medalist in 2008. Not a single influencer responding to this poll ranked him as their first choice.
• Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich may be able to raise money, and he sure gives good speeches, but he has little stock with online influencers: he received the most fifth place and sixth place votes. It may be that his time is just too far past, that he carries too much baggage, or that he’s seen as having failed adequately to capitalize on the opportunity of 1994.

Now it gets interesting.

Question 2: Please Select One of the Following Theoretical Candidates for the 2012 Republican Nomination (Includes Dark Horses)

1. Paul Ryan 30%
2. Mitch Daniels 12%
3. John Thune 11%
3. Rick Perry 11%
5. Jeb Bush 9%
6. Jim DeMint 8%
7. Sarah Palin 6%
8. Tim Pawlenty 4%
8. Newt Gingrich 4%
10. Mike Pence 3%
11. Haley Barbour 2%
12. Mike Huckabee 0%

There were several additions to the field for the second question, including Sen. John Thune, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, conservative darling Sen. Jim DeMint, the ever-controversial Sarah Palin, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and (the extremely unlikely to run) Jeb Bush. We also dropped Mitt Romney from this selection, just on the very slim chance that he does not run, and because no one’s really been asking the question of what would happen if he decides against it.

A few notes:

• As you can see, the respondents were overwhelming: the young Paul Ryan, who has not given much if any indication he is seriously considering running for higher office (and rejected calls to run for Senate or Governor in Wisconsin), received 30% of the total votes, more than double the next entry.
• It’s interesting that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was such a non-factor. We expected her to dominate this section of the poll, and we were wrong. Even Jim DeMint ranked higher among influencers.
• There is a strong contingent for both Thune and Perry made up of defectors from Pawlenty, Pence, and Barbour, who all fell to single digits. Only Mitch Daniels retained the bulk of his supporters, coming in second.
• We will drop Mike Huckabee from this section of the poll in our June edition, as he attracted no votes, and likely add Romney, who we frankly can’t see sitting this one out.

We’re sorry if you’re a blogger who wasn’t included this time — we may expand the request list for June, and just take the first 100 respondents. If you’re someone famous and awesome and want to be included next time in this casual assessment of where things stand, please contact us at media [at] newledger.com.

Please note: We had great responses for our first survey, with 80% of our originally requested influencers voting within the timeframe. Because a few of the original requesters couldn’t participate (thanks to organizational restrictions) and a few didn’t want to yet, we extended the invitation to other bloggers and writers who had missed the cut on our original list. Due to a flaw in our poll settings (sorry, first time), while everyone answered the second question, a few people only ranked one candidate of the list of six, which is why the rest of the percentages are a bit odd.

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In an email conversation with a few Republican insiders in early 2008, when then-Gov. Sarah Palin was merely a little-known rising star in conservative circles, talk turned to a debate about the ability of Republicans to compete on a broader scale in House districts. I brought up an idea I’d been toying with for some time — I called it the “Smart Mom” rule. It’s worth revisiting in a cycle like this one, where upsets are to be expected in marginal districts. This morning I find that, in the wake of Palin’s example and in stark opposition to the other chamber’s political idiocies, the Republican House political leadership seems to be applying a good idea:

So far this year, 239 women are candidates for the House and 31 for the Senate, according to data from the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics. Among them, a record 107 Republican women have filed for a House seat, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee — surpassing a previous GOP high of 91 in 1994, and a sharp increase from the 65 who ran in 2008. And those numbers could still grow. In each year Rutgers has been keeping track, the final tally has exceeded the late April figure by more than 20 candidates.

“It looks like it is going to be a record year,” said Gilda Morales, who crunches the data for the Rugter’s [sic] women’s center. “What’s bringing these numbers up is Republican women.”

The jump in female GOP candidates mirrors the enthusiasm of Republicans in general, said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who leads efforts to recruit female candidates for the NRCC. “I just think overall candidate recruitment is going well for the Republicans after two cycles where it’s been more difficult for us.”

Traditionally, one of the biggest reasons conservatives have a male-dominated Chamber of Commerce and local sports hero representation in the lower chamber is that they have a hard time finding female candidates for higher office. This is not because there are insufficient conservative women — as you may know, the gender gap is really just an example of the expanded racial gap than anything else (white women voted for McCain by a margin of 53-46) — but it’s because conservative and especially Christian women tend to choose to abandon their careers, or shift to part time work, the instant they have kids.

This is not a bad choice for them, and probably a good one for their families, but it’s one that deprives the GOP of a lot of very good candidates — a situation which is only becoming more challenging for Republicans as women overwhelmingly surpass men in educational achievement.

My thought, then, was that if Republicans were smart, in every district where they find a Democrat who has a 60+ edge, and the GOP has no obviously active candidates or farm team members in need of some seasoning, a general rule ought to be: run a Smart Mom.

In every one of these longshot districts, there’s a mom — someone who, even if they have a part time career, own a small business, a former teacher, kids in the army, or is approaching retirement. It’s an extremely difficult challenge to run a campaign with young kids or teenagers without feeling the ramifications — so instead find moms who came along on the Reagan train, are now in their 40s and early 50s, and in many cases are adapting to empty nests. The opportunity to do something that’s worthwhile, interesting, challenging, and — since it’s unlikely they’ll raise significant amounts of money — gives them the opportunity to leverage their vast resources of personal connections in lieu of significant funding.

The Smart Mom rule would be a top-down package, providing interested individuals with candidate training schools, a basic web campaign, a few seminars, eager college student volunteers, etc. — and if they make it close in the closing months of the campaign, DC can always send some cash. The ability to cut Rockwellian ad campaigns for normal middle aged suburbanite moms would represent a major break from the traditional over-groomed ambitious white men who typically represent the GOP brand. In the ideal form, these challenger candidates would be difficult to attack, unafraid to speak their minds, have natural connections within church/school communities to offset spending disadvantages, and even in a losing effort, would scare a few entrenched professional politicians in closer-than-expected races. And even if Republicans only adopt this strategy in the districts they expect to lose, in a sea change year the odds would favor a few of these candidates breaking through.

A Smart Mom approach would break away from traditional male candidates who likely have no shot anyway, and are just passing a resume check to get on the ballot. If Rep. McMorris Rodgers is adopting this strategy — essentially, drafting candidates who are like her — it’s a positive sign that Republicans are getting away from some of the stagnant old traditions which led to a House caucus that currently has only 17 elected GOP women. Regardless of your opinions of either party, I’m sure we can agree that’s a good thing.

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Norman Podhoretz has a perceptive piece on the Republican Party, the conservative movement and the reaction to the ever-divisive Sarah Palin:

When William F. Buckley Jr., then the editor of National Review, famously quipped that he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT, most conservative intellectuals responded with a gleeful amen. But put to the test by the advent of Sarah Palin, along with the populist upsurge represented by the Tea Party movement, they have demonstrated that they never really meant it.

Podhoretz’s point hits home. Few political leaders today resemble those 2,000 names (both Palin and Obama have benefited from their base thanks to their unique backgrounds), and fewer still of the self-styled thought leaders of conservative policy. The tea parties are just the return of the Perotistas, and one wonders if such an unstable fire-breathing dragon of a movement would even exist if Republicans had avoided listening to obtuse young childless policy wonks who’ve never run a business or a household.

If the right is going to lead anything, they must reconnect. They can start by listening.

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Leon Wolf:

There are three possible explanations for this, none of which end with Sarah Palin in the White House.

The first is that Sarah Palin is really and truly sick of politics and has decided to hang up her spurs. It is disappointing to those of us who have stood by her, but it certainly isn’t a poor reflection on her personally. Not everyone is cut from the material that allows them to stand in front of the media glare that comes from running for national office, especially when the person in question is a Republican and their family comes into the crosshairs.

The second is that she has decided to focus immediately on running for President in 2012. This suggestion is not a serious one: any person with a whit of sense knows that resigning without even a full term completed takes her completely out of the equation. If she cannot finish a single term, or handle her national travel while finishing out her term, how can she combat the full force of the Obama machine? Only the most foolhardy or clueless would consider this the path that Palin is taking; it is thus no surprise to find Chris Cilizza peddling it as a viable theory. If it is true, it demonstrates that she lacks the political judgment to run a national campaign in any case.

The third is that there is another shoe that has yet to drop, whether scandal, undisclosed health or personal issue, or other. It is probably pointless to speculate on these matters until they become known: if another shoe is set to drop, then drop it will, and we should expect it soon. The longer time goes past without word of it, the less likely it is that it exists.

Christopher Badeaux:

The takeaway from Sarah Palin’s resignation today is that if you’re a Republican (especially but not only a woman) with children under the age of 18, don’t bother.

Seriously, what’s the point? John Roberts’s kids became a talking point, and he was nominated to an appointed office. Sarah Palin’s freaking maternal records became a subject of debate — what reporter would come up to a man, say, like her husband, and say to his face, “Isn’t it true that child isn’t yours?” No jury outside the Bay Area would find him guilty or liable for literally dragging the little worm’s face across fifteen feet of concrete. Barry Obama’s medical records release was a one-page note from his doctor — “All’s Well! Thanks for asking!” — and we’re talking about the heartbeat keeping Joe Freaking Biden from the Oval Office.

Anyone remember all that talk about Sasha and Malia’s likelihood of teenage sex based on race, age, and economic strata? How about Al Gore’s kids? John Edwards’s? Can you remotely imagine any mainstream news reporter even giving air or print time to the theory that Chelsea Clinton had had multiple abortions, regardless of the truth? Can you imagine any of those politicians’ children, if born with Down Syndrome or autism or anything remotely equivalent, being a hate object and being called a political prop?

Had I the talent, looks, charm, and ambition to run for political office (which I do not), I’d have learned over the last year not to do so. My children and my wife mean too much to me. My opponent’s teenaged daughters could be running a lesbian brothel and there wouldn’t be a peep; my daughter could be caught kissing a boy and there’d be rumors he’d knocked her up and I forced her to get an abortion, and those rumors would get mainstream press play.

This isn’t even to get into the insanity of a State ethics system that allows complainants to make repeat, baseless charges against an official, incur no costs, and watch as the official runs up hundreds of thousands in legal bills for which she is personally liable. This is nauseating, stupid, and proof that we’ve crossed some line: Republics work. Things like this are why pure democracies don’t.

Pejman Yousefzadeh:

If Palin has decided she doesn’t want her family to be in the crosshairs, and is therefore getting out of politics, I understand. If she thinks that she is going to become President, or achieve some higher office as a consequence of this move, she has another think coming. If the Left continues to believe that she will try to be a political figure, they will continue to launch ethics investigations, and ex-governors can’t defend themselves as well as governors can. In any event, the Left will now be encouraged to try the same tactics on the next up-and-coming Republican star, or perceived one.

Benjamin Kerstein

I may be naive, but it seems like it could work for her if she’s planning a presidential run. It seems to me that Sarah Palin is the only possible candidate the Republicans have who shares an essential quality with Obama: she gets the conservative base excited and riled up to a near-religious degree. That’s an intangible quality, and you either have it or you don’t. I don’t think the Republicans can even hope to beat Obama if they can’t find a candidate with that kind of charisma. So, for Palin, the real question should be, will this work for the base? I think it will. They’ll see her as a small town woman viciously wronged by the political and media elite, including those in her own party. I think this will arouse even more sympathy for her and increase her appeal. Whether this is good for the Republican Party on a national level, however, is something else entirely.

Ben Domenech

Sarah Palin is the most divisive political figure in America. She has been for the past year. Just the other day — before we knew of her impending resignation announcement — a few friends and I discussed some points made by Jim Geraghty on a particularly loathsome series of articles and statements by major media and online figures with pretenses of rationality.

For my part, I argued that there’s really little difference between the reaction to Palin and the reaction to other good-looking conservative women — as exemplified by the recent Playboy scandal and the litany of examples provided by the online left over the past few years. But perhaps what is different, in Palin’s case, is the assistance of the mainstream media. And in this case, I don’t blame them as much as some do. Palin is great for magazines. She sells. She’s sexy, controversial, and has plenty of local enemies to give quotes. A third of America loves her to death and a third wishes she would die in a fire. That’s gold, Jerry.

I confess, I don’t understand the motivations of some of this hatred. Palin is by all accounts a fairly normal politician; if anything, it’s hard to see the ideological differences between her and, let’s say, Mike Huckabee, who charms many on the left (heck, even Stewart and Colbert). This makes me think it’s a lot more about style than substance, about who she’s decided to be, about her accent, and about that wink. It’s all just a matter of personal reaction, exaggerated by personal experience — I have a friend who also decided to give birth to a child with Down Syndrome, and so the accusations that Trig Palin is nothing more than a political prop of his mother is the sort of thing that make my skin crawl, even when they come from individuals known far and wide for their ability to spew inhuman excrement from their keyboards. Maybe others don’t have this experience, but hypothetically, if Michelle Obama had been confronted with the same situation and made the same choice Palin did, my admiration for her would be astronomically higher, and I don’t hesitate to say that questions about her pregnancy would be considered unacceptable across the pro-life right. But that’s beside the point.

The divisiveness Palin represents could be a reason to think she’s not done with politics, or as Erick Erickson rightly draws the distinction, only done with electoral politics. She’s on the cusp of a massive book tour and her popularity among Republicans remains very high:

Palin’s biggest strength is her enduring popularity among the Republican base. A recent Pew Research Center poll showed that while she remains divisive among the general public, some 84% of white evangelical Republicans, and 80% of conservative Republicans, give her high marks.

But as Jonah Goldberg notes, and Ace echoes, this is just not a decision that will bolster her support among these corners. With all the freedom it grants to work politically in the lower 48 and escape the multiple frivolous complaints lodged against her in Alaska, that freedom comes with a major penalty: she now legitimately will lose any political experience arguments against any other potential primary candidate in 2012, and certainly against President Obama. It is just not conceivable to view her as a national candidate for the presidency matched up against others in the race.

Resigning at the end of her term in 2010 — I could see that. She’d have as much elected experience as Romney, and the race for the presidency takes two years anyway. But now? I think the idle chatter about an impending scandal is just that — she’s been so heavily monitored over the last year, I think everything that’s there has already been turned over. If it is a scandal, I’m more likely to believe it’s something involving one of her children rather than Palin herself. She withstood the attacks, the vile innuendo, the Photoshops, and the pornos (yes, pornos, multiple) for the last 10 months, after all. I doubt the problem is a lack of personal toughness from the self-described “mama grizzly.”

Personally, I now think she’s really had enough. She has, in the past, always spoken of preferring motherhood to politics. Regardless of Mark Halperin’s smart points to the contrary, I believe that’s the path she’s taking. She’ll raise a ton of money for like-minded Republicans on the circuit, her book will sell well, she’ll continue to inspire affection from devoted fans and anger from her enemies, and Andrew Sullivan almost certainly won’t stop writing about Trig whenever she pops up to do an interview. But this is not 1962, and she is not Richard Milhous Nixon. Absent another successful run for office down the road, I can see no situation where Palin is ever in the serious conversation for the presidency.

A small hypothetical for you all to entertain as you watch tonight’s debate:

When Joe Biden first ran for the Senate, he ran as a Democrat in a Democratic year. In Washington, he’s been a fairly moderate Democrat – a servant of MBNA and the credit card companies in Delaware, he’s been a frequent friend of the corporation and the businessman. He’s played the Washington game a bit – sending his son to a high-class lobbying job, playing both sides of Clarence Thomas during that nomination debacle, putting his foot in his mouth on more than one occasion – but on the whole, he’s never been a radical.

Is it that hard to imagine Biden as a Republican, instead of a Democrat?

His voting pattern is not all that dissimilar from Senator Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, or Biden’s former colleague, moderate GOPer Bill Roth. Highly educated and ambitious from his youth, he has the brash ego of a career politician and a penchant for outrageous remarks that far exceed any Macaca moments. He likes the military and Amtrak and corporations. He likes America. He dislikes hippies. He’s fairly moderate in ideology and testy in temperament.

On the other side, you have Sarah Palin – a rural feminist, with a strong religious undercurrent, a blue collar background, a PTA member, a Union member, pro-gun, pro-life, and pro-military but a bit isolationist and rather libertarian on gay rights issues. A son in the military – a recruit, not an officer – and a Huckabee-esque penchant for bashing authority. She can’t be painted into any particular corner ideologically, but she is hated by government bureaucrats as much as she is loved by the citizens of her state.

Is it that hard to imagine Palin as a Democrat, instead of a Republican?

She’s the member of no old guard, no political establishment, has no family wealth to fall back on. Her astounding political win in a relatively minor state comes hard fought against the male-dominated Republican leadership. She does so by taking a populist anti-corporate and anti-establishment position, talking in very blue-collar terms about climate change and the need to install immediate reforms. If there’s a comparison on the D side, she’s the female Jim Webb: brash and inspiring, the people who like her adore her, and the people who dislike her hate her intensely.

Imagine this debate, for one moment, with Sarah Palin – the socially traditionalist (need those evangelical swing voters!), blue collar union member, telegenic Democratic Veep nominee – and Joe Biden – the old white guy who’s been in Washington forever, wedded to the credit card companies, who’s never done anything but be a lawyer-politician, who’s gotten money from every interest group and traded favors with everyone under the sun – as the Republican Veep nominee?

I could see it. And I wonder how the media would treat it differently.

Update: Victor Davis Hanson has the right idea.