Reagans In The Rear-View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are.

From The Next Right (http://www.thenextright.com/jon-henke/sarah-palin-and-the-right)

"If Ruffini thinks Palin will be the leader of a grassroots revival, then I think he is probably over-optimistic. As an abstraction, Sarah Palin is a fantastic leader. She's a genuine outsider, she's stood up to her own party, she's pursued and won major reform fights, she's made difficult cuts in spending, and she's generally in line with the Republican grassroots on policy issues. And she's a fresh, interesting face for the Republican Party. (italics mine)

But to be the substantive leader of a political movement, she needs three things:

1. A clear, but sophisticated, political philosophy
2. A serious governing strategy to move the ball forward on her political philosophy
3. A support base, including grassroots and elite infrastructure, that can mobilize to defend her and advance her agenda

I understand why Palin is a compelling idea. I just haven't seen much evidence that she's got the serious substance behind the marketing abstraction. At least, not right now. Remember, Ronald Reagan spent decades writing, speaking and working on difficult political issues, thinking deeply about what he believed and why, before he was taken seriously as a major movement leader. And even then, he stood upon the shoulders of giants. The next leaders of the Right will not be riding an emerging Movement into power; they will be building a Movement anew."

It is always interesting to see movement conservatives claim intellectual heft as part of their party; not to mention the ease with which they Stalinistically erase their history (wasn't "compassionate conservatism" technically the last "clear but sophisticated" conservative intellectual movement? Why hopscotch over to Reaganism? I'd love to see an "intellectual" Republican explain to me why "compassionate conservatism" failed, or how Reaganism as economics is different from general "Washington Consensus" economics.)

But I digress; what has consistently interested me about the Republicans this year is their "team of mavericks" meme - that basically you can have your herd of cats - and eat it too. A party that finds as its highest point of esteem rebellion against the party is a party that will never win anything. Remember how Tom DeLay had a "little black book" that listed every lobbyist who raised money for the GOP, and if you weren't in it, you didn't get access? That's not the way to run a government, but it is the way that you keep power in an government, and if Republicans think they were done a disservice by that blatant "pay your dollar and take your ride" brand of politics, then they just weren't the wealthy Republicans, who made out like - and often were, if you've been paying attention to the contractors in Iraq - bandits.

Now, the rest of those qualifications show a profound ignorance of politics; how again is she a "genuine" outsider? Is anyone not from a political family an outsider now? Because Sarah Palin strikes me as no more an insider or an outsider than Obama - she ascended the greasy pole just like any other citizen not born a scion of a political family (such as your Gores, Bushes, McCains, and Byrds, for example.) Her fiscal record is vastly more populist than either classically conservative, or even neo-Keynesian Republican (think Nixon's "We're all Keynesians now") - after all, she raised taxes to give each citizen of Alaska more money from the Permanent Fund, something straight out of the Huey Long playbook, so that "cut taxes" bit is more of a magic phrase than an accurate assessment. And by generally in line with Republican policy issues, I have no clue what this Henke means; aside from her views on guns and god, there isn't much in her speeches that wouldn't give a Ron Paul supporter the conniptions, which is where the new and final schism in the current GOP is probably going to come from. And in the light of that kind of GOP emphasis on reform - the kind of Paulite reform that destroys the Department of Education, for example, that makes up the real intellectual direction of the party these days - Palin ain't got nothin'.

If honesty is a virtue - and when it comes to self-examination, it generally is - then the GOP is far from virtuous these days. Coming off of Bush, and attempting to understand what happened outside of the freak event of 9-11 that lead to their dominance, the GOP wishes to believe that the "silent majority" still is "Waiting for Righty", which is simply not the case. The bailout put a nail in the common belief that Wall Street ultimately could be trusted to make Americans wealthy through unregulated, off-ledger speculation rather than capital reinvestment in infrastructure and industrial capacity (though lord knows Corporate America wrung every tax break and tariff it could by claiming it was going to just that, just as soon they finish shipping all the lathes and wrenches to the subsidiary in Ciudad Juarez.) The "ownership society" (again, another conservative intellectual concept strangely quiet these days - perhaps because those people who took it seriously now own a share of a society worth 40% less than it was a month ago) is a dead issue; the unions are starting to reverse the last four decades declines in membership, political registration is through the roof, and the domestic issues that Democrats constantly own on are front and center - especially since we've already negotiated a 2011 withdrawal from Iraq (not that anyone's really talking about it.) In short, the GOP is a party falling apart, and the fact that they're even talking Sarah Palin as a serious potential candidate for the resurgence of the party is moonbat babbling at its most enjoyable. Sarah Palin can't create a conservative grassroots movement - she's all that's left of it. And if the Republican thinking class can't see that, then they are in for a rough couple of decades.

That Is All For Now.