She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It

By FRANK RICH
SARAH PALIN and Al Sharpton don’t ordinarily have much in common, but they achieved a rare harmonic convergence at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. When Sharpton told the singer’s children it was their daddy’s adversaries, not their daddy, who were “strange,” he was channeling the pugnacious argument the Alaska governor had made the week before. There was nothing strange about her decision to quit in midterm, Palin told America. What’s strange — or “insane,” in her lingo — are the critics who dare question her erratic behavior on the national stage.

Sharpton’s bashing of Jackson’s naysayers received the biggest ovation of the entire show. Palin’s combative resignation soliloquy, though much mocked by prognosticators of all political persuasions, has an equally vociferous and more powerful constituency. In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.

That’s why Palin won’t go gently into the good night, much as some Republicans in Washington might wish. She is not just the party’s biggest star and most charismatic television performer; she is its only star and charismatic performer. Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind. Palin gives this movement a major party brand and political plausibility that its open-throated media auxiliary, exemplified by Glenn Beck, cannot. She loves the spotlight, can raise millions of dollars and has no discernible reason to go fishing now except for self-promotional photo ops, ,


The full article - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/opinion/12rich.html?em

The guy read my thoughts only that he's infinitely more articulate.

Articulate but bad journalism.

If you gonna bash Palin do so with a straight face, not in connection to the unpopularity of Sharpton.

Negro_Ntns:

Articulate but bad journalism.

If you gonna bash Palin do so with a straight face, not in connection to the unpopularity of Sharpton.

If you gonna bash Sharpton, refrain from associating him with that ignoramus called Palin.

Me thought Sharpton gave a brilliant speech at the MJ memorial. Palin would pay a million bucks to be able to possess his oratory prowess.

Ibime:

If you gonna bash Sharpton, refrain from associating him with that ignoramus called Palin.

Me thought Sharpton gave a brilliant speech at the MJ memorial. Palin would pay a million bucks to be able to possess his oratory prowess.

did you just use "Al Sharpton" and "oratory prowess" in the same sentence?

hehehehehehe. . . . . of course now, Sharpton gave the best speech at the MJ skitzno, followed by Marlon Jackson.

Ibime:

hehehehehehe. . . . . of course now, Sharpton gave the best speech at the MJ skitzno, followed by Marlon Jackson.

True sha.

But musn't that mean everyone else that graced the stage must have had zero to nada 'oratorial skills' for Sharpton to have risen so 'far' above them?

jesoul,
Goodness, i haven't heard from you for a "good minute".

davidif:

jesoul,
Goodness, i haven't heard from you for a "good minute".

I'm around . . . movies, religion, sports etc. How body?

People might not like Sharpton but his oratory skills and power should not be in question. Not many people have it and i personally rank him with Obama, Martin Luther in this regard.

JeSoul:

True sha.

But musn't that mean everyone else that graced the stage must have had zero to nada 'oratorial skills' for Sharpton to have risen so 'far' above them?

Everyone else gave out their words in unique ways but what made sharpton's message phenomenal was the part about the strangeness or otherwise of M.J and besides, he is known to be a powerful orator.
@Topic
Good riddance to bad rubbish i personally thought palin was resigning to start a new reality t.v show titled how not to put a dummy in office.

THE GLORIOUS THIRD- by Hendrik Hertzberg- The New Yorker

Sarah Palin spells her Christian name a letter longer than the singer spells his muse’s, but her whims are likewise elusive and her motives similarly mysterious. Ever since the 2008 Republican nominee for Vice-President of the United States suddenly announced that she would resign the governorship of Alaska at the end of July, nearly sixteen months before the expiration of what was supposed to be her first term, a single question has been on every lip: What on earth was that all about?
No one knows. Speculation, some of it fact-based, abounds. She is sick of politics. Or she’s just sick of Alaska politics and wants to do her politicking in the Lower 48. Or she wants to run for senator next year. Or she wants to help other Republicans running for senator or governor in other states, with a view to collecting Presidential I.O.U.s. Or she needs time to coach the ghostwriter and promote the product of a cash-rich book project she recently signed a contract for. Or she thinks the Alaska legislature is getting stroppy (e.g., it might override her refusal to accept millions in federal stimulus funds) and figures it’s better to let her lieutenant governor take the fall. Or she wants to fish more. Or there’s an asteroid-size scandal hurtling her way, and she wants to be outside the blast area when it detonates. Or there’s no big scandal, just a lot of little ones that aren’t even true but nonetheless require the services of lawyers too pricey to retain on a government salary. Or she’s bored. Or (though she is one of the few political job-quitters in memory not to have given this as a reason, as well as one of the few who could say it plausibly) she wants to spend time with her family.
“Some are going to question the timing of this,” Governor Palin predicted in her speech. Sure enough, some did—and no wonder. The Governor made her announcement at the start of a holiday weekend. The setting—the lawn of her lakeshore home, with geese honking in the background and, for an audience, a sparse scattering of standing supporters in knit shirts and shorts—suggested haste. So did the fact that the press was given less than two hours’ notice, while her in-laws, her state’s congressional delegation, and the grandees of the state and national Republican Party, including the former running mate who elevated her to global fame, were given no notice at all.
The questioners of the timing included a reporter from Time, who, in one of the damage-control interviews Palin gave last week, asked her, “Why make the announcement on July 3rd?” and added, a little apologetically, “People assume scandal.” The Governor, after expressing indignation that anyone might think she was quitting for other than “altruistic, sincere, and articulated reasons,” replied, in part, “July 3rd is the eve of Independence Day. It is meaningful to be able to say: Look, there needs to be freedom all the way around here to progress.”
It may be inferred from this that Palin sees a certain parallel between the events of July 3, 2009, and those of July 4, 1776. And, indeed, her speech had echoes of the document signed in Philadelphia two hundred and thirty-three years and one day earlier. “Let Facts be submitted to a candid world,” proclaims Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. “I’ve given my reasons now, very candidly,” proclaims Palin’s. Both support “life”—in Jefferson’s case, as part of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” in Palin’s, as a component of “free enterprise and smaller government and strong national security for our country and support for our troops and energy independence and for those who will protect freedom and equality and life.”
Here’s Jefferson on political change:

Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Here’s Palin on same:

Government’s supposed to serve from the bottom up and not move towards this top-down, big-government takeover, but rather will be protectors of individual rights, who also have enough common sense to acknowledge when conditions have drastically changed, and they’re willing to call an audible and pass the ball when it’s time so the team can win.

In Palin’s case, the government that she was declaring independence from is the one that she herself is governor of. She was therefore in the awkward position of having to argue that she has had “so much success in this first term” (e.g., “We took government out of the dairy business”) that “doing what’s best for Alaska” requires her to abandon her post. But the bulk of the Wasilla declaration, like the bulk of the Philadelphia one, was devoted to the enumeration of what the latter’s author called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object”—the Object being, in Sarah Palin’s case, making things hard for Sarah Palin.
The colonists’ catalogue of complaints against George III ranged from “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good” to “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”
The Governor’s complaints against “adversaries” and “enemies” were more humdrum:

You don’t hear much about the good stuff in the press anymore, though, do you?

Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt.

The state has wasted thousands of hours of your time and shelled out some two million of your dollars to respond to opposition research. And that’s money that’s not going to fund teachers or troopers or safer roads.

But the evidence suggests that she is thinking not so much about Alaska’s money (the Anchorage Daily News found that the two-million-dollar figure relies on extremely creative accounting, and that not a cent has been diverted from teachers and the like) as about her own (and not the money that she has spent on lawyers, most of which has been supplied by others, but the payday that awaits her in private life). Levi Johnston, the nineteen-year-old father of Palin’s grandchild, has offered some testimony on this subject. Last Thursday, at a press conference at his lawyer’s office (in Palin’s circle, nineteen-year-olds have lawyers and hold press conferences), Johnston recalled his then prospective mother-in-law musing about “how nice it would be to take some of this money people have been offering us and, y’know, just run with it. . . . I think the big deal was the book. That’s millions of dollars right there.”
“Levi,” a reporter put in, “say Sarah Palin ran for President in 2012. Would you vote for her?”
Johnston sighed. “No,” he said. “I think she’s a great lady and all, but after seeing what she did now—you know, this leaving Alaska—I would have to say no. I mean, obviously if she’s stressed out as governor, I mean, moving up to the Vice-President or President is huge. I just don’t think, anymore, that she’s cut out for the job.”
Back in 1776, the signers of the Philadelphia declaration pledged, among other things, their fortunes. The Wasilla rebel stands to make one. Perhaps more than that, though, being governor simply isn’t any fun anymore. And this is one girl from the north country who just wants to have fun