Sarah Palin and the politics of resentment

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Here's our Quote of the Day, from Frank Rich's excellent Sunday NYT column on Palin, Palinism, and the GOP:

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 essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. Yes, she is of the religious right, even if she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage. But family-values politics, now more devalued than the dollar by the philandering of ostentatiously Christian Republican politicians, can only take her so far. The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.

*****

It’s more likely that she will never get anywhere near the White House, and not just because of her own limitations. The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.

Brilliantly put -- Rich at his finest. (Make sure to read the whole thing.) And, as of right now, it is true, I think, that Palin is the Republicans' "last presidential candidate standing":

Such would-be competitors as Mark Sanford, John Ensign and Newt Gingrich are too carnally compromised for the un-Clinton party. Mike Huckabee is Palin-lite. Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal — really? That leaves the charisma-challenged Mitt Romney, precisely the kind of card-carrying Ivy League elitist Palinists loathe, no matter how hard he tries to cosmetically alter his history as a socially liberal fat-cat banker. Palin would crush him like a bug.

I would just caution that the 2012 election is still a long way off. It's Obama's to lose, of course, but there's ample time for the Republicans to regroup -- if not for that election, then certainly for 2016. (It could be Jeb by then, or perhaps Cantor, or another who isn't currently on the presidential radar.)

I'm hoping the Republican Party continues to embrace Palin -- if not Palinism, a far more noxious and malevolent phenomenon, a genuinely dangerous political movement -- for a good long time. The reality, though, is that it will eventually emerge from its Palin obsession, perhaps sooner rather than later, and, when it does, it will be stronger and more of an electoral threat to the Democrats than it is now (or may be in 2012).

Let's enjoy the GOP's Palin Era while it lasts, but let's not forget to look with sober anticipation to its successor, whatever and whomever it may be.