 ith the choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as Sen. John McCain’s running mate, the GOP has once again reached out to the conservative, white middle-class voters it needs to win the presidency. But this time it comes at a very high price — namely, the potential loss of Palin to the neoconservative political orbit and the likely end of any substantial future influence of real conservatives on the party.
Palin herself is already paying a very high price. Few candidates for high office have ever been so harshly treated in the nation’s corporate news media. Ever since McCain announced she would be his running mate, Palin has been subjected to a steady drumbeat of denunciations and smears delivered with a nastiness not seen since 1964 when conservative GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was depicted as a maniacal right-wing extremist itching to plunge the world into a nuclear holocaust. At the time, CBS news correspondent Daniel Schorr even claimed that Goldwater went to Germany to visit “Hitler’s old stomping ground” and “link up” with right-wingers there.
Today, 40 years later, ABC News tried the same Nazi smear on Palin. ABC’s senior national correspondent Jake Tapper reported that when presidential candidate Pat Buchanan visited Alaska, Palin met him wearing a Buchanan for President pin. Tapper then claimed that Buchanan has a “long history of questionable comments” and quoted radical left Rep. Bob Wexler, D-FL, saying, “Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer...”
Talk radio host Ed Schultz whose show is broadcast on more than 100 stations, including seven of the 10 largest radio markets, called Palin “an empty pantsuit” who had sparked a “bimbo alert.” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen called Palin a “sitcom candidate” whose tenure in office would be a “disaster movie.” Former Democrat Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle called Palin “extreme right wing” and claimed she had “absolutely no experience.” Time magazine’s Joe Klein charged the choice showed McCain’s “recklessness,” and a sea of talking heads on TV complained of Palin’s alleged “inexperience” in foreign affairs, an objection they never raised when in 2004 presidential hopeful John Kerry named former ambulance-chasing prettyboy attorney and political neophyte John Edwards as his running mate.
News organizations even stooped to outright lies. Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic questioned whether Palin’s fifth child was really hers, suggesting the baby was her daughter’s, and that the governor had engaged in a bizarre public deception by pretending to be pregnant. ABC News, Time, Associated Press, United Press International and other major corporate news operations portrayed Palin as some sort of nightmarish “religious extremist” by lying about her support for the Iraq war. They falsely claimed she had referred to the conflict as “a task from God,” a quote taken out of context and deceitfully replayed relentlessly. (See story on page 3.)
The reason for the venom is clear, as Peggy Noonan, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan, pointed out in the Wall Street Journal. Middle Americans perceive Palin to be like themselves, culturally and politically. Therefore, “she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy. She could become a transformative political presence. So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick,” said Noonan.
Despite the corporate media’s hate campaign against her, Palin has succeeded beyond the McCain camp’s wildest expectations. Before her selection, McCain’s erratic and thematically incoherent campaign suffered from low turn-out at events, an apathetic Republican base, and weak fund raising.
But after Palin’s electrifying speech at the GOP convention, the campaign was dramatically transformed.
A typical McCain event had averaged only about 1,000 people. But with Palin as his running mate, more than 10,000 showed up for a McCain rally in Colorado Springs, and 20,000 showed up in Fairfax, Virginia. The campaign raised a remarkable $10 million in the first three days after Palin’s speech, and another $4 million at a single event in Chicago, Obama’s hometown.
Polls showed a dramatic shift, too. A USA Today/ Gallup Poll had showed Obama beating McCain, 47 percent to 43 percent. But after Palin joined the McCain ticket, Gallup reported McCain leading Obama among likely voters 50 percent to 46 percent. At the same time, there was “a very substantial jump in the percentage of Republicans saying they are more enthusiastic about voting,” from 42 percent a week before, to 60 percent now.
Unfortunately, candidate Palin will be forced to defend McCain’s neoconservative support for mass immigration, free trade, and global democracy. McCain himself had to swallow hard to accept Palin, for his new shaky alliance with conservative Republicans is not a comfortable one. His first choice for a vice presidential running mate was his friend Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Al Gore’s former running mate, and a social and cultural leftist whose only major disagreement with left-wing Democrats is his support for President Bush’s invasion of Iraq. As Middle American News reported in previous issues, McCain has previously denounced the constituency whose support he now solicits, among them the National Rifle Association and Christian activists. He betrayed Republicans when he joined forces with Democrat senators to prevent President Bush from appointing Supreme Court judges viewed as “too conservative.” And McCain finds conservative policies so loathsome, he even approached Democrat Senate leaders and discussed switching parties.
In his convention speech and in interviews with reporters, McCain bragged that he is “beholden to no political party” and pledged to appoint Democrats to his administration. That means McCain will place supporters of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Albert Gore to govern at his side. On the CBS show Face the Nation, he said he intends to appoint many of them.
“I don’t know how many, but I can tell you, with all due respect to previous administrations, it is not going to be a single, ‘well, we have a Democrat now,’” he said.
If McCain wins what is likely to be a very close election, it will be because of Gov. Palin and the white, middle-class conservative voters she has attracted. If so, conservatives will have been once again lured into conferring power on a man who opposes them. And Palin, once so full of promise and potential, will have been sacrificed by McCain to the vulgarian pecksniffs of the media only to help his Democrat friends achieve power in Washington.
|
