But what place should Sarah Palin have in our future?
She's been a fantastic governor. Don't tell me she's incompetent or stupid. She took on one of the nation's most entrenched good-old-boys networks in the country and won. She's charming, good-natured, and has courage and firmness of conviction. Yes, I like her. But I don't get the feeling that she had any thoughts about national politics at all until her phone rang and John McCain was on the other end. Maybe someday she'll be more marketable--yes, we need to take that into consideration--but for right now, what we need is to change the party's brand.
(This is the cue for all the good Ottowa County conservative stalwarts to denounce me as a RINO.)
I read two columns about the future of the GOP, both of which highlighted Sarah Palin: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. for the American Spectator, "Vitality in the Wilderness," and Byron York for NRO, "Palin, the Governors, and the New Power in the Republican Party." First, Tyrrell:
What provoked Brooks's fandango with the Traditionalists and the Reformers was a meeting the former group held in the Virginia hills outside Washington to prepare for the years ahead. As Brooks reports, I was present; his term Traditionalist, however, is misleading. There was more variety within the group than you would find among liberals planning a revival in 2004. There were libertarians, evangelicals, tax cutters, hawkish foreign policy advocates, and others. It was indeed the kind of turnout that could be termed "Reaganite," and there are other meetings coming up. For years the conservative movement has had more variety than the liberal movement, which might explain why only 22% of the American people call themselves liberal while 34% call themselves conservatives. There is vitality on the right, and there will be vitality in the wilderness, though the last time we were out here we only stayed two years. Liberal overreach and incompetence saw to that.
(I'm listening to a week-old Hugh Hewitt show on iTunes right now, by the way, and he's talking to Mark Steyn about how Palin's drawing big crowds and that the movement is still there. Great; we can galvanize the 44% of conservatives so that we can have 44% of people be disappointed every election day.) Look, we couldn't get our message across to Americans, by a 52-47 or so margin. We lost Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia. If the national GOP can't get this, the Michigan GOP at least has to: conservatism can speak to many people to whom we've never, ever reached out. Libertarians, evangelicals, tax cutters, military hawks...how long will we preach to the choir before we realize we need to be preaching on the streets?
Sarah Palin is not the voice of a rejuvenated conservative message; I'm afraid she'll be, for many, a would-be avenging conservative angel. She is the personification of fightin' words for a party whose guns have been out of bullets for a while.
York:
Palin’s re-emergence here left a lot of Republicans wondering whether she would be part of a reformed GOP leadership. Barbour said she “helped the ticket,” but yesterday, during a session with the press, Pawlenty and a group of other leaders seemed hesitant to endorse her candidacy. When a reporter asked whether they would have been comfortable with Palin as president, there was a long silence. “I think Gov. Palin is an extremely talented person, and she’s going to be one of the key voices of the party, for Republicans, for a long time to come,” Pawlenty answered. “All I can say is that John McCain made very clear that one of his key criteria for selecting a VP running mate was that that person was ready to be president on day one. So in his judgment, she met that criteria, and he felt strongly about that, and so we’ll have to defer to his judgment and that process.”
It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, and none of the others at the table — Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, former eBay CEO and top McCain aide Meg Whitman, and former OMB chief Rob Portman — said specifically that they would have been comfortable with Palin as president.
This is more reassuring. Sanity must reign among the governors and other high-ranking folks if this is going to be a time-out instead of an exile. We need to be looking for the people who can change the image of Republicans as big business shills and cold ideologues. People like Bobby Jindal ought to figure heavily in this.
Conservatives want revenge. We need to calm down, consult our values, pull out the moral compass, and survey the terrain. Then we can move forward, intelligently.
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