She Is The Republican Party

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The headline reads:

EXCLUSIVE: Palin plans to stay in politics

Well why not?  As Frank Rich says she is the modern Republican Party

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.

The Republican party has become the party of people who long for "the good old days" when the vast majority of voters were white.  Now that demographics are changing those whites see themselves as victims and Sarah Palin is a master of victim hood.  Sarah Palin will make a lot of money but the party she inherits is a dead end. 

Those Republicans who have not drunk the Palin Kool-Aid are apocalyptic for good reason. She could well be their 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. She has the Teflon-coated stature among Republicans that Romney can only fantasize about.

Were Palin actually to secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a fiasco for the G.O.P. akin to Goldwater 1964, as the most relentless conservative Palin critic, David Frum, has predicted. Or would it? No one thought Richard Nixon � a far less personable commodity than Palin � would come back either after his sour-grapes �last press conference� of 1962. But Democratic divisions and failures gave him his opportunity in 1968. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and a seemingly bottomless war in Afghanistan, you never know, as Palin likes to say, what doors might open.

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.