Frank Rich: Sarah Palin owns the GOP

July 12, 6:21 AMInternational LGBT Issues ExaminerKelvin Lynch

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               Frank Rich/Photo: AP

Frank Rich wrote an op-ed piece in today's New York Times titled "Sarah Palin broke the GOP and now she owns it".  Pointing to a new USA Today/Gallup poll, Rich says Palin's standing in (what's left of) the GOP has risen to 71%, despite (or perhaps because of) recent criticism of her decision to resign as Governor of Alaska.

"That’s why Palin won’t go gently into the good night, much as some Republicans in Washington might wish," Rich wrote.  "She is not just the party’s biggest star and most charismatic television performer; she is its only star and charismatic performer."

According to Rich,

"Palin 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.

Rich says, "The wave Palin is riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.  Palinists regard their star as an icon of working-class America even though the Palins’ combined reported income ($211,000) puts them in the top 3.6 percent of American households. They see her as a champion of conservative fiscal principles even though she said yes to the Bridge to Nowhere and presided over a state that ranks No.1 in federal pork."

"The Palinists’ bogus beefs about double standards in the media reached farcical proportions at Fox News on the sleepy pre-Fourth of July Friday afternoon when word of her abdication hit the East," said Rich. "The fill-in anchor demanded that his token Democratic stooge name another female politician who had suffered such 'disgraceful attacks' as Palin. When the obvious answer arrived — Hillary Clinton — the Fox host angrily protested that Clinton had never been attacked in 'a sexual way' or 'about her children.'"

Rich said, '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."

Conservative critic David Frum has predicted that if Palin were to actually secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a fiasco for the GOP akin to Goldwater in 1964. "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."

Rich calls Palin the "born avatar" of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a GOP that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.

God help the Grand Old Party.

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