Republican Faux Populism?

Frank Rich in the New York Times:

That Republican leaders can pass off deceptive faux-populism as “pitch-perfect populism” is in part a testament to the blinding intensity of the economic anger and anxiety roiling the country. It also shows the power of an incessant bumper-sticker fiction to take root when ineffectually challenged — and, most crucially, the inability of Democrats to make a persuasive case that they offer anything better.

Frank Rich, "Palin's Cunning Sleight of Hand," New York Times, 14 February 2010.

On the rhetorical difficulties of contemporary populism, see also James Surowiecki, "The Populism Problem," The New Yorker, 15 February 2010.

Photograph: Ed Reinke/AP

Sarah Palin: Devotion and Resignation

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's resignation speech is really very peculiar. The New York Times reprints the full text of the speech here. It is worth a read.

My guess is that those who were most enthusiastic for Sarah Palin during the recent presidential campaign will find a way to be enthusiastic about the resignation speech and the prospects for a Palin presidential campaign in 2012.

But the peculiarities of the speech do little to put aside the doubts of many Americans -- including Independents and Republicans -- that Palin is a lightweight, non-serious politician and would be a disaster in the White House.

A strange time for governors.

Gail Collins in the Times quotes a typical passage from the speech: “And a problem in our country today is apathy,” she said on Friday as she announced that she would resign as governor of Alaska at the end of the month. “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’ No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time ... to BUILD UP.” Collins then comments: "Basically, the point was that Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter."Gail Collins, "Sarah's Straight Talk," New York Times, 4 July 2009.

Governor Palin's speech is peculiar in so many ways. It is fairly long, and it rambles, and in rambling it offers contradictory logics about matters that never had to be raised in the first place. It is hard for a rhetorical critic not to notice that no self-evident situational exigence, strongly visible to her public, was in circulation before the speech, and so part of her rhetorical task would be to offer a convincing depiction of the situation that called forth her resignation. This she really did not do, thus creating an immediate stampede on the part of commentators in the news about her possible motives -- the most likely of which, in their view, is that Palin is planning to run for president and has just further damaged her chances.

Or that there is some further scandal about to burst forth, following a long trail of ethics investigations into the behavior of Governor Palin and her cabinet and family.

Or that the motivation was temperamental and psychological -- that Palin is basically either (1) a committed family person and Christian who has higher priorities; or (2) that she is a flake and a lightweight. There is plenty of evidence for both of these competing views, the choice perhaps depending on one's degree of political sympathy for Palin.

This resignation might be illuminated, at least rhetorically, by recalling Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). Hirschman's fascinating little book considers the varieties of individual response to a failing organization -- one can simply leave (or leave under protest); one can stay and try to give voice to arguments and appeals that might bring about change (or leave while giving voice to such arguments and appeals). Hirschman shows how one can act loyally, creating surprising and productive relations between voice and exit. Thinking of Palin's exit in Hirschman's terms invites us to consider other recent actions by leading Republicans dealing with the widespread perception of the Republican Party as a failing operation--consider Arlen Specter, for example, and the chant of Rush Limbaugh and others that Republicans who don't follow the line should get out. Palin and Specter are exiting in very different directions, but perhaps Hirschman's perspective helps us to see their similarities.

See also:

Todd Purdum, "It Came from Wasilla," Vanity Fair, August 2009.

Maureen Dowd, "Now, Sarah's Folly," New York Times, 5 July 2009.

Video of the speech is here.

The photograph of Governor Palin is from her governor's web page.

Those McCain Robocalls

Talking Points Memo has recordings and transcripts, along with some fact-checking, of the McCain-Palin robocalls that many observers are calling a new low in presidential campaigning.

First Dude Express Comes to State College, PA

The Centre Daily Times, State College, PA, reports today that Todd Palin will arrive this afternoon in time to tailgate and attend the Penn State - Michigan game.

A Bad Week for McCain-Palin

This is the week that the campaign reached its ugliest -- so far.

Serge Kovaleski, "Alaska Inquiry Concludes Palin Abused Powers," New York Times, 10 October 2008.

Gov. Sarah Palin abused the powers of her office by pressuring subordinates to fire her former brother-in-law, a state trooper, an investigation concluded.

Elizabeth Bumiller, "McCain Lauds and Attacks Obama on Same Day," New York Times, 10 October 2008.

After a week of trying to portray Senator Barack Obama as a friend of terrorists who would drive the country into bankruptcy, Senator John McCain abruptly changed his tone on Friday and told voters at a town-hall-style meeting that Mr. Obama was “a decent person” and a “family man” and suggested that he would be an acceptable president should he win the White House.

But moments later, Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, renewed his attacks on Mr. Obama for his association with the 1960s radical William Ayers and told the crowd, “Mr. Obama’s political career was launched in Mr. Ayers’ living room.”

"Your Abbreviated Pundit Roundup," Daily Kos, 11 October 2008.

Bob Shrum, "Time to Ask McCain, 'Have You No Sense of Decency Left?'" Huffington Post, 10 October 2008.

The reality is that in a country facing two wars and a mounting economic crisis, these desparate and despicable appeals aren't working. Obama's lead is mounting, nationally and in the battleground states. But there is a threat here too that is all too real. When I heard someone in a Palin crowd yell out "traitor" as the candidate lashed out at the Democratic nominee, I thought of the full-page ad that appeared in a Dallas newspaper on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963. The headline--"Wanted for Treason"-- was sprawled across a poster-sized photo of President John F. Kennedy.

You don't put country first by running this kind of campaign.

A more or less coherent narrative is emerging in press coverage of the Republican campaign, all the more surprising because essentially the same narrative is emerging left and right, and on the "main stream media" as well as in the blogosphere, and in serious journalism as well as comic sendups. Palin is portrayed as superficial, dishonest, and abusive. McCain is portrayed as a geriatric case -- an angry, out of touch, desperate old man who will do anything to seize his last chance at the presidency. This is a narrative that will be difficult for McCain to disentangle himself from, as it seems to account for both the silly (his "wandering" at the debate) and the serious (his and Palin's encouragement of a level of anger and threat that, as one commentator pointed out, would stimulate a Secret Service intervention if said by anyone else). McCain's very inconsistency has emerged as part of a consistent narrative -- and that's hard to shake, since any new tactics fit so easily into the coherent story of his incoherence.

See also Harold Ford, Jr., "Will McCain Do Anything to Win?" Washington Post, 11 October 2008.

Khaled Hosseini, "McCain and Palin Are Playing with Fire," Washington Post, 12 October 2008.

Jonathan Martin, "John Lewis, Invoking George Wallace, Says McCain and Palin 'Playing with Fire,'" Politico, 11 October 2008.

(image Stephen Crowley/The New York Times, 11 October 2008)