Andrew Sullivan and Frank Rich serve up a couple of tasty pieces on the Palin / GOP clownshow today.

Palin leads the right into a reality TV vortex
The Alaska governor’s resignation shows how shallow Republicans have become
Andrew Sullivan

Writing about Sarah Palin always presents a quandary. Does one operate under the usual assumption that this is a rational figure, a serious politician, a rising Republican star . . . or do you acknowledge the copious evidence that she cannot tell the truth, has delusions of grandeur, has no policy record to speak of and quit her job as Alaska governor halfway through her first term because she is, in her own explanation, “not a quitter”? I think that you have to proceed under the assumption that this is a joke of a candidate and a symptom of a political party in the middle of a mental breakdown.

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The reality of Sarah Palin is that politics is a means to her higher goal: celebrity. Every action she takes is designed to make sense . . . if you believe that government is really a version of a reality show. The remote, David Lynch-style location, the family often in trouble with the law, the pregnant teenage daughter and her impossibly handsome redneck boyfriend, the boyfriend’s angry sister, an ornery Alaskan trooper, a few moose and mysterious pregnancies . . . and, well, the mini-series never ends. The best guess I’ve heard of the real reason for her abrupt departure is: “I’m a celebrity . . . get me out of here!”

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And this helps explain the broader problem with American conservatism right now. It is less a movement than an industry. From Fox News to talk radio to conservative publishing houses, it has created an alternate and lucrative media reality that is worth a fortune to those able to exploit it. Alas, these alternative media thrive on paranoia, hatred of liberal elites and growing extremist rhetoric made worse by a hermetically sealed echo chamber of true believers. Anyone criticised by the left or even by the establishment right is a martyr in this world. In America, martyrdom sells. And Palin is a product worth lots of money.

She wants some of it; and she has no actual interest in governing America (even though she’d love the title of president). She referred to giving up her “title” as governor, not her “office”. In this, she is the ultimate Republican of this degenerate moment: all culture war, no policy; all identity politics, no engagement with practical answers to difficult public problems; and all hysterical opposition to Barack Obama, no actual alternatives offered.

Since even epic scandals heighten celebrity rather than diminish it, Palin’s future is secure. Her party’s? Getting bleaker by the day.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6688848.ece

She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It
By FRANK RICH

SARAH PALIN and Al Sharpton don’t ordinarily have much in common, but they achieved a rare harmonic convergence at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. When Sharpton told the singer’s children it was their daddy’s adversaries, not their daddy, who were “strange,” he was channeling the pugnacious argument the Alaska governor had made the week before. There was nothing strange about her decision to quit in midterm, Palin told America. What’s strange — or “insane,” in her lingo — are the critics who dare question her erratic behavior on the national stage.

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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.

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These are the cries 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. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/opinion/12rich.html?ref=opinion

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

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I also think Gov. Palin wouldn’t and won’t meet with us, or most any other media outlet that doesn’t express adulation over her, because she wants to preserve her “media victim” image as much as possible.

To regularly interact with editorial boards and to engage in substantive discussions with journalists and commentators who could challenge her ideas could undercut that self-made “victim” status.


And if she really is a “media victim,” shouldn’t she be lambasting the editors and journalists directly, in face-to-face meetings or in on-the-record interviews? That’s what other politicians and state leaders regularly do.

As for me, if the governor had specific complaints with the Daily News-Miner, I didn’t hear about them.

It’s worth noting that she did find time to talk to several News-Miner editors about the issues, for two hours, back in 2006 while she was campaigning for governor.

That seems like a long time ago now.

We haven’t changed much since then, but she sure has.

Rod Boyce is managing editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. http://newsminer.com/news/2009/jul/11/palin-dodged-open-discussion/?opinion

The reality of Sarah Palin is that politics is a means to her higher goal: celebrity.

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.