Sarah and the Non Sequitur Loving Base

I have successfully avoided the actual Palin announcement of her retirement, but I have nosed into some of the punditry that she provoked. And it seems to me that the most salient message that she got across was that being governor is a hindrance to her desire to improve the country. Aside from the easy joke that her resignation will certainly improve Alaskan government, I think this is a fascinating example of how The Base perceives reality.

The non sequitur has emerged as the primary intellectual mode of conservative expression, and Sarah clearly reflects the wingnut zeigeist with her claim that quitting her job is the way for her to avoid being a quitter. Liberals of course will hoot derisively at this oxymoronic proposition, but The Base understands her perfectly. Politics to the modern wingnut is not about effective government -- as Reagan set forth the doctrine a generation ago, government is not the solution, government is the problem. Grover Nordquist famously opined that the fundamental goal of conservatism was to shrink the government enough that it could be drowned in a bathtub. Sarah's notion that staying in the governor's chair would be quitting fits perfectly into this wingnut tradition of denigrating government.

Vote for me to run the government because I don't want the government to exist has proven to be a winning pitch, at least through the election of 2004 -- and the demographically dwindling GOP Base still responds to the proposition enthusiastically. Sarah's seeming illogic actually embodies the party's philosophy. How can you oppose Government when you are running it?

From 1994 through 2004, Limbaugh, Gingrich and Shrub dominated American politics by mastering the art of attacking the idea of Big Government while simultaneously making that Government bigger and bigger and bigger. They won most of the elections during that span by separating the idea of a campaign from the reality of govermental operations. Sarah has now brought this basic strategy to its logical conclusion -- she brazenly maintains that being Governor prevents her from serving the public. Her function is to campaign for conservative values.

What we call The Base has always been a pretty thin minority. The Karl Rove strategy was to get these people to turn out in much higher percentages than the reliable democratic constituencies like African Americans or union members. This worked to make the elections of 2000 and 2004 very close -- close enough to be decided by controversial vote counts in Florida and Ohio respectively. Squeaking out those two elections and thereby dominating public life for most of this decade made The Base seem to be the most significant electoral bloc in the country -- recall how so many people were calling Sarah a "game changer" when she burst on the national scene and energized The Base. But as the 2008 election played out, even though The Base got all lathered up about Sarah and even though The Base responded enthusiastically to the desperate (and hysterically funny) attacks on Obama the Arab, Muslim, Socialist who pals around with terrorists -- when the votes were counted the GOP got creamed.

The wall to wall disaster of Bush's second term coupled with the ongoing shift in demographics toward a younger multi-ethnic polity combined to bring the era of The Base to a full and final stop. Obama may fumble away his huge political advantage, and if he does, The Base could be a part of a new governing coalition someday. But the basic Karl Rove strategy of feeding these idiots a diet of Teri Schiavo and gay bashing will never win national elections again.

Sarah's illogical babbling does not hurt her with these folks, and her basic point that being Governor of Alaska keeps her from serving the conservative cause is the truth. And the more that she gets mocked, the more popular she will become with this faction.

I have a hard time seeing her, as an individual, having the marathon runner's discipline to win the GOP nomination in 2012. But if she gets the right handlers -- and listens to them -- she can easily win the nomination. And the fact that she quit as Governor will be a net plus for her, because at the end of the day, her constituency doesn't give a flying fuck about who is the Governor of Alaska.

Obama is one lucky sumbitch when it comes to GOP opposition.

It's an incredible horrific embarrassing train wreck.

She could take a dump on national TV and her base wouldn't care. But she loses more and more credibility with everyone else.

Her base isn't enough to get her the presidency.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/2009/07/full-text-of-palins-resignation-speech.php

Or even more fun is trying to read the transcript on its own. The words on their own make sense, but arranged like this, it's such nonsense.

the title? "Webster's Dictionary" ...

the words on their own made sense, but not when arranged that way ...

:evilgrin:

... statements like:

"her claim that quitting her job is the way for her to avoid being a quitter"

is actually an example of a direct logical contradiction.

I mean, how is that perceptibly different from, say, Larry Craig claiming that he isn't gay just because he made hand and foot signals to another guy in a men's room? Or Mark Sanford's claim that he's a traditional family values man, despite having a hottie girlfriend in Argentina?

Call me crazy, but I see a consistent pattern here.

so I may be off on the terms -- but isn't the contradiction a subset of the non sequitur, ie, all contradictions are non sequiturs, but some non sequiturs are not contradictions?

The most prominent Republican non sequitur of recent years was, "We are fighting them there so that we don't have to fight them here." Another illogical formulation that added the mixing of metaphors was, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

When Rove programs Shrub to say stupid shit like that, it is cynical manipulation. Even now it is hard to say exactly how stupid or cunningly faux-stupid Dubya is. But Sarah gives every indication of being one of The Base herself -- somebody too stupid to understand why contradiction is a problem.

That is why I suspect that she will find some way to blow her advantage with The Base. She has the attention span of Curly Howard.