Sarah Palin: Ms. Conspiracy for president?
By Richard Cohen
WashPost
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
The mind of the demagogue is a foreign country. It has a strange culture, enemies that only the natives can see, a passion about the ridiculous and a blowtorch kind of sincerity that incinerates logical thinking. On Sunday, the custodian of one such blowtorch was on Fox News. I am speaking, of course, of Sarah Palin.
She was charming, amusing and believable. When Chris Wallace asked her about any presidential ambitions, she did not coyly say that she had not given the matter any thought. Instead, she said that if her party needed her, if her country needed her, if the need for her was truly great, then she would sacrifice her freedom of movement, the privacy she enjoys with her family - never mind their tabloid lifestyle and addiction to publicity - and give it all up and run for president. All over the nation, a fair number of Republicans reached for the antacid. Oy!
A Palin presidential candidacy, Politico tells us, would give the GOP establishment a near-fatal case of hives. The leadership generally considers her to be both unelectable and uneducable. (She seems hardly better informed than when she was a lone sentry, binoculars trained on nearby - and forewarned - Russia.) A recent Post-ABC News poll showed that only 39 percent of voters viewed her favorably and a still lower figure, 27 percent, considered her qualified to be president. (Who are these people?) But as Republican leaders know, Palin's numbers are much higher among their own rank and file. With conservative Republicans, 55 percent think she's qualified to be president - and among Tea Party types, she wins by acclamation. The nomination, please.
John McCain's little joke is turning out not to be so funny. In choosing Palin as his running mate, he set a standard for political recklessness that I hope will never be bettered. Still, it would be reckless in itself to transfer McCain's cynicism to Palin. This is the constant mistake made with all demagogues. We think that they cannot be serious or sincere - that if we could be a fly on the wall we would hear them mocking their own followers as imbecilic. History teaches otherwise.
(More here.)
WashPost
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
The mind of the demagogue is a foreign country. It has a strange culture, enemies that only the natives can see, a passion about the ridiculous and a blowtorch kind of sincerity that incinerates logical thinking. On Sunday, the custodian of one such blowtorch was on Fox News. I am speaking, of course, of Sarah Palin.
She was charming, amusing and believable. When Chris Wallace asked her about any presidential ambitions, she did not coyly say that she had not given the matter any thought. Instead, she said that if her party needed her, if her country needed her, if the need for her was truly great, then she would sacrifice her freedom of movement, the privacy she enjoys with her family - never mind their tabloid lifestyle and addiction to publicity - and give it all up and run for president. All over the nation, a fair number of Republicans reached for the antacid. Oy!
A Palin presidential candidacy, Politico tells us, would give the GOP establishment a near-fatal case of hives. The leadership generally considers her to be both unelectable and uneducable. (She seems hardly better informed than when she was a lone sentry, binoculars trained on nearby - and forewarned - Russia.) A recent Post-ABC News poll showed that only 39 percent of voters viewed her favorably and a still lower figure, 27 percent, considered her qualified to be president. (Who are these people?) But as Republican leaders know, Palin's numbers are much higher among their own rank and file. With conservative Republicans, 55 percent think she's qualified to be president - and among Tea Party types, she wins by acclamation. The nomination, please.
John McCain's little joke is turning out not to be so funny. In choosing Palin as his running mate, he set a standard for political recklessness that I hope will never be bettered. Still, it would be reckless in itself to transfer McCain's cynicism to Palin. This is the constant mistake made with all demagogues. We think that they cannot be serious or sincere - that if we could be a fly on the wall we would hear them mocking their own followers as imbecilic. History teaches otherwise.
(More here.)
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