Like Trump, Palin had powers beyond the campaign trail: She wore a celebrity halo rarely seen on a politician. Her traveling circus in the fall of proudly embraced redneck America, Hank Williams Jr. Her crowds were rapturous. It was a partisan culture clash that only gave Palin more strength. Her family dramas became tabloid favorites. Obama left readers to draw the obvious comparison to Trump. Whether Trump was watching closely or not, Palin carved out a new path to power.
Out of the White House and essentially deplatformed from Twitter and Facebook, Trump is inhabiting something of a media time warp, now much more dependent on traditional media for attention.
Between and , Mitch McConnell might have controlled the official levers of GOP politics in Washington, but no Republican occupied the public consciousness more than Sarah Palin. The country might have had its first Black president in office, grappling with seismic economic distress, but Palin was the entertainer in chief.
Her face was splattered on magazines, on cable and broadcast news, on Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, on Oprah and CBN, on Facebook and Twitter, on weirdo fan blogs and international news sites alike.
She was inescapable. National Review launched a blog dedicated solely to observing Palin. As the Tea Party movement forced its way into the national conversation, she emerged as its de facto standard-bearer.
Political pundits were at once confounded and bewitched. Any of this sound familiar? Twitter Facebook E-mail. January 10, By submitting comments here, you are consenting to these rules: Readers' comments that include profanity, obscenity, personal attacks, harassment, or are defamatory, sexist, racist, violate a third party's right to privacy, or are otherwise inappropriate, will be removed.
More Stories. Financial trusts and secrecy in a U. Show more. Get Our Newsletter Subscribe. She had it. But on the issues she made the focus of her administration—the oil tax and the gas line—she had good staff, listened to them, and backed them up.
She was a transformative governor, no question. But she must have appealed to him for reasons beyond her gender and vivacity. Palin was fresh from major, unexpected victories. For this, she was wildly popular. Bush and the Republican establishment, and the glory they had won him. Instead, they turned hard right. She says unwarranted ethics investigations are what prompted her to quit. Most Alaskans seem to think she left to get rich. But she also had lost her political base. Republicans had never liked her, Democrats felt betrayed, and everyone believed she was now fixated on the presidency.
Today, only about 33 percent of Alaskans hold a favorable view of her. But Alaskans seem relieved to have him in charge. Parnell is also a former oil lobbyist for ConocoPhillips. But in December, having been elected in his own right, he decided to make some changes, and began by firing the remaining members of the Magnificent Seven.
The Resource Development Council for Alaska, a leading business lobbying group, has taken up this cause in earnest. Most legislators give Parnell even odds of succeeding. Everyone agrees that the oil industry is reasserting itself, now that Palin has moved on. Listening to it today, you can practically hear her shift registers, the state figure morphing into a national one, the old Palin becoming the new. What if history had written a different ending?
What if she had tried to do for the nation what she did for Alaska? The possibility is tantalizing and not hard to imagine. The week after the Republican convention, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and the whole economy suddenly seemed poised to go down with it.
Palin might have been the torchbearer of reform, a role that would have come naturally. Everything about her—the aggressiveness, the gift for articulating resentments, her record and even her old allies in Alaska—would once more have been channeled against a foe worth pursuing. Where true Palinism could be most productively applied is on the issues consuming Washington right now: debt and deficits.
She did this not by hewing to any ideological extreme but by setting a pragmatic course, applying a rigorous practicality to a set of problems that had seemed impervious to solution. She challenged supposedly inviolable political precepts, and embraced more-nuanced realities: Republicans sometimes must confront powerful business interests; to govern effectively, you have to cooperate with the other side; you sometimes must raise taxes to balance a budget; and doing these things can actually enhance rather than destroy your career, whatever anybody says.
This approach is sorely absent from most of what happens in Washington these days. But had she run as a reformer, these would have amounted to a character trait—not her defining trait—and one shared by many successful politicians. Just look at her running mate! The Palin they knew faced many of the same obstacles, and nothing about her charmed career, from mayor to governor to vice-presidential nominee and finally to global celebrity, suggests to them that she would ever be deterred.
Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. This really, really disgusts me and ticks me off. I want to know right now who said it, who would ever lie about such a thing this is the type of bullshit lie about family that WILL keep me from running for Governor.
I hate this kind of crap. I thought it was bad enough that my kids have been lied about recently regarding illegal activities that they had NO part in whatsoever. She's led a city and a state. She's reduced taxes and government spending. And she's actually done something about moving America toward energy independence -- taking on the oil companies while encouraging more energy exploration here at home.
Taxpayers have an advocate in Sarah Palin. She even sold the former governor's private plane on eBay. Romney, believed to be angling for a future presidential run, also gave a full-throated endorsement of his former primary rival. We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington -- throw out the big-government liberals and elect John McCain," Romney said as the crowd cheered "USA!
Republicans prefer straight talk to politically correct talk," Romney said. Taking a veiled jab at Michelle Obama for suggesting on the campaign trail in February that she was "proud" of the country for the first time in her life after her husband won the Iowa caucuses, Romney said, "Just like you, there has never been a day when I was not proud to be an American.
Huckabee, a former Baptist minister who, thanks to widespread support from Christian evangelicals, was the last of McCain's most credible rivals to drop out of the race, reminded the crowd he wanted to be at the top of the GOP ticket. Slamming the media's coverage of the election, Huckabee argued that the press has united the conservative moment -- saying that coverage is "tackier than a costume change at a Madonna concert.
Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle, who introduced Palin, nodded to the potential vice president's family drama. After Palin's speech, there was a roll call vote that culminated in McCain becoming the Republican nominee. Republicans argued there was a huge opportunity, because of the tremendous interest in Palin's speech, to restart the general election campaign. She's opened up the playing field on hockey moms in America, she's re-energized the base and galvanized the Republican convention," said longtime Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg as he walked through the convention hall.
Amid a swirl of media reports about Palin's family and background, McCain's campaign Wednesday angrily called for an end to questions about it's "vetting" of Palin's background. She blasted the overall coverage of Palin as sexist -- and specifically an Us Weekly cover headlined "Babies, Lies and Scandal. And for whatever reason, the media has decided to treat her differently, because, I believe, because she's a woman. The potential first lady added that she approved of the selection of Palin as her husband's running mate, saying, "It's wonderful" that Palin's year-old daughter is pregnant, claiming the campaign "knew about it.
They're going to have a new grandbaby -- I mean, a new life. It's wonderful. Senior campaign adviser Steve Schmidt released a statement calling questions a "faux media scandal designed to destroy the first female Republican nominee" for vice president, lashing out at "the old boys' network" that, he said, runs media organizations.
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