In review, it seems that this litany of complaints spends an overly large amount of time wailing about the activities of, and presence on Earth, of the organism labeled Sarah Palin. I’d be hard pressed to deny that such is the case. I do spend a lot of time and energy in posts concerning her.
The reason for such focus upon Palin is that I honestly believe she is dangerous when we consider her possible role in the future of this nation. While many of the pundits and political analysts discount the possibility that she will ever become POTUS, I don’t.
Common reasons advanced against her potential election include her current refusal to commit to a campaign, her declining “favored candidate” poll numbers, her continued employment by Fox News, and her history of resignation from her position as governor. These are all valid reasons to bet against her candidacy and subsequent election. But they must be offset by the nature of her targeted voter base, teavangelists, when it is combined with the overall GOP base. Palin appeals to fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. She appeals to the poorly educated; she is quite willing to appeal to racists, to anti-tax voters. The anti-abortion segment of her base is already militant and willing to vote against anyone who proposes that women should have any say in pregnancy and its prevention.
Looking at her history, we find an attempted book banning at the Wasilla library/. We see her elected to a mayoral position followed by her hiring a city manager to do the job she was elected to do. We see a steady line of resignations from jobs that she sought but soon found too hard or too boring. We see ethical transgressions, revenge firings, and other morally shaky actions.
It is impossible to disregard her intellectual shortcomings. She has displayed no understanding of history, of economics, of foreign policy or the Constitution as it applies to this nation’s history and future. Her political idol is one of the least competent men ever to be elected as POTUS, Reagan.
In a logical world, she would be un-electable. But the current American voter base is poorly educated, fearful of the economic future, and badly polarized. Much of the base is willing to establish a Christian theocracy and simultaneously willing to eliminate non-Christians from the electorate and populace. That same base is angry with the supposed “elite” (educated, progressive, white-collar workers while failing completely to see that the GOP/teavangelists are the very elite they are ranting about.
If we had a voter base that would actually turn out to vote, I would worry far less about Palin. But the cultural trending away from education, combined with the effects of a GOP propaganda machine that never stops spreading lies, is frightening at best. Palin has ghostwritten two books. It matters not that they are dreck – the people who bought them won’t read them closely enough to determine their lack of merit. They are PR tools. So was the Alaskan “reality show.” So too is the soon to be “documentary movie” crafted to make the masses ignore her intellectual “vacancy” sign that flashes brightly each time she is allowed to speak without heavy oversight. She’s been engaged in a PR campaign since failing to win Ms. Alaska. The voter base that will support her fails to see that while losing as Ms. Alaska she won as Ms. Informed.
There is a deep enough pool of idiocy among the current voter base that it is sadly possible that she might slide into office, carried on a wave of pseudo-populism by the very worst of the American voters. After all, Nixon, Reagan, and G.W. Bush were elected by a similar base, twice each. The same politically un-learned base is all too eager to put another mindless puppet into the oval office. If we aren’t frightened by that though, perhaps we deserve Ms. Informed.
Mencken’s First Law
No man ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Variants of this also attributed to the Sage of Baltimore include “No man ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people” and “Never overestimate the intelligence of the voter.” The basic law may well be a popular condensation of a wordier comment by Mencken: “No one in this world so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people” (Chicago Tribune, September 19th 1926).
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