Target: Sarah Palin

By Kleinheider Posted on November 6, 2008 at 1:55 pm

If you believe Fox News, Sarah Palin is straight-up ignorant. She doesn’t know that Africa is a continent not a country and she cannot name the nations which comprise NAFTA. The state’s liberal bloggers are eating up these off-the-record reports as if they were sent to us on stone tablets.

Say what you like about Sarah Palin, she is a popular politician. She likes the camera and the camera likes her. She appeals to conservatives on a visceral level. They see her not just as someone who can represent them but as someone who, in many senses, is them.

Conservative people, Republican voters, feel a cultural affinity to Palin that no smartly written right-wing column or affected folksy demeanor can match.

Put simply, the woman is dangerous to the Republican establishment.

McCain needed to change the game when he chose his Vice Presidential running-mate. He needed fire and fire is what he got. It was a risky move for John McCain to make. But the pick was even riskier for the Republican elite going forward.

McCain gave an authentic charismatic cultural conservative direct access to a national stage. John McCain created a monster that now the establishment must destroy.

John McCain has a legacy to protect and his acolytes have careers they need to preserve. This historic defeat has to be hung around somebody’s neck. It sure as hell isn’t going to be McCain.

They need her to take the fall for this.

Republicans who have designs on the presidency (Romney, Huckabee and others) also have an interest in taking Plain down a few notches. This woman, after all, was designed to be window dressing, something to gin up the base and add some energy to the ticket.

The Republican elite was willing bump Sarah Palin up several spaces up the career ladder in pursuit of an election victory, in pursuit of power.

But they lost. Now Republican movers and shakers want her to simply fade away and go back to where she came from — literally and figuratively.

Don’t get it twisted, Sarah Plain may very well be the raving idiot she can appear to be. All these stories about her stubborn ignorance may be 100% true. However, it’s naive to simply ignore the reasons why this information is being leaked.

It is not in pursuit of truth, it is in pursuit of a political goal. Cultural conservatives, to the elite, are voters, not leaders.

They are foot solders who live the simple, church going lives that the leader props up an ideal while he leads the deracinated, amoral existence so common in Washington D.C.

Whether Palin is truly intelligent or ignorant, ultimately, is of no consequences. Palin was seen by Republicans as commodity, a means to an end, a product line that now must be discontinued.

As a running-mate, Sarah Palin could be controlled. As an independent political force, she is a loose cannon. She has not “paid her dues.” She has not been jaded and compromised in the way many who have spent years in big league politics have been.

They need her to go away. Again, all this information we have heard and will hear may be very, very true. But let’s not forget who is distrusting the information and what exactly is motivating them to do do.

UPDATE: The smearer revealed.

SEE ALSO:
Roger Abramson
Sean Braisted
KAG
Guerilla Women
55-40
Dan Cleary
GoldnI
Six Meat Buffet
Aunt B.
Phil Klein
Rich Hailey
American Conservative

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Tags: cultural conservatives, Sarah Palin