John McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate surprised many political observers, who expected a higher-profile choice like Tim Pawlenty or Mitt Romney. What surprised was Palin’s relative obscurity. Not surprising was the crass pandering Palin’s selection represents, to disappointed Hillary Clinton supporters on one hand, and to the Religious Right on the other. Time will tell, but I doubt McCain’s campaign can have it both ways and successfully appeal to these very different groups simultaneously.
Palin’s speaking persona is engaging; her content, unimpressive. Palin introduced herself and her family well; from there, it was downhill. She ignored many policy issues squarely addressed in Barack Obama’s content-packed acceptance speech, wrongly mocked Obama’s community-organizing experience as lacking “actual responsibilities,” railed against unspecified “Washington elites,” “special interests,” “the Washington herd,” and “oil company lobbyists” – hypocritically, since, while running Washington the past eight years, her own Republican Party has virtually rubber-stamped oil interests’ views. Unlike Obama’s and Biden’s addresses last week, Palin’s speech ignored Americans’ economic pain, or compelling stories of Americans squeezed by foreclosures, lack of health insurance, and job discrimination. She hurled plenty of right-wing “red meat”: less taxes, less Big Government, more war in Iraq, and single-minded zeal for more oil drilling, accompanied by delegates chanting “drill, baby, drill.” In the process, Palin probably ignored that her audience wasn’t only conservative Republican delegates in St. Paul, but also millions more, far more ideologically moderate and diverse, viewers. Political scientists know national-convention delegates are very unrepresentative of their parties’ identifiers: on average, Republican delegates are further right than Republicans in the electorate are – and much further right than the electorate as a whole. I doubt this reality much concerned Karl Rove’s deputy, Steve Schmidt, who now heads McCain’s campaign, favoring the brass-knuckled personal negativity that has defined McCain’s advertising lately.
In the early 1990s, Religious Right leaders pursued “stealth tactics” to gain control of the Republican Party, with considerable success. Today, Republican stealth tactics (attempting to conceal Palin’s extreme conservatism) continue. As vice president, Palin would be the far right’s rubber stamp in the White House, pushing more right-wing Supreme Court nominees like Clarence Thomas and salivating at overturning Roe v. Wade. Palin’s radical-right positions include opposing endangered-species protection for polar bears, denying human-induced global warming, favoring criminalizing abortions even in cases of rape and incest, and supporting teaching creationism in public-school science classrooms. As mayor, she sought to ban some books from Wasilla’s town library. Addressing her church, she described the Iraq war as “a task that is from God,” and supported a proposed natural-gas pipeline as “God’s will.”
My May 30 Free Press column, “GOP is Too Far Right,” documents the right’s stranglehold on today’s Republican Party, whose moderate contingent shrivels with every passing election cycle. Sarah Palin’s selection as running mate does nothing to counter these realities; in fact, it further exemplifies them. If McCain wins, the most ideologically extreme running mate in modern history will be one 72-year-old’s heartbeat away from the presidency.
Fred Slocum is an associate professor of political science at Minnesota State University. He is part of a Free Press team of readers asked to comment more frequently on issues of the day. He considers his political views Democratic.
Footnotes
1)McCain apparently believes that disappointed Clinton supporters, especially female Clinton supporters, will flock in droves to a Republican ticket with a woman on it. He may be right, but I doubt it: see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/van-jones/palin-youre-no-hillary-cl_b_122479.html. One Clinton supporter, noting Palin favors banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest, said “Sarah Palin is to women’s equality what Clarence Thomas is to civil rights.”
2)Palin and Clinton are both female, but similarities end right there. Clinton is pro-choice on abortion; Palin is staunchly anti-abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. Clinton has a long record of support from feminist political groups; Palin is an ardent supporter of Religious Right causes, and it is no secret that the Religious Right is hostile to the feminist movement and its goals. Indeed, the Religious Right usually portrays feminists as enemies of what they view as the “God-ordained” role of women as homemakers and subservient to their husbands, a doctrine even reflected in the ultra-conservative Southern Baptist Convention’s statement of beliefs. See also http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/sarah_palins_address_to_the_rn.html.
3)Indeed, Palin’s slap at community organizers was downright insulting, but not isolated, as other Republicans cheerfully joined the “let’s trash community organizers” parade; see http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/09/04/gop-mocks-community-organizers/.
4)In Republican-speak, “less taxes” or “lower taxes” really means “less taxes for the rich” and “less taxes for corporations.” Republican tax policies have relentlessly and unapologetically shifted the distribution taxes away from the wealthiest and onto the middle class, and John McCain, in voting for repealing the estate tax (2006) and in reversing himself to now favor making Bush’s tax cuts permanent, favors more of the same.
5)In reality, while Republicans regularly claim to oppose Big Government, their real concern is minimizing government intervention only in economic matters: environmental protection and worker safety laws, and other government regulation of business, taxes (favoring tax cuts heavily slanted to favor corporations and the rich), and assistance to the less fortunate (favoring cuts, cuts and more cuts, and privatizing Social Security). Grover Norquist zealously pursued wave after wave of tax cuts to forcibly shrink the federal government to a size where one could “drown it in the bathtub.” In a party now virtually joined at the hip with the Religious Right on social issues, few Republicans are concerned with government intrusion into, if not dictation of, people’s moral decisions. On abortion, the party again adopted a rigidly anti-abortion stance: if you are pregnant, you WILL carry the pregnancy to full term, whether or not you want to, no matter what the circumstances. Republicans led the 2005 effort to force government intervention in private medical decisions, when congressional Republicans led the charge to force Terri Schiavo to remain in a vegetative state and connected to a feeding tube, against her and her husband’s wishes. Republicans, in league with the Religious Right, regularly lead efforts to establish and extend government discrimination against gays and lesbians, in recognizing relationships, adoption, foster parenting, and in hostile and discriminatory ballot resolutions like Colorado’s Amendment 2 (1992) and Oregon’s failed Measure 9 (1992), among others.
6)See http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n23_v110/ai_13235609 and especially http://www.theocracywatch.org/taking_over.htm#Religious. It is no surprise that Republican Party platforms routinely endorse Religious Right agenda items, including overturning Roe v. Wade, sweeping abortion bans, anti-gay discrimination by government in marriage and other spheres, teaching creationism in the public schools and endorsing coercive organized prayers in the public schools. In 2004, the Texas Republican Party, one of the most far-right of any state parties, endorsed a “Christian Nation” platform plank (see http://www.explodedlibrary.info/2004/06/why_the_texas_g.html), declaring “The Republican Party of Texas affirms that the United States of America is a Christian nation, and the public acknowledgement of God is undeniable in our history. Our nation was founded on fundamental Judeo-Christian principles based on the Holy Bible. The Party affirms freedom of religion, and rejects efforts of courts and secular activists who seek to remove and deny such a rich heritage from our public lives” – an unmistakable reference to court rulings against Roy Moore’s brazenly sectarian Ten Commandments crusades in Alabama and frequent right-wing efforts to get around Supreme Court decisions banning organized, coercive prayer and Bible readings in public schools.
7)http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-ap-cvn-palin-environment,0,6369060.story; also see http://www.americablog.com/2008/08/sarah-palin-wants-to-let-polar-bears.html. Palin obviously considers oil drilling in Alaska as far more important than protecting polar bears, whose habitat of ice floes is being seriously threatened by unprecedented melting brought on by global warming. Climate scientists know that global warming is especially strongly felt in the polar areas, where rapid temperature rises are causing melting glaciers, ice shelves to break off of Greenland and Antarctica’s ice sheets, and where polar bears are being forced to swim long distances because ice floes are becoming more scarce. Sarah Palin herself acknowledged the strong impact of global warming on Alaska because it lies so far north.
8)http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1837868,00.html; also see http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/08/30/sarah-palin-making-john-mccain-look-like-al-gore/.
9)http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/101906/sta_20061019031.shtml.
10) http://dwb.adn.com/news/politics/elections/story/8347904p-8243554c.html, and http://www.thelangreport.com/religion-or-lack-of/sarah-palin-wants-creationism-taught-in-school/.
11)http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/us/politics/03wasilla.html?em.
12)http://news.yahoo.com/story//ap/20080904/ap_on_el_pr/cvn_palin_iraq_war; also see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html.
13)http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html; see a video clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS_VduCWhzM&feature;=related.
14)Slocum, Fred, “GOP is Too Far Right.” My View column, Mankato Free Press, May 30, 2008; http://www.mankato-freepress.com/letters/local_story_151113330.html.
15)Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005); see http://www.hackerpierson.com/. Hacker and Pierson, both professional political scientists, writing when Republicans held both the White House and Congress, show that Republicans “have strayed dramatically from the moderate middle of public opinion, yet faced little public backlash. Again and again, they have sided with the affluent and the ultraconservative, while paying little heed to the broad majority of Americans . . . If politicians veer off center, the normal checks and balances of American government are supposed to pull them back. Yet Republicans have short-circuited many of these checks and balances . . . [via] a systematic weakening of the bonds between ordinary voters and elected politicians [and] a deliberative process systematically restricted and distorted by party chieftains, unresponsive power brokers subverting the popular will, and legislation written by and for powerful interests and deliberately designed to mute popular discontent.” The major facilitators of these phenomena include President George W. Bush, his former top advisor (and current Wall Street Journal columnist) Karl Rove, now-indicted former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and Republican power-broker Grover Norquist, head of the virulently anti-government (in economic policy only) lobbying group Americans for Tax Reform.
16)The incredible shrinking moderate presence in today’s Republican Party is evident in the Bush Administration, as moderates like former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman have left the administration, feeling marginalized by more conservative White House appointees like Donald Rumsfeld (in Colin Powell’s case) and the administration’s relentlessly anti-environmental policymaking, evident in its resistance to any concerted action against global warming, walking away from Clinton-era lawsuits to force utilities to comply with the Clean Air Act, muzzling of government scientists and experts from speaking out on global warming, lifting of restrictions against mountaintop-removal mining (a huge gift to Republican-allied mining companies) and attempt to relax arsenic standards in drinking water, among many other examples. In elections, the pattern has been that Republican members of Congress deemed insufficiently conservative have faced primary challenges from far-right “true believers,” often well-funded by right-wing power brokers like Americans for Tax Reform and the so-called Club for Growth. In this vein, moderate Republican Rep. Marge Roukema of New Jersey fended off strong 1998 and 2000 primary challenges from archconservative Scott Garrett, but retired from Congress in 2002, and Garrett won the seat in a Republican district in November 2002; moderate Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania barely won his 2004 primary against archconservative Patrick Toomey; and in Michigan, moderate Republican Joe Schwarz lost his 2006 primary to the far more conservative Tim Walberg, who then was elected to Congress from another Republican district. Finally, political scientists Hacker and Pierson show that both House and Senate Republicans have moved rightward far more than their Democratic counterparts have moved leftward, and that Republican activists are both further off-center and galloping further rightward, while Democratic activists as a group are more centrist and moving slightly toward the center.
