Dorrk Dot Com

So now that Barack Obama is the President-Elect, I don’t have much to say about his transition. Like all conservatives of good conscience, I hope that his presidency is a great success for the United States, but I expect it won’t be. FTR, neither did I expect McCain to achieve very inspiring results had he managed the improbable feat of devising a feasible plan for victory, which is partly why I feel fairly blase about the result.

Some things I find interesting in the aftermath:

Lots of navel gazing and infighting amongst conservatives about the future of the Republican party.

I tend to agree with Jonah Goldberg that, yes this was big defeat, but not exactly a surprise, and full of big signs that do not necessarily mean the destruction of the Republican party, the most important of which was the giant personal appeal of the winning candidate, which is most likely limited to 8 years as a key factor in presidential politics.

I’m not concerned about the future of the GOP. First, I would ditch it in an instant if Obama miraculously reveals that his deeply progressive intellectual heritage was just the misleading outerwear for a closet libertarian budget hawk and evangelist for American exceptionalism. Second, parties out of power tend to find their way. Yes, there will be fights over which kind of conservatism should be the spearhead of a revitalized party, but as long as conservatism remains a guiding principle, there will be a place for the GOP at the big table.

But this stuff is going to work itself out naturally despite the punditry when the party finds a (hopefully) charismatic candidate in 2012. Whoever has the best personality will likely determine the future of the GOP, until the next candidate comes along.

The big question is, will it be Palin?

I’m agnostic on her political future. I think the post-election analysis has been unfair to her, as was most of the mid-election analysis. Despite her two terrible TV interviews, she really provided the only serious momentum the McCain campaign ever attained. Although many loathe her, she also deeply connected with many conservatives in a way that few politicians do (I’m not fond of this kid of cult of personality politics, however, which is one of the reasons I’m not thrilled by the Obamenon either). That many of Palin’s critics cannot understand her particular appeal beyond comic book demonization goes a long way in explaining the cultural divide in our country.

I wouldn’t mind if Palin vanished back into the obscurity of Alaskan State politics, but I also think that if she does re-emerge in 2012, she will do so with 4 years of serious attention paid to national electoral politics, an area with which she was plainly unconcerned prior to her selection as McCain’s running mate. I suspect with the right kind of preparation, you’ll see a different Sarah Palin. If she’s not different in that way, I hope she stays away.

That brings me to this, the best argument I’ve seen so far that Palin helped McCain lose, rather than provided his only brief hope of winning:

The creator of this video also commissioned a Zogby poll backing up the interviews in this video.

First, this suggests that Palin may have helped Obama simply by providing an easily caricatured distraction from serious coverage of other candidates. That she became the focal point of the media meant less time to study what I still think are serious defects in Obama (I still maintain, however, that McCain wouldn’t have had a prayer without her, so it’s probably a wash).

It’s clear not only from this video and poll, but also from private conversations, that substantive criticism of Obama either never penetrated beyond a limited sphere of political junkies or, if it did reach the general public, was immediately compartmentalized as unreliable right-wing smearing.

Certainly there was some really stupid and malicious hysteria about Obama, such as suggestions that he was secretly Muslim and/or wasn’t a U.S. citizen. But these were not ideas promulgated by serious political actors on the right. Yet, Obama’s rather obvious pattern of obfuscating, lying about and fliply disowning two+ decades of far left wing intellectual development, which should be fair game in any political election, was and still is dismissed as the same kind of reactionary nutbaggery. Of course, dwelling on those campaign battles is pointless now that the election is over, but one does wonder when and if any rational criticism of Obama will penetrate what appears to be a remarkably resistant membrane of affection.

Lastly, this new poll exposing the blithe ignorance of Obama supporters also should act as a little antidote for Democrats who have smugly championed that old poll about misinformed Fox News viewers as hard evidence of their own intellectual superiority. Few traits are as evenly distributed as self-righteous idiocy.

Tags: No Comments