Now that the debate is behind her, Sarah Palin appears to have little reason to hold back. As Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post explains, the vice-presidential candidate
has trained her moose-hunting sights on bigger trophies — Barack Obama and the media.
And in doing so, Parker says, she is proving to be especially adept at using Republican code words on the stump.
Palin successfully conveyed to those she was targeting that she is a Ronald Reagan-ish outsider who puts God and country first. And The Other is just like that elitist, flip-flopping John Kerry.
That’s a plateful of imagery and a buffet of touchstones familiar to those who distrust “elitists” and who recognize in Palin a kindred regularness.
Her folksy, but fiery, attacks are not new, of course. What the Palin stump speech amounts to is a distillation of the Karl Rove technique, of the divide and conquer approach used by the Republicans since the early 1960s when the country-clubbers were relegated to second-class citizens in a party that would come to be dominated by the angry and resentful. That was the lesson that Richard Nixon took from Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated 1964 presidential race, one in which he carried six states — his home state of Arizona and five traditionally Democratic southern states. Nixon read the political tea leaves, sensing a seismic shift in demographics that was reinforced when Ronald Reagan fanned the flames of racial resentment and anger at the hippies to take the California state house. Nixon then rode his Southern Strategy — building an electoral campaign on the same kind of disaffection — all the way to the White House. The divide-and-conquer approach became a Republican staple for 30-plus years.
One might have expected that, with the collapse of the so-called Republican brand with George W. Bush’s failed presidency, this verbal violence would have been relegated to the dustbin of history where it belongs.
It hasn’t, of course, and we have John McCain and Palin to thank (as well as Hillary Clinton, but that is a story for another time) for, as Parker writes, “amp(ing) up their rhetoric of difference.”
Neither McCain nor Palin would dare mention Obama’s middle name, Hussein, but they can play up Obama’s past associations and let others connect the dots. Terrorist. Muslim. Dangerous. Other.
It is legitimate to question character and dubious associations — and William Ayers is certifiably dubious. The truth is, Obama should have avoided Ayers, and his denouncement of Wright was tardy. But this is a dangerous game.
The McCain campaign knows that Obama isn’t a Muslim or a terrorist, but they’re willing to help a certain kind of voter think he is. Just the way certain South Carolinians in 2000 were allowed to think that McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his illegitimate black child.
The ugliness has a dangerous side, as demonstrated by reports on Politico and in The Washington Post (Parker cites these, as well). Dana Milbank describes a Palin rally that is chilling in its descent into something resembling fascism. Palin, he writes, continued attacking Obama for a loose connection to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers.
“Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” Palin said.
“Boooo!” said the crowd.
“And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'” she continued.
“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.
“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.
Chilling.
