My lousy local paper has the annoying tendency to fall back on running Cal Thomas' syndicated opinion columns every few days, and they're usually about as predictable as the nameplate on the front page: liberals bad, secular liberals very bad, white conservative Christians good.
I happened to glance at his column as I was waiting to get a haircut this morning, though, and it turns out Ol' Cal isn't getting any Rich Lowry starbursts from Sarah Palin at the moment.
And the weird thing is, his reasoning parallels a lot of our criticism of Palin, and the GOP as a whole, from the left.
Behold:
The victim thing is getting old. Conservatives have a significant presence in virtually every venue they like to denounce. That includes government (though not this one) and especially the media. Talk radio rules and the rulers are conservatives. Fox News Channel dominates the ratings. The conservative presence in academia lags, but there are universities that do not revise American history and mock religious values. Movies? There are some with solid conservative principles, such as Sandra Bullock's latest film, "The Blind Side." Will conservatives go see it, or are they more comfortable denouncing "Hollywood"? How about reinforcements for those conservatives already "making it" in the mainstream media?
That's not a "moderate" Republican like Snowe or Collins talking. It's Cal Freakin' Thomas - and he goes on to observe, correctly I think, that the GOP is in for a world of hurt in 2012 if it nominates a Beltway insider type who's unable to attract the support of the Palin hordes.
Of course, Ol' Cal then goes on to call the Palin crowds "the GOP base," and I think he's as wrong about that as he is about "Obama's hard-left agenda" and the other tripe he usually spews. The Palin crowds are no more loyal to the Republican Party than they are to Sarah herself (as we saw when she pulled her quitter act and took off halfway through her book signing in Indianapolis.) I think we'll see in 2012 - and maybe even in 2010, if we're lucky - that the angry, populist right will not be the loyal base that the corporatist, establishment right has depended on since the Reagan era.
And even if the "establishment" right takes Cal Thomas' advice and actually tries to lead and govern and do something beyond whining about persecution and victimhood, I don't see how they manage to stabilize that coalition with the angry populists that they need to be anything but a small minority.
Poor Cal...