When Sarah Palin crashed the scene she completed a circle not many initially noted.
- She speaks admiringly of union membership right off the bat? Idolized John Glenn (D)? Thanks two democratic women for making her chance possible? This should be interesting.
- Alaska? America's welfare state? $1.87 in fed funds for every $1.00 in taxes paid? Isn't the other 80% of their existence based on redistribution of taxes on Oil extraction? Every, man, woman and child gets $3,269 annually from the "Permanent Fund." Sounds great, let's do that in LA and WV, too if "the people" own the resources.
- A VP pick designed to be an automatic celebrity. So much for the inexperienced lightweight celebrity named Hussein.
Yes. These are not the earmarks (sorry) of the GOP standard. As noted on 9/1 when I wrote this, pre-RNC, this thing will "unspool faster than a golf-ball in a blender."
Now, thanks to Fiorina and Wall Street, McCain is unspooling himself...
As noted, Palin is a poser in idealized Democratic clothing on some issues. She's a fictional candidate who draws from a smorgasbord of imagery and latent and not so latent feelings about modern life. She's impossible, is what I mean. But all the poo-pooing about speaking of persona and personal story misses the point. She is emblematic of the sleight of hand that embodies Republicanism today.
Suddenly, union labor is noble, experience is overrated and celebrity is cool. Suddenly, teen promiscuity must be viewed compassionately. Suddenly, Old Boys and their networks are the enemy. Suddenly, oversight and deregulation are urgently needed remedys. Suddenly, privatizing Social Security seems a tad, umm, dangerous. Joe Conasan seems to have noticed what, no doubt, you have noticed too.
This populist rhetoric sounds strange, especially when emitted by a politician whose circle of advisers include former Senator Phil Gramm, vice president of the scandal-tainted Union Bank of Switzerland, and John Thain, chief executive of the firm formerly known as Merrill Lynch. But when facing the angry voters who have watched their savings evaporate, the conservative Republican more hopes to sound more like a liberal Democrat again.
He wants to blur the differences between himself and Barack Obama on fundamental economic philosophy. But there is one critical issue where the Arizonan has established a record that cannot be escaped so easily...
Yeah. Suddenly, it's not so great or neccessary to be a Republican.
Turns out, it's not so necessary to have Chief Executive leadership skills anymore, either. Just ask Carly Fiorina. Today, she stepped into a propeller, pushed forward by her own ego: Are McCain or Palin CEO material? Her answer, based on her own stellar experience at HP I suppose, was, of course, "No." Nothing, she said, compares to running a company--OLE!!-- especially not running a country. Damn. there goes Mitt Romney's talking point.
Here, watch.
Now, she's right, even though Fiorina's no Warren Buffet. George Bush's invocation of his "CEO Administration" was always laughable, not so much because it didn't apply, but because his business record was so downright awful what with it being full of failures, sleight of hand, and stock hemaorrages.
The point here is that being Repuiblican and being a hotshot businessperson have lost the sheen they once had. All those Net Present Value charts, too-cute MBA formulae and Cato Institute globalist bull sessions have proven to be as persuasive and attractive as, well, the bullshit we're all standing in.
That's why Palin as a choice stopped me in my tracks. She's a rifle shot, from 1000 yards, but one that must, in order to hit its mark, miss the trees, hills, dales and shrubbery that are the landscape of her actual choices, deeds and various other progeny. If you squint and strain, really hard, she looks and sounds like a folksy Democrat or a--gasp--ambitious shop steward. Sorta like when GWB feigned the appearance of competent CEO.
So, if it sucks to be an (R) and it sucks to be a CEO with executive experience, what's left? Mix gasoline and wine and call it salad dressing, maybe?
By my clunky metrics, running a country, being titular head of it, is more akin to being a hybrid of McGuyver and Moses. One part resourcefulness, one part visionary. Ready for anything, and no part CEO--especially because, in political terms, it don't work (from March 2004):
The "CEO" administration is falling back on techniques that highlight the dark side of popular perceptions of the CEO. This is that they are self-interested, vicious, arrogant and intolerant of criticism.
As the narrative unspools--bridges, troopergates, pro-stranger danger ads, pigs and cosmetics--we see that some candidates appear to fit the "regal" yet dark CEO archetype just fine, that their personalities tend to enforcing loyalty and political expedience and impatience with truth. Sarah Palin was for it before she was against it - the bridge to nowhere I mean. That phrase and it's veneer of cheese that goes with the salad dressing essentially disqualified Kerry in 04. We'll see about Palin.
As for McCain, well, he now is in the position of calling all his and Phil Gramm's old buddies nasty names - disgusting greedy Wall Street, corrupt self-serving money men, shadowy old boy's network, selfish corporate CEOs and cronies. He's all over the tube doing it as I type this. Yes, something must be done about regulaltion and oversight gone amiss--maybe, umm, a commission? But, when he talks of how "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" he means not M1 or GDP or savings rates or wage curves or the consumer price index; he means us--you and me--we're the fundamentals™, the hardworking backbone of America. Or something like that. Or whatever you need it to mean.
It means an odd change of plans for Republicans and, if you're interested, it's what was discussed here, Anti-Republican Republicans: You got what you wanted, but is it really what you asked for?
Yeah, at the end of the season, John McCain is forced to ask you to vote for a half-assed, fairweather Democrat: Him.
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Tomorrow, let's talk about how the current apprentice-Moses needs to find his inner McGuyver.