Umm, Were We Listening to the Same Speeches?
David Brooks thinks that Palin’s speech wasn’t a bunch of red-meat to a GOP base that desperately wants the campaign to be elitists vs normal people, but instead that it was a brief moment when “the forces of reform Republicanism [that] took control.” Maybe Brooks really thinks that’s true, but in my approximation, there’s only one sense in whihc Palin be said to be a reform candidate: she beat corrupt Republicans in Alaska.
But that wasn’t part of any national reform agenda, it was instead canny positioning on Palin’s part. The GOP is the only game in town, as far as statewide elections go, so Palin had to run against her own party to win the election. Nowhere in Palin’s speech or political persona is their an inkling of reform beyond her limited accomplishments in Alaska. We’ve never heard Palin talk about a more family friendly tax code (she could easily look here and here), we’ve never heard her talk about health care, we’ve never heard her talk about inequality, economic insecurity or any of the issues that most reform-oriented Republicans think the party needs to develop coherent, substantive positions on.
Palin (and McCain too) also haven’t really addressed the ideological barriers to reform of the GOP. It isn’t Jack Abramoff or Ted Stevens that stands between the hidebound GOP of today and the reform GOP of tomorrow. It’s Grover Norquist. And McCain was against the constant GOP agenda of more and bigger marginal income tax cuts, but he’s since thrown that away. Palin, as best we can tell, has no real position on income taxes or payroll taxes, and probably just accepts the GOP orthodoxy on those questions.
I have a feeling that well-intentioned, honest, reform minded conservatives like Ross, Reihan and Brooks are investing much too much in both McCain and Palin. Although McCain has criticized his party in the past, he simply isn’t invested enough in policy too become a messenger of big-think, Grand New Party style reform. When given the oppurtunity to present his own policy agenda, it was the policy agenda of GOP presidential nominees past. Palin is even less of an advcocate for GNP esquereform that McCain. For those three, it seems like Palin – purely by her affect and the rough handling she’s gotten in the press – is a defacto breath of fresh air, but until she shows some willingness to branch out ideologically from the GOP, she’s really just an especially appealing, articulate and charming culture warrior. And McCain is an ornery hawk.
For a good example of a faction/politician taking on entrenched interests within their party, look at the late 80s early 90s Bill Clinton. Because of the “intellectual spade-work” done by the DLC, Clinton didn’t have to take a “slaughter all the mean interest groups” approach that McCain mistakes for “reform.” Clinton did intellectual reform, he fought back at the ideas that were held by the paleoliberal base of the Democratic party. And no one, even if they are as charming and appealing as Sarah Palin or as smart as Bobby Jindal, is going to pursue any type of meaningful reform until the ideas that have driven the conservative base of the party since 1964 are seriously discussed and then discarded.
(PS – Tobin Harshaw, you’re the best blogger in the world.
