Op-Ed: Sarah Palin's Courtship of the Right

During her national debut at the Grand Old Party Convention, in St. Paul Palin exclaimed, “I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment. And I’ve learned quickly these past few days that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington élite then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone. I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion.” However, Sarah Palin’s sudden rise to the upper echelon of the Republican party, has more to do with members of the Washington power elite than she has let on. According to an article in the latest issue of The New Yorker, Sarah Palin was more than happy for them to come to her so she could make her case. Her rise to DC politics began from the humblest of beginnings. John Bitney was a top policy adviser on Palin’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign and has known her since junior high school. During her gubernatorial campaign, Bitney said, he began predicting to Palin that she would make the short list of Republican Vice-Presidential prospects. “She had the biography, I told her, to be a contender.” Bitney, a Wasilla, Alaska native still considers Governor Palin a friend, even though after becoming governor, in December, 2006, she dismissed him. He has said about Mrs. Palin, “Sarah’s very conscientious about crafting the story of Sarah. She’s all about the hockey mom and Mrs. Palin Goes to Washington—the anti-politician politician.” Bitney, who is now the chief of staff to the speaker of the Alaska House, says that upon being elected governor, Palin began developing relationships with Washington insiders, who later championed the idea of putting her on the 2008 ticket. Bitney stated, “There’s some political opportunism on her part. For years she’s had D.C. in mind. She’s not interested in being on the junior-varsity team.” Now enter Adam Brickley, a college student and a staunch conservative. Brickley is not from Washington, instead from Colorado, but he’s been trained by a number of conservative organizations in Washington. He is a home-schooled evangelical Christian, the kind of conservative Christianity best described as Messianic Jews, meaning that they believe to be like Christ they need to be Hebrew, because Christ was a Hebrew. Brickley attended the Leadership Institute, an organization founded by evangelical christian Morton Blackwell, to train sort of cadres of the right wing. He’s received scholarships from various right-wing organizations and he currently lives in a dormitory that’s part of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, a major right-wing think tank. He’s been trained in how to help the conservative movement and how to become part of it. He was looking for somebody who could add some pep to a possible Republican ticket and like many conservatives, he was particularly worried about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as a possible Democratic ticket. Disenchanted with the mainstream conservative women, he thinks about and then looks up 'the lady that just got elected in Alaska' and sees that she’s considered kind of a rising star. So, he starts a blog that’s called Sarah Palin for Vice President Blog. He actually was ahead of the conservative publications when he starts pushing Palin, and his blog gets picked up by many other conservative blogs and then finally works its way on to conservative radio, Rush Limbaugh, and in to the American Spectator as well as the other conservative magazines. While he’s pushing Palin, his blog gets a lot of traffic. Now the nexus of these forces coming together, both of which are really Washington forces, begin pushing Palin. Now, Alaska's capitol city of Juneau is a major stop for cruise ships that come through Alaska. Those include political cruises that are run by the conservative political magazines. When Sarah Palin was elected governor, she learned that a number of those Washington insider elite members of the media, would be trooping through Juneau. Despite her rhetoric stating that she 'doesn’t seek their approval', in fact, she invited most of them to lunch and to other receptions that she hosted. She even charmed some of them with a helicopter ride to go see some major sites in Alaska. So, Sarah Palin was indeed courting some of those Washington insiders. In particular, they were the pundits that work for the Weekly Standard and the National Review. She apparently made a great impression on some of these pundits when they came through because they returned from the warm cold of summer in Alaska and wrote fabulous stories about her. Since being named the GOP VP candidate, the Alaska Governor has continually mocked what she calls “the mainstream media.” However, in late 2007, the state of Alaska hired a public-relations firm with strong East Coast connections, to promote the governor and the natural-gas pipeline that she has been touting as one of her major accomplishments in Alaska. So along with the good press generated from the cruise stopovers, the major reformer narrative cultivated by the PR firm and the reality that here was not that much competition if you were looking for a female Republican Party figure from the far right, Sarah Palin was elevated to Joan of Arc, GOP Vice-Presidential candidate. It must be noted that it really almost did not happen. McCain and his close young ally from the Senate Lindsey Graham, were both leaning heavily towards Democrat turned independent and 2000 Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman from Connecticut. McCain had a great comfort level with Lieberman and hoped to pick him for vice president. But all of the top GOP political operatives were saying that he could not do it because it’s going to hurt McCain with the base of the Republican Party, who were already lukewarm on the so-called 'maverick'. Lieberman was just too liberal for some, but in hindsight he would have been perfect for VP - the exact contradiction of what the McCain campaign has symbolized. He is a hawk on foreign policy, but on domestic policy he still has liberal leanings. He is also pro-choice on abortion. That being so, the Republican operatives around McCain, told him he couldn’t have Joe Lieberman. Now McCain, faced with the perfect opportunity to show real mavericking, folded and selected who the party hacks wanted, Sarah Palin. For all of his talk about country first, McCain had not really spent any time with her. After all, McCain was not on any of those Alaska cruises. She was not even vetted by McCain's campaign staff. He did talk to her for around fifteen minutes at a DC reception in February, but not one on one. So the hacks engineered a private conversation for him that lasted less than three hours in total, before he picked her. That is how it happened. I'm sure John McCain and some Republicans have some buyers remorse in his forced selection of Sarah Palin. He would have surely fared better with anyone else, even Lieberman on his ticket, instead of Mrs. Palin. Now Sarah 'Barracuda' is apparently breaking out from the McCain handlers. She is blaming them for things like the $150,000 spent on her outfits, which damaged her image as a Washington outsider and not an elitist. After all, an ordinary, small town PTA mom just does not spend that kind of money on the most expensive clothes in the country. It certainly hurt her well cultivated image. So she’s saying that this was not her idea, and it was pushed on her by the McCain campaign. Sort of the way she was pushed on John McCain. While many on the right have soured on the Alaska Governor, her early proponents are still singing her praises. With her grassroots support still intact, Palin now appears to be separating herself from the ticket that is imploding. Does anyone else get the feeling that they’re turning on each other? Perhaps she is indeed positioning herself for 2012 and trying to limit the damage from this unlikely run. What happens if the McCain-Palin ticket wins the election? If the last few weeks of the campaign are an indication, this would be the most incohesive Presidential pairing since George Washington and John Adams.