Matt Yglesias claims this isn’t a parody:

I love the voice-over guy. Almost NFL Film quality.

Ambinder’s never going to top “iatropic excitement”, but he gives it a try here. (Via lots of other bloggers.)

For those who don’t want to read the link, I’ll give a shorter: Sarah Palin can’t win a national election now but she will be able to if she reads a few books over the next couple years.

It’s an axiom of American politics that everything that happens is good news for conservatives. Therefore, since the Palin book tour is happening, the Palin book tour is good news for conservatives.

And yet, aside from the Weekly Standard whackjobs, I haven’t hear anyone say that Palinpalooza is good news for conservatives. Not Halperin. Not Ambinder. Not the Politico. And the Weekly Standard’s line is more just “she pisses liberals off, and that is good” than any kind of argument that she represents good news for conservatives.

Can anyone think of any argument that prolonged exposure to Sarah Palin is good for conservativism? I can’t think of any. There’s got to be some, given that, it is in fact good news for conservatives since it is happening.

Update. I have to admit, Rich Lowry has come up with the most convincing argument I’ve heard yet that Republicans can use her to keep the teabaggers from forming a third party. It’s still not that convincing because I don’t believe the teabaggers will from a real third party (though they may run challenges in states with third-party infrastructure).

Her supporters identify with her populist, unaffected vibe and tend to be disaffected with politics as usual — they’re Palin Perotistas. A drastic image makeover would only drive them away.

Republicans need these voters more than ever given the roiling grassroots revolt against Obama’s governance. Without them, they can’t get a majority; they’d be doomed if they were ever to slide into a splinter party. If Palin is their voice and channels their energy productively, she’s part of the Republican answer to Obama, no matter what presidential politics ultimately holds for her. There’s an upside to rogue.

It’s easy to romanticize the past, of course. But I distinctly remember that 20 years ago, things like sudden increases in the number of people going hungry were considered important issues. Nowadays to even muse about whether this is something we can do something about as a society marks you as an unserious hippie. Even as we speak, Slate/Levitt/TNR are probably writing something along the lines of “you think that having a high percentage of the population without access to food is bad, but once you get past the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords, you’ll see that blah blah blah.” David Brooks is probably on the Snooze Hour telling E. J. Dionne that the only solution is food vouchers and, anyway, in Red America, the hungry can always visit the Applebee’s Salad Bar for free. Robert Samuelson and Fred Hiatt are cooking up some bogus figures to tell us that there is no way that we, as a society, can do anything about this. And, anyway, Michael Moore is fat, so how can anyone really be hungry?

What the hell happened? How did all the conservative talking points become so thoroughly internalized in this country?

Is Erick Erickson going to make every single race a “hill to die on” for conservatives?

Update. Is est bonus novus pro conservatives.

I realize this is nut-picking but I was a bit surprised to see a local right-wing blog praying for Obama’s death (via).

Psalm 109:8 – May his days be few; may another take his office.

I guess I don’t get it, in a way, because Joe Biden would just become president then. Maybe they’re concurrently praying for his death.

But that would just make Nancy Pelosi president.

How far down do you have to go in the order of succession before a Republican becomes president?

Update. Via the comments, apparently they need to be praying for the deaths of Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Robert Byrd, Hillary Clinton, and Tim Geithner. That gets you to Robert Gates.

A metaphysical question: can God create a line of succession so long that He cannot kill everyone on it?

In for a Broder, in for a Brooks. Am I alone in thinking that “prairie background” sounds like a euphemism? And why do so many profiles of Republican presidential candidates read like soft-core gay male pornography (not that there’s anything wrong with that)?

As you may or may not know, Thune is the junior senator from South Dakota, the man who beat Tom Daschle in an epic campaign five years ago. The first thing everybody knows about him is that he is tall (6 feet 4 inches), tanned (in a prairie, sun-chapped sort of way) and handsome (John McCain jokes that if he had Thune’s face he’d be president right now). If you wanted a Republican with the same general body type and athletic grace as Barack Obama, you’d pick Thune.

[....]

He says his prairie background has given him a preference for small companies and local government.

I’m struck by how much Lou Dobbs’ quitting to go “beyond my role” sounds like Sarah Palin’s “choice is to take a stand and effect change” by quitting. And lest we forget, there are many who believe that the best way to fight Obamafascism is to go Galt.

This all makes me miss the days when people quit to spend more time with their families.

The Florida Republican primary is starting to look like a Soviet show trial:

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist hasn’t done himself any political favors by feigning ignorance that President Obama was in his home state last month.

Desperately trying to distance himself from President Obama and his own early support for the administration’s stimulus in the midst of a competitive Senate primary, Crist told reporters that he had no clue that the president was in Florida./

But through a public records request, the St. Petersburg Times found his top aides were well-informed of the president’s visit and responded to the White House that the governor couldn’t attend.

This is pretty exciting—Sarah Palin is coming through my town as part of her book tour next week.

Find out here if she’s coming through your town.

Once upon a time, the conventional wisdom was that “all politics is local.” Now, it’s conservative heterodoxy to, suggest, as Larison does, that

defeating Crist will be a hollow victory so long as the movement conservative alternative to the Crists of the party seems increasingly pre-packaged and crafted by national activists who are oblivious to and uninterested in local conditions around the country.

Granted, Tip was not a conservative, obviously. So I ask: have conservatives always though that some broad, vague, Randian, Burkean vision superseded any and all local, “parochial” issues? Or is this something new?

Update. Some point out that conservatives used to talk a lot about “federalism”. I always thought that people just talk about states’ rights when their party has no power at the federal level. So it seems strange to focus on a top-down, unified national message when you are completely out of power at the national level.

But maybe that is the central lesson here, that despite the fact that there are few Republican elected officials in Washington, the city is still wired for Republican control in a way that makes conservatives act as if they were in power. When the Politico says you’ve got a headwind at your back, the pundits say it’s a center-right nation, and you’re enjoying a Balzian resurgence , why not run cookie cutter conservatives in every district in the country? The conservative philosophy has never failed and whatever happens will be some form of good news anyway.

Bobo on independents:

Independents are herds of cats who find out what they think through a meandering process of discovery. Right now, independent voters are astonishingly volatile. Democrats did poorly in elections on Tuesday partly because of disappointed liberals who think that President Obama is moving too slowly, but mostly because of anxious suburban independents who think he is moving too fast. In Pennsylvania, there was an eight-point swing away from the Democrats among independents from a year ago. In New Jersey, there was a 12-point swing. In Virginia, there was a 13-point swing.

[....]

Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order, within which they can lead their lives. They can’t always articulate what they want, but they withdraw from any party that threatens turmoil and risk. As always, they’re looking for a safe pair of hands.

Nate Silver

Too often in “mainstream” political analysis, once it is pointed out that independents have swung in one or another direction, the analysis stops. The pundit inserts his own opinion about what caused the independent vote to shift (“Obama’s far-reaching proposals and mounting spending”, says the Washington Post), without citing any evidence. It’s a neat trick, and someone who isn’t paying attention is liable to conclude that the pundit has actually said something interesting.

But in New Jersey, there’s literally almost no evidence that the Democrats’ agenda had anything to do with Jon Corzine’s defeat. Voters who cited a national issue were more likely to vote for Corzine, and voters who cited a local one, the Republican Chris Christie.

The whole Bobo piece is a classic, from the jigsaw puzzle he played with as a kid to the “America moved to the right” meme. The Sulzbergers must be very proud of him.

I have to admit that the teabagger candidate in NY-23 is polling better than I expected he would. Though, in retrospect, it makes a reasonable amount of sense: the teabag movement appeals largely to the old and the district is old. But I’m wondering if there’s even more to it. It’s my sense that the basic tenets of teabaggerism are:

• Low taxes!


• Small government!


• Get off my lawn!

Conspicuously absent are

• Jesus!


• Fight the new Hitler!

In particular, the Dick Armey outfit FreedomWorks seems to be about promoting freedom (I guess from taxes and regulations) here as opposed to freedom (to be a quasi-western American puppet state) abroad. And they don’t seem to talk about Jesus much. Obviously, all kinds of crazy people showed up at the 9/12 festivities, mean of them Hitler-obsessed and heavy into Jesus. But some of that is just that, to paraphrase James Carville, if you drag a Fox News crew through a retirement home, there’s no telling what you’ll find.

I think that a Jesus-reduced, Hitler-reduced conservative message might work reasonably well in some parts of the country, including the rural northeast. It’s probably too anti-union to really work in New York State at large and too anti-immigrant to really work nationally, but if teabagging is traditional wingerism with more Rand and less religion, more Galt and less GWOT, it may end up less fringey that I originally thought.

Bobo’s obsession with chain restaurants took a disturbing turn this morning:

Since April 2007, New York magazine has posted online sex diaries. People send in personal accounts of their nighttime quests and conquests. Some of the diaries are unusual and sad. There’s a laid-off banker who drinks herself into oblivion and wakes up in the beds of unfamiliar men. There’s an African-American securities trader who flies around the country on weekends to meet with couples seeking interracial sex. (He meets one Midwestern couple at a T.G.I. Friday’s.)

Like John, I’ve always thought that third parties were like the XFL. In fact, if it were up to me, all third-party candidates would have to wear a He Hate Me starter jersey on the campaign trail.

Not surprisingly, chunky David Brooks feels differently:

Imagine if Bloomberg, instead of using New York’s Republican Party as a flag of convenience, had spent his mayoralty building up a permanent third force in city politics — a good-government party, modeled after the 19th-century Mugwumps, that could provide a civic-minded counterweight to the Democratic machine.

Or imagine if California’s famously polarized legislature included several smaller parties — Libertarians, Socialists, Social Conservatives — capable of forming coalitions with either the left or the right, so that every budgetary debate didn’t pit a bloated Democratic majority against an intransigent Republican rump.

I’m going to forgive the gratuitous “I’ve heard of a political party you’ve never heard of” reference, because I understand the iatropoic excitement that comes from talking about obscure historical events.

But Libertarians, Socialists, Social Conservatives solving California’s perennial budget crisis? Is he not aware that the problem is the 2/3 vote required on budget votes? How on earth would more political parties help with that?