The Hutchinson Report
Palin is Obama’s secret weapon
Sarah Palin may turn out to be Obama’s greatest political asset. Polls show that Obama is the most polarizing Democrat since Truman. Palin, in turn, is the most polarizing Republican since Lincoln. That makes her the perfect distraction, foil, and ultimately, perfect perverse Obama ally. Palin’s inanities, idiocies, and cartoonish utterances are now legendary. She is the butt of SNL laugh lines, giddily mocked and ridiculed by Democrats and the pundits, groaned at by the GOP regulars, and shunned by the man who plucked her out of the Arctic tundra and made her a household name, John McCain. Polls show that her approval ratings are dreadful, and the overwhelming majority of poll respondents say that she’s not fit to be president. But this only makes her even more bizarrely appealing.
She sells papers like crazy, and a Palin piece on web sites invokes pages of comments. She jumped Oprah’s rating to the highest in two years when she appeared on her show to hawk her book. The crowds that wildly cheered her during the presidential campaign and just as enthusiastically cheer her on her self-promotion jaunts around the country haven’t slacked up one bit. The networks stumbled over each other to cover her tea party convention speech. CNN, especially, sniffed a ratings bonanza in Palin and dispatched an 11 person crew to the convention, and then carried her mostly canned, standard bromide laced speech live.
The GOP regulars sneer and pretend to shun her. Democrats mock and poke fun at her. But in a year when the party polls are about as popular as the mumps, and Obama’s approval numbers have plummeted faster than the Hindenburg, Palin is the perfect every person’s anti-candidate. McCain certainly knew that. He gambled that her homespun matronly stump style, Down Syndrome challenged son, and Bible spouting, gun-toting appeal would be tonic for his sagging campaign. Since winning elections is still as much about which candidate can win the hearts not the heads of the voters, Palin was the one to tug at the religious conservative’s heartstrings.
If McCain had played it close to the vest and picked say Mitt Romney as his VP mate, it would have left him wide open to the rap that the best the GOP could do was put up two aging, multimillionaire white party warhorses. With the financial meltdown and public rage over Wall Street conniving and manipulation, along with the Bush administration’s bailout plan that thumbed a nose at desperate homeowners, cash strapped small businesses, and down on their luck workers, Obama almost certainly would have routed that pair on Election Day.
Palin was the only possible antidote to that. She sent the signal for McCain that his administration would not simply be a recycled four more years of Bush policies. Few bought that, but with the deck seemingly stacked hopelessly against him anyway, Palin did just enough to make the final popular vote respectable for him.
Palin on the loose in 2012 would potentially render the same aid to Obama. Progressives, liberal and moderate Democrats will dutifully vote for Obama, vote unenthusiastically for him, or pay some lip service to Third Party challenges, and then grumble as they pull the lever for him. Palin poses absolutely no threat to his solid or lukewarm Democratic base. The mere mention of her as a possible candidate will terrorize disgusted Democrats out of their Obama inertia. The real damage that she can do will be to confuse, rile up, and split Republicans. Polls show that while voters in general say Palin’s not presidential timber, a huge minority of Republicans say that she is. That could translate out into millions of disgruntled, frustrated voters who would be sorely tempted to push, prod and hector the GOP to give Palin her due. Many would be just as sorely tempted to vote for Palin as a maverick candidate, or if her name is not on any ballot, stay at home. This would be tantamount to a vote for Obama.
Palin’s strength is playing on and stoking popular rage and frustration with tin ear politicians who have turned voters into invisible men and women. But much, of course, can change in the next two years. A sharp upturn in the economy, the disappearance of the much loathed by Palin’s cheerleaders of Obama’s health care reform package, the fade in public fury over Wall Street’s free booting wheeling and dealing, a wind down in the Iraq War, and the semblance of stability in Afghanistan, would make Palin an amusing, if not regrettable trivia question. For now, a mesmerized media, titillated public, and legions of Palin loathers, have made Palin the talk of the land. That talk is just fine for Obama.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press).
DISCLAIMER: The beliefs and viewpoints expressed in opinion pieces, letters to the editor, by columnists and/or contributing writers are not necessarily those of Our Weekly.
The attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11 followed a violent protest at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, over a low-budget anti-Muslim film made in the United States. It initially appeared to the intelligence community around the world that the assault on the Benghazi consulate was another spontaneous response to that film, since Islamic individuals worldwide were screaming for revenge.
CHARLOTTE, N.C.—During a roundtable briefing with Black journalists at the Charlotte Convention Center just before President Barack Obama accepted his party’s nomination for president, his campaign said there is a sense of urgency for African Americans to get out and vote.
Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett told the roundtable of journalists that the assault on voting rights should motivate Blacks to get to the polls in November.
You may write me down in history
with your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
— “Still I Rise,” a poem by Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou’s words are a timeless mantra for African American motherhood—particularly single motherhood—which has so often been subjected to controversy and political fodder.
A group of 20 to 30 protesters marched in front of the Fullerton home of Marilyn Davenport, the embattled member of the Orange County Republican Central Committee who sent an email two weeks ago depicting the president of the United States as a chimpanzee.
Just a week before President Barack Obama was set to arrive in Los Angeles, a member of the Orange County Republican Central Committee was adamantly determined to save her position after appending the president’s face on a chimpanzee with the words, “Now you know why—No birth certificate!”
Marilyn Davenport sent the email containing the depiction, which included a chimpanzee mom and dad dressed as humans, with the picture of Obama superimposed over a smaller chimpanzee’s face.
