The crowds lining up in the cold for her book tour are likely to be the most motivated to line up at the polls in G.O.P. primaries. They don’t speak the same language as Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner or, for that matter, McCain. They are more likely to heed Palin salesmen like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh than baffled Bush administration grandees like Peter Wehner, who last week called Palin “a cultural figure much more than a political one” on the Web site of the establishment conservative organ Commentary.
Culture is politics. Palin is at the red-hot center of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black president and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those Americans who haven’t benefited from bailouts. (Frank Rich)
He thinks we should be worried, but I'm not convinced. Or let me put it this way: it's not Palin we should worry about, it's the 25% she represents becoming 45% or 55%. If you think that's a possibility, then we should be worried, not about Palin herself but about the conditions that would cause that many Americans take leave of their senses to vote for her--an economic meltdown and a collapse of Dem credibility. Both are possible, and that worries more than whether Sarah Palin will get the GOP nomination in 2012.
Culture is, alas, politics. Palin is a celebrity-culture figure more than she is anything else. And celebrity culture is the culture of distraction, the culture of bread and circuses. She serves a political purpose insofar as she serves the interests of the Owners to keep us all distracted by the way we either love or hate her, thus dividing and keeping us conquered. This will continue to be our fate so long as we allow what are fundamentally cultural values and identity issues dominate our politics. Do I think that's going to happen? No, because the left is as stupid about it as the right. Our politics are a form of entertainment, and it's entertaining to fight about things that in the larger scheme of things don't matter. It's dangerous to to fight about things that do, and what matters is the concentration of power and wealth with the owners.
If the Dems implode, and if Palin isn't the one to emerge to assume the mantle of "throw the bums out", someone equally as bad on the substance will. It's hard to imagine Palin doing a worse job than George Bush because it's agurably impossible; but she is, in fact, capable of doing an equally bad job. So we have nothing to fear there except a return to GOP normalcy.
But that speaks more to the diseased nature of our politics than it does anything else, and Sarah Palin is a symptom, not an agent of the illness. As I wrote last week, it's a disease that's in the body politic, but it's in remission--for now. NY 23 is a clearer indicator of its strength than Palin's book sales. Things can change--the disease could very well present more acutely in the near future. But we should be more worried about the underlying causes than about the symptoms.