|
Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man.
snip
Until now, the political leaders who’ve used the movement to their electoral advantage have come to it as outsiders. Reagan the Hollywood actor, Perot the data-processing billionaire, Buchanan the DC journalist, and George W. Bush the energy-industry scion and owner of a merely recreational ranch in Crawford, Texas, have had very little in common with their rural and exurban constituents, and their gestures at farmyard, strip-mall or cowboy-boot cred have tended to come across as phoney and embarrassing. Photographed inside J.C. Penney’s or Costco or Safeway, they’ve looked hardly less exotic than poor Michael Dukakis did on board his ill-advised tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real thing.
snip
Palin’s political gumption was never better exercised than it was five years ago. Follow closely this rather intricate sequence of manoeuvres, because it reveals a lot about her. In 2002, towards the end of her term as mayor, she mounted an underfunded run for the office of lieutenant-governor, and came a close second in the Republican primary. She then attached herself to the gubernatorial campaign of Alaska’s junior US senator, Frank Murkowski, speaking by his side at every possible opportunity. The reason? If Murkowski won the governorship, his Senate seat would be in his gift, and Palin had set her heart on going to DC. On the trail, she fêted him, slathering on the butter and topping it with jam. Murkowski won, the vacancy in the US Senate yawned, and Palin went to Juneau for an interview. After due consideration, the new governor – this being Alaska – decided that the person best qualified for the job was his own daughter, Lisa. He could hardly have delivered a more insulting blow. However, his largesse was not yet exhausted and he gave Palin the consolation prize of a seat on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a part-time job that paid $122,400 a year – good money, but not at all what she was after.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
