Alaska has bidden goodbye to Sarah Palin as its Governor. Financial scandal seems likely, but not sure, to follow her out of office. Some may feel tempted to bury her political career, especially after her goodbye address three weeks ago yesterday when she seemed to be distractedly making up her reasons for departure on the fly as if in some meth-influenced frenzy. (And before anyone starts: I mean no offense to meth addicts with the comparison.)
She's not gone, though, in all likelihood. Even if she hasn't yet hit on the precise path to retain her influence and spread her message, she will. We haven't seen the last of her, probably not for the next quarter-century. She will always be dangerous and thus will always be a fair target for abuse -- even if that abuse helps energize her base.
This diary is about how and why she'll retain enormous influence.
It won't be as a recipient of campaign funds. It will be as a donor.
The first thing to note about Sarah Palin is that she is the real thing: she truly is the comely face of fascism come to America. (Note: I have in mind Italian fascism, an intensification and perversion of populism, rather than German Nazism. Sarah Palin may turn out to be a race exterminationist -- but I doubt it. In any event, it's not the basis for her appeal.)
Palin is a classic, out and out, right-wing populist of the Pat Buchanan stripe, but she differs from most right-wing populists in one critical way: she is truly and really not an elitist. She doesn't come from money, she wasn't well-educated, she doesn't speak well when not on script and is too stupidly self-confident to put herself on script, she's not a sophisticated analyst, she sees conspiracies and elite cabals around every corner, she rejects being judged by normal standards (which she mocks), and she and her supporters don't give a damn about what you or I or the elite media think of her or them except as a goad to greater resentment and grievance. What Buchanan and most Southern Republicans (and occasionally Democrats) pretend to be, Sarah Palin actually is: a grifter like Andy Griffith's brilliantly realized street-fighter-turned-political-media-darling "Lonesome" Rhodes in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd.
Maybe thirty percent of the population is now entirely off its nut -- the result of bad education, bad politics, and a media environment that has sought to substitute the lowest form of religious hucksterism for the Enlightenment -- and while that is not enough to make her the next Kingfish it is enough to make her a Kingmaker.
I think that that's what she was trying to get at with her rambling speech about "taking [her] fight for what's right for Alaska in a new direction" that she could not begin to describe. She knows that she has a huge following of people behind her and that those people have both money and the willingness to vote as she directs. This year, Republicans don't want her campaigning for them and conservative Democrats seem perplexed that she would offer to do so. Next year, though, Sarah Palin will (if she wants, and I think she'll want) have a huge pile of money in her PAC to spread around as she sees fit, and she will have almost every Republican's ear if she wants it. In 2012, even someone like Mitt Romney who seems to see Palin as a poison fruitcake may well tell her that she can pick his Vice-President, so long as it's someone reasonably qualified and well-scrubbed and someone for whom she's willing to rally the troops.
The right-wing populists have their Queen. She is probably smart enough to realize, in the short term, that she's not going to be able to lead for now, at least until the heat dies down over her Governorship. She will, as Reagan did after leaving California's Governorship, eventually hire ghostwriters for incisive op-eds in leading articles to build her national cred as more than a lightweight. Maybe she'll run against Mark Begich for Alaska's Senate seat in 2014; she'll no doubt hear the call, but maybe she won't feel the need.
If you want a model for Sarah Palin's future actions, try this one, which I almost made the cheeky title of this diary before discretion got the better of me: Sarah Palin is Markos Moulitsas times a hundred. That is, what Markos is viewed (rightly or wrongly to whatever extent) as being able to do for the widely diverse Democratic Party -- engaging common folk like us in the process and turning us into activists and, more importantly from the party's standpoint, contributors -- Palin will be for the GOP. She'll be the main person you have to impress to unlock populist support. What the Club for Growth and Grover Norquist are for the economic wing of the party, Sarah Palin will be for the social conservative wing.
To put it mildly: if you're a person who's willing to adopt those positions, that is not a bad gig.
The best part, for Sarah Palin, will be the lack of accountability. She doesn't actually have to do anything but preen and sneer. With the most moderate of protections, she won't be able to get into any ethics problems. She'll still be a star of political stage and screen. She will be able to take any personal grudge -- and she is a world champion grudge-holder -- and turn it into a cause. Few Republicans will dare to cross her; only the most secure Democrats (both electorally and in terms of security staff) will be willing to stand against her activated goon army.
Are you laughing at Sarah Palin? It's time to stop, because she's not going away. She'll be, through floods of individual small contributions to her PAC, one of the largest contributors to the Republican Party -- and will be treated accordingly.
The point of the story is this: we can't let up on her. If she has committed ethical violations, we have to get her sent to prison. If in terms of morality she has feet of clay, we have to expose them -- even though the Vitter-Ensign-Sanford-loving Republican base will not care. Sarah Palin gets no pass until and unless she is out of politics altogether and permanently. If you think that attacks on her are gratuitous now that she's out of office, look at where she's heading. She'll be the Queen of All Thorns in our party's side for as much as decades -- the equivalent of the George Soros who exists in Republican conspiracists fever dreams -- and she gets no pass and no respite from us.
This isn't born of spite, however. I look forward to a day when she no longer matters. I wish her every happiness so long as she keeps her nasty self away from the welfare of our nation, which she is so well-placed to undermine.