Advice to Daniel Larison of American Conservative: Don't fly on small aircraft for a while:
By McCain’s own standard, Palin’s eventual opposition to the bridge project is beside the point–it is federal pork as such that he finds offensive and which he now claims Palin has combated as part of his effort to make Palin into a credible reformer of Washington. It is hardly inspiring that she has to make false statements in order to make this central claim, and it is deeply troubling that the "reform" ticket is daily making claims about Palin’s record that only the most generous partisan could accept as honest.
To hear her tell it, she was some bright-eyed champion of halting earmark spending who wanted nothing to do with that ridiculous "Bridge to Nowhere." The reality was that she very artfully changed her position to fit the new political circumstances. Meanwhile, the people in Ketchikan (a.k.a., Nowhere) remember how she exploited Alaskan resentment at the national derision of their area to win support for her bid for governor, only to turn around on the national stage and use the same derision to put herself on the same page with McCain.
To hear establishment Republicans tell it, Sarah Palin has the Republican base on ice.
To hear establishment Republicans tell it, the McCain campaign can now turn its attention to hockey moms in blue states.
But lo and behold there are fiscal and movement conservatives who see through the smoke and are deeply troubled. This is a vulnerability begging to be exploited.
Palin "stopped" the bridge after a significant component of its funding had been denied by Congress; she "stopped" the bridge when it had become a national symbol of wasteful pork and a target of derision. In other words, right up until the project became politically radioactive her instinct and her public position was to support it. It is true that Alaska Republicans supported the bridge and in zeroing out state funding Palin eventually broke with them, but it is equally true that she broke with her old position on the bridge, which had been identical with the position taken by the Alaska Congressional delegation. Indeed, as she said during her race for governor, she supported state funding for the project and thought it important to get the federal funding while Alaska’s Republican representatives in Congress were still in the majority.
I wrote yesterday about getting serious with voters, 1:1. This is yet more evidence that this is precisely what we need to do, and yet more evidence that we cannot shy away from creating dialogue with Republicans as well as low-info undecideds. Yesterday, I swayed a Republican.
You can, too. Please believe me. Sarah Palin's values are so far out of the mainstream that when you ask a sensible person to defend them, the sound of their own voice will birth a dissonance inside their own head so profound that by November 4th, they'll run screaming from this ticket.
Go, fight, win!
UPDATE: From the comments (damn!):
themagnificentferret, on September 12th, 2008 at 7:00 am Said:
I’m sorry, but defending the statement "Palin opposed the bridge" is like defending the statement "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms Lewinsky." We can say that either is technically not a lie, as long as you abide by a narrow time frame or definition. But neither one is the truth.
Back in the Clinton era, I believed conservatives were at least somewhat less likely to indulge in Clintonesque contortions. Now, I fear that there’s nothing to conservatism, particularly McCainism, but tortured logic, technicalities, faux outrage, and outright lies.