Sarah Palin » White House Chronicle

- The Perils of Palin on the Fox Box
- - By
    
    Llewellyn King
  - Published
    
    January 14, 2010 – 12:05 pm
  - Category
    Articles/Features
    
    King File
  - Tags
    Ann Coulter
    Dick Morris
    Fox News
    Going Rogue
    Joe Scarborough
    Laura Ingraham
    Michelle Malkin
    Mike Huckabee
    Newt Gingrich
    Pat Buchanan
    Sarah Palin
- The great television event of this winter is not what happens with Jay Leno and the late-night crew at NBC. Rather it is Sarah Palin signing on as a contributor for the top-rated Fox News Channel.
  
  In her maiden run on Fox, Palin delighted her admirers and confirmed the negative view of her by those who watched “The O’Reilly Factor” just to see if the former Alaska governor would make a spectacle of herself.
  
  When Palin dismissed allegations about her shortcomings as John McCain’s 2008 running mate in the new book Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, as “crap,” both her followers and detractors got what they thought they wanted from the Woman Who Would Be President. Her followers saw a gutsy conservative and her detractors heard a woman who they believe to be ignorant and incapable of serious responses to serious charges.
  
  For Palin, the real issue is what will television do for her? Will it hurt or hinder? Will it be the final nail in her political coffin as she becomes a talking head, an entertainment, a figure of fun?
  
  To appear from time to time on television is essential for aspiring office seekers. To have a regular spot there is something else. It reveals the mind behind the face, and no politician has been able to survive or be enhanced by too much television.
  
  If Palin doubts this, she look at her colleagues on the Fox box. Step forward Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and Dick Morris. Or switch over to MSNBC, and see how things are going for two other former politicians: Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough.
  
  Let us take them one at a time.
  
  Newt Gingrich, once the fount of Republican ideas, is a somewhat reduced man on television, another pundit among many. It has not put him up in the polls as a potential Republican candidate for president.
  
  Karl Rove, once thought to be the omnipotent brain behind President George W. Bush, has also been leveled by regular television appearances, with his insights no more compelling than those of a host of Washington commentators.
  
  Watching Dick Morris’s lugubriousness on Fox, it is hard to believe that President Bill Clinton hung on his words, as did many other politicians. Many political reporters in Washington have as much insight.
  
  Over at MSNBC, Pat Buchanan, some-time presidential candidate and longtime columnist, gets more air time than all the rest. This outpouring of Buchanan philosophy has not produced the slightest groundswell for him to run again.
  
  Joe Scarborough, a former U.S. congressman, has done well as a morning television host, but nobody has suggested he should give this up and return to politics.
  
  Television can be good for the ego but it is a career killer, unless that career is in television.
  
  While television builds name recognition, it also breeds familiarity and robs politicians of their mystique. We do not want to know what politicians think about absolutely everything that happens every day. We want to believe they know things we do not know and think things above our understanding.
  
  Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate, alone has been enhanced by appearing on Fox. But he is hosting a variety show, not just showing the variety of his opinions. He is good on television — so good that he may never run for office again. Huckabee could offer himself to any network as an accomplished entertainer and host.
  
  Palin comes to television with a fearsome following. She has reputedly sold 2 million copies of her book, Going Rogue, has 1.5 million friends on Facebook and half a million followers on Twitter. All of those numbers are in the stratosphere.
  
  Has there ever been such devotion to a political woman, so much homage paid to the idea of an iconoclast as a leader? It is a lot to risk for jabbing at liberals on television, along with other women who jab at liberals like Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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- Sarah Palin as Joan of Arc
- - By
    
    Llewellyn King
  - Published
    
    September 15, 2008 – 10:47 am
  - Category
    Articles/Features
    
    King File
  - Tags
    Barack Obama
    Joan of Arc
    Joe Biden
    John McCain
    Republicans
    Sarah Palin
- You see Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska; I see Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who vanquished the English in France and facilitated the crowning of Charles VII as King of France, thus ending English claims to the French throne.
  
  Like Palin, Joan was an invigorator: She inspired the French to fight the English. When she failed to win over the generals and the nobles, she went over their heads to the people of France. Soon she had liberated Orleans, after a string of victories, and cleared the way for Charles’s investiture at Reims. Even before his ascent to the French throne, Charles had made the teenager co-commander of his army.
  
  There is dispute over whether Joan actually fought or just carried the French standard in battle. No matter. She electrified the French. And although the 100 Years War dragged on for another generation, Joan had shaped the future of the French nation, giving it a sense of national identity that it had lacked:
  
  She galvanized all levels of French society, revitalized a sick and cautious political establishment, and ignited the new feelings of nationalism in the French army and the peasantry. Essentially, what Palin has done so far for the Republicans.
  
  Joan believed that she was the instrument of God; that she had heard voices from the age of 12, urging her to expel the English from France. Unfortunately, the voices were to be her death knell. She was captured by the English, who handed her over to the Ecclesiastical Court in Rouen, which tried her for heresy. She was convicted and burned at the stake. She was just 19, but she had changed the course of European history.
  
  Later, the Roman Catholic Church decided that it had made a terrible mistake and denounced the trial, finding her innocent after the fact. But Joan was not canonized for another 500 years.
  
  Look at Palin and see the “Maid of Orleans”: She has fought the Republican establishment and energized the rank and file of the party. And that is probably where the similarity ends, although she seems to be quite certain about God’s purposes.
  
  The speculation in Washington is: When will the Palin bubble burst? So far, she has been repeating the same speech on the stump and has only granted one television interview.
  
  The strategy of keeping Palin from the public is beginning to wear thin. And even John McCain himself seems to be hankering for the recognition that he is the nominee for the presidency not the trophy vice presidential candidate from Alaska.
  
  Yet for McCain, it is also all about Palin. If he wins the presidency, she will be credited with attracting women and blue-collar voters to the Republican standard. If she falls apart in the next month, through a combination of hubris and ignorance, she will take down the McCain candidacy.
  
  Also, the speculation in Washington is that Barack Obama’s forces are retooling for an assault to coincide with the one and only vice presidential debate. It is a debate fraught for both the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and for Palin.
  
  Biden is given to talking too much and he knows too much, which is sometimes a disadvantage. He will be struggling to appear neither avuncular nor condescending. Palin needs to memorize talking points on every issue and stick to them. This is a dangerous tactic, but it is her best option. And it more or less worked in her interview with Charles Gibson of ABC.
  
  Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the late senator from Washington state, who I interviewed on many occasions, answered the question he thought you should ask not the one you asked. He did this especially on television, as I found out when I was part of a panel on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
  
  Palin’s strategists will probably also try to give her a disarming one-liner that she can repeat frequently, which George W. Bush did with “fuzzy math” in debating Al Gore. People tend to remember the one-liner and forget the rest of the question.
  
  Although Charles ennobled St. Joan and her family, he resented the fact that she had done what he had failed to do against the English aggressor. History may be repeating itself with John McCain.
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- The Swamp in Washington That Awaits
- - By
    
    Llewellyn King
  - Published
    
    September 9, 2008 – 10:23 am
  - Category
    King File
  - Tags
    2008 Election
    American Enterprise Institute
    Barack Obama
    Cato Institute
    Congress
    earmarks
    Joe Biden
    John McCain
    Sarah Palin
    The Brookings Institution
    The Heritage Foundation
    think tanks
- Dear John, Barack, Sarah and Joe,
  
  You have come a long way, gang, and two of you are going all the way. Congratulations. All four of you say you are going to change Washington. Here in the nation’s capital, we are not convinced.
  
  For starters, let us take earmarks. They run in the thousands. They may be dented by a new administration, but they will not be stopped. Bringing home the pork is largely why we, as voters, send our senators and representatives to Capitol Hill. Earmarks have become a clumsy redress for the indifference of the central government to local need. They have become the palpable evidence of our tax dollars at work. We cannot sense the value of a missile shield in Eastern Europe, but we can measure the stop-and-go traffic on our way to work.
  
  If all politics are local, so are all earmarks. The courts have said that the president is not entitled to a line-item veto. Ergo John McCain, unless you can substitute a funding initiative that Congress will agree to, or you are prepared to shut down the government often, your promises will go unfulfilled. (Check the shutting-down-the-government option with Newt Gingrich,)
  
  Then, friends, there is the permanent alternative administration: the think tanks. These are the intellectual halfway houses where ambitious public servants park between tours of duty in government. Their influence is pervasive, subtle and continual. Every administration leans on think tanks which agree philosophically with it. And here is always a think tank which is particularly close to every administration. For Ronald Reagan, it was The Heritage Foundation; for Bill Clinton, it was The Brookings Institution; and for George W. Bush, it was the American Enterprise Institute.
  
  The epicenter of neoconservatism, The American Enterprise Institute provided the Bush administration with ideas, personnel, moral support, and rationales for the invasion of Iraq and the formulation and promotion of the troop surge. Vice President Cheney has been especially close to AEI. His wife, Lynne, is a fellow there and many old colleagues inhabit its halls on 17^th Street. They include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Lawrence Lindsey and David Frum. You have to admire the place and its initiative in seducing an entire administration.
  
  Growing in influence on the conservative side, and waiting for a friend in the White House, is the Cato Institute, which has been strengthening its roster of libertarian/conservative thinkers.
  
  Meanwhile, the liberal Brookings Institution is churning out policy papers on everything from education reform to Pakistan. A team of powerful liberals is ready to take Barack Obama by the hand and lead him down the path of liberal righteousness. Already Brookings experts are advising the Obama campaign, including Susan Rice, Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Of course Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, is president of the think tank and the nation’s leading liberal columnist, E.J. Dionne, Jr., hangs his hat there.
  
  The point is not that the think tanks are bad but that they are powerful, and they generate the ideas of government. Remember you may not be interested in them, but they are interested in you. The press tends to point to the lobbyists of K Street as controlling Washington. The lobbyists influence Congress, but the think tanks influence an administration.
  
  Finally, White House hopefuls, there is the bureaucracy: permanent, entrenched and bloody-minded. The civil service approaches each new administration with skepticism and often hostility. With every administration, the bureaucracy gets a new senior management team in the form of political appointees (secretary, deputy secretary, assistant secretary, etc.). Often, the bureaucracy frustrates these appointees from the get-go. Many a cabinet secretary has had to bring in a small group of loyalists in order to wage war on the larger staff. One agency head told me that she felt she could only confide in her chauffeur and her secretary.
  
  You two lucky victors in this presidential contest will learn that it is easier to invade a faraway country than it is to reform the Washington establishment. Orthodox or maverick, liberal or conservative, Washington is waiting for you.
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- On a Blind Date with Annie Oakley
- - By
    
    Llewellyn King
  - Published
    
    September 2, 2008 – 12:08 pm
  - Category
    King File
  - Tags
    2008 Election
    2008 Republican National Convention
    John McCain
    Sarah Palin
- In Washington, and around the world, we are waiting for the first torpedo to hit the hull, as they say. Having been broadsided ourselves in the extraordinary selection of Sarah Palin by John McCain for his running mate, we who cover politics are treading water.
  
  Predictably the polemicists are out in front praising, or damning, with a terrible tribal loyalty. If the tribal leader says it is so, so it is. And why not say it is brilliant, or catastrophic, while you are about it? Talk is cheap, and the Internet and talk radio makes it plentiful. Oh so plentiful.
  
  Nobody really will have much idea about Palin until that first torpedo fired is on its way. It could be a gaff on economics or foreign policy or something her Democratic antagonists have dug up from what appears to be a Doris Day past. We will begin to know her by how she responds.
  
  We know that she is a kind cartoon Westerner, a huntin’, fishin’, gun-totin’ Annie Oakley who is going to draw a bead on easy money in Congress and easy virtue along K Street. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know all about that one. We also know that, with the exception of Dick Cheney, no vice president has had the power to effect much.
  
  If the heroin from the tundra makes it to Washington, Palin will have to do more than face down oil lobbyists and wayward legislators; her big challenge will be the party chiefs and their financiers who helped get her elected.
  
  Washington may be corrupted by special interests, but it is also sustained by them. Lobbyists not only control a lot of campaign money they also own a lot of knowledge. Because they know the industries they represent, in a complex world, legislators need lobbyists–lobbyists they feel they can trust. At some level, every expert is a lobbyist. There are precious few people with deep knowledge on any subject who do not hold opinions about what they know. The smart legislator can sort out the frauds, like Abramoff, from those who work in the vineyards and know the grapes.
  
  The selection Sarah Palin tells us very little about her. But it tells us, again, mountains about John McCain. (Disclosure: I have known McCain almost since he came to Washington, and he has spoken at defense conferences I used to organize.)
  
  Yes, what McCain’s pick again tells us about McCain is that he is the most capricious of senators, and that he can see no contradiction in his own contradictory positions. McCainism is not conservatism. It is a view of the world peculiar to the man who holds it. His grip on Republican orthodoxy, outside of a right to life and a strong military, is tenuous.
  
  Most of the delegates now assembling in St. Paul would, one suspects, leave a private chat with the man they are about to nominate shaking their heads. They believe money is speech, he does not. They believe in drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he does not. It goes on and on.
  
  More, they are opposed to tokenism and quotas. But in selecting Palin, McCain has perpetrated what must be the most cynical act of tokenism and quota acceptance in recent political history. He also has again demonstrated his unique capacity to be on both sides of an issue.
  
  McCain’s rap on Barack Obama is that he is inexperienced. Now McCain has propelled the neophyte’s neophyte into the small group of people who might sit in the Oval Office and lead the free world. Nearly one in three vice presidents have become president. And McCain is not a young man.
  
  His choice of Palin suggests that McCain is either a cynic or a fatalist—much more likely the later. The fatalist has no faith in orderly progression, but expects happenstance to intrude and change the course of events. It was fate that got McCain shot down and captured. It is McCain coercing fate that has put Palin on the national stage. Win or lose, she will be there for a long time.
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White House Chronicle

News Analysis with a Sense of Humor

The Perils of Palin on the Fox Box

Sarah Palin as Joan of Arc

The Swamp in Washington That Awaits

On a Blind Date with Annie Oakley

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