Slate..Sarah Palin's brand of populism is dangerous and deceptive. [View All]

[Ichingcarpenter]

Writing about Sarah Palin in Newsweek last month, I pointed out the crude way in which she tried to Teflon-ize herself when allegations of weird political extremism were made against her. Thus, she had once gone to a Pat Buchanan rally wearing a pro-Buchanan button, but only because she thought it was the polite thing to do. She and her husband had both attended meetings of the Alaskan Independence Party—he as a member—but its name, she later tried to claim, only meant "independent." (The AIP is a straightforward secessionist party.) She didn't disbelieve all the evidence for evolution, only some of it. She hadn't exactly said that God was on our side in Iraq, only that God and the United States were on the same side. She says that she left the University of Hawaii after only one year because the climate was too sunny for an Alaskan; her father (whom she considers practically infallible) tells her most recent biographers that she quit because of the preponderance of Asian and Pacific islanders: "They were a minority type thing and it wasn't glamorous. So she came home." And so on. As I tried to summarize the repeated tactic:

So there it is: anti-Washington except that she thirsts for it, and close enough (and also far enough away to be "deniable") to the paranoid fringe element who darkly suggest that our president is a Kenyan communist.
Last week, the new darling of the right did her best to vindicate me. She appeared on the radio show of a certain Rusty Humphries,

What price the courageous frontier huntress now—an empty-headed echo chamber for rumor-mongers and freaks who shoots from ambush and then runs away? Some condescending right-wing intellectuals are calling her style "populist" and comparing it with Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan. The true name for it is demagogy, descending from Joseph McCarthy, Robert Welch, and the nastier elements of the old Nixon gang—people to whom slander and defamation was second nature.

http://www.slate.com/id/2237638/pagenum/2