So what's behind the pretty smiles and beautiful hair, the geniality and folksiness, the 'you betcha!'s of Sarah Palin and her 'Mamma Grizzlies', as she calls them? What political inclinations and policies would they actually seek to implement were they to win national office? (It doesn't look like we're going to find out by them actually telling us!)My guess is that they would try to take the country in the same direction that we have gone since 1981, which is towards a 'conservatism' that includes three major elements: free-market economics, a hawkish foreign policy, and a Christian fundamentalist cultural moral code.
Doesn't that sound like what you know about Sarah Palin and Christie O'Donnell? A flag-waving all-out support for our wars abroad, a move to privatize and deregulate every part of the economy (and to correspondingly shrink any government involvement in the economy), and a strong effort to stop abortion, gay marriage, and other cultural sins that offend fundamentalist Christians so much.
Yet it is my contention that economic and foreign policy conservatism, such as that (tacitly) championed by Sarah Palin, has actually been the normative American policy for the last 30 years, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, and that it is the accumulated three decades of conservative practice that has brought America to its knees.
Do people not understand that the stock-market and housing crash of 2008, the Great Recession with its unemployment and housing chaos in which we're embroiled, and our enormous trade deficits abroad, all stem from the basically free-market economic policies of the last 30 years? They certainly weren't caused by the centrist Obama who wasn't even elected yet when the crash occurred, yet many Tea Partyers are acting as if he's to blame. No, it was the three decades of his conservative predecessors, who brought us to this point (and I include Clinton in that mix, with his Democratic version of free-market economics, called neo-liberalism). Former conservatives who recognize this and who have turned from their old ways include Paul Craig Roberts, Bruce Bartlett, Kevin Phillips, and David Stockman.
Sticking with economics, what is it that a President Palin would do to solve the economic mess that we have been left with? From all I can tell, she would continue the free-market economic policies of the past 30 years that have literally crippled us as a nation.
Yet, on the other hand, we really don't know what Palin et al would do. Can anyone remember any new policy that Palin or O'Donnell have actually proposed to begin to address our huge economic problems and the national decline that so many of us are seeing both as a present and future reality? I can't think of one. It's all just a blank slate, just 'twitter' messages to the faithful, a diet of nothing but cute quips, laced with shrill sarcasm and ridicule for the current administration as they try to clean up the mess left to them.
(Oh, wait, I do remember one policy: 'drill, baby, drill'! Just ask the people on the Gulf Coast how that one has played out.)
Quoting Tolkien and C.S. Lewis as Christie O'Donnell has been doing so much recently, as wonderful as these two British Christian fantasy authors are, is not going to solve our domestic economic problems. (And I say that with the greatest of admiration for Lewis and Tolkien, so much so that I visited The Eagle and Child Pub in Oxford in 2002, where the Inklings would meet to talk and read their novels over a pint and a pipe).
What makes anyone believe that people like Palin and O'Donnell, who are completely bereft of national governing experience, have ANYTHING WHATSOEVER to offer the American people by way of political leadership? These two, and the others like them (eg Sharron Angle of Nevada) are the 'not-ready-for-primetime' politicians.
Except for waving and smiling and winking, they really don't know what they're doing, they can't stand up to the big boys (and girls) of the national media, and they don't not have the brains, the character, or the necessary experience for high national political office. And the same goes for most of the Tea Party candidates that are showing up these days....they just don't cut it.
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