Providential Palin
BARNES, FRED
Providential Palin She may be the one conservatives have been waiting for. BY FRED BARNES John McCain was inching up on Barack Obama last week in the presidential polls as his...
...And just to be clear about her conservatism: Palin is pro-life, pro-gun, promilitary, pro-Iraq war, pro-spending cuts, pro-tax cuts, pro-drilling for oil everywhere (including ANWR), profamily, and pro-religion...
...Now, with Sarah Palin’s elevation, they are...
...This was a surprise to me...
...Palin is a different kind of Republican...
...To paraphrase Democrats, the torch must be passed to a new generation...
...A conservative leader, should one emerge, doesn’t have to be Reaganlike...
...And Biden, also a Catholic, jumped in on Pelosi’s side...
...She’s a conservative reformer who, somewhat like McCain but more like Ronald Reagan, is forever poised to challenge the sluggish (or corrupt) Republican establishment and shake up the status quo...
...Paul...
...Maybe Palin is the leader conservatives have been waiting for...
...What if McCain and Palin win...
...It has belatedly come to understand that a Democratic sweep of Congress and the White House would lead to the enactment of “card check,” a tactic to avoid the secret ballot in union elections and thus dramatically improve the prospect of success in organizing drives...
...But it was Palin herself, rather than the boldness of McCain, that instantly galvanized conservatives...
...But she wouldn’t give up...
...So Republicans were beginning to come together, but it was thanks largely to Democratic noisemaking...
...BY FRED BARNES John McCain was inching up on Barack Obama last week in the presidential polls as his campaign cleverly picked and pecked at Obama’s vanity...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Obama can’t match even one of these accomplishments...
...With Palin on board, the change issue is no longer Obama’s exclusive possession...
...That’s an awful lot of political signifi cance to ascribe to a vice presidential pick...
...They haven’t had a leader since Reagan left the scene, and they need one...
...And Palin will attract more women to the ticket than McCain and Vice President X ever would have...
...Then came the address by Obama before 85,000 people at Invesco Field in Denver...
...There are a number of impressive young leaders in Congress—Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, to name three in the House—but they’ve been leapfrogged: If McCain loses, Palin will be the hope of the future...
...Friday, the day her selection was announced, the McCain campaign had raised $4 million online—more than six times its previous daily record...
...I didn’t get into government to do the safe and easy things,” she declared after McCain introduced her as his running mate...
...The event was a grandiose spectacle that overwhelmed the doctrinaire content of the speech...
...She brought down Alaska’s governor, attorney general, and state Republican chairman (see my “Most Popular Governor,” July 16, 2007...
...They weren’t credible...
...Republicans desperately need younger leaders...
...If he wins, she’ll actually be the future...
...A leader can adapt conservatism to new times and popularize the faith...
...She was not only a surprise choice but also an electrifying one, and her selection has far-reaching implications...
...At the Democratic convention, speeches by the Clintons and Senator Joe Biden, Obama’s running mate, salved the campaign a bit...
...A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not why the ship is built...
...Republicans weren’t on offense...
...Republicans have made some serious headway in recent weeks...
...Palin and McCain are more likely to produce both “change we can believe in” and “change we need...
...After all these years, Democratic politicians still don’t understand that picking a fi ght with the Catholic bishops on abortion is a political loser...
...But given who Sarah Palin is and what her future might be, it’s not too much...
...She slashed government spending...
...I’m not going to list those forces...
...Many of the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination this year insisted on likening themselves to Reagan, but it was a pathetic exercise...
...She used increased tax revenues from high oil prices to give Alaskans a rebate...
...The Democratic convention made the hostility of Democrats even clearer...
...And if the McCainPalin ticket wins, it has the potential to carry Republicans through a rough patch and even ensure conservative dominance of the party—for years to come...
...She just improved McCain’s chances of being the next president...
...But as a political happening, it worked like nothing I’ve seen before...
...Speech after speech demonized business...
...Read the newspaper...
...One of the most politically savvy of the Catholic prelates, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, rebutted Pelosi...
...Obama credited workers with the productivity gains of recent years, ignoring the more important role of a massive investment in technology...
...Sarah Palin changed all that...
...Indeed, she already has...
...Dubbing someone the new Reagan is silly, especially someone who’s been a national fi gure all of a few days...
...She killed the “bridge to nowhere...
...Conservatives have a lot riding on Palin, too...
...It energizes the Republican base...
...As vice president, Palin would be next in line for the Republican presidential nomination after McCain...
...Assuming she didn’t wander off the conservative reservation—an unlikely occurrence— she’d be hard to stop...
...By 10 P.M...
...McCain couldn’t mobilize the Republican base, but Palin can...
...But she certainly is good for Republicans right now...
...She took on the biggest industry in Alaska, the oil companies, to work out an equitable deal on building a new gas pipeline...
...She and McCain are more likely to clash with special interest groups than are Obama and Biden, who have yet to buck a single liberal pressure group...
...Palin’s reform credentials, her social and economic conservatism, and her personal story had become well known to conservatives...
...Democrats also awakened another member of the Republican coalition, an unreliable member: the business community...
...McCain gets enormous credit for naming a conservative woman to his ticket...
...Her entry will change the nature of the presidential race...
...And it looked like we were in for the selection by McCain of a humdrum vice presidential running mate, followed by a not very interesting Republican convention in St...
...Republicans were demoralized, which could be fatal in an election year in which most of the larger political forces are working against them...
...Let’s start with the presidential race...
...Maybe not...
...If he knew better, he didn’t let on...
...She came up with the insight that Catholic doctrine on abortion is in fl ux, justifying support of legalized abortion by Catholic politicians...
...You might have thought House speaker Nancy Pelosi would have enough sense not to spark a fi ght with the Catholic bishops on abortion...
...But no...
Vol. 13 • September 2008 • No. 48
