Compare Sarah Palin’s rhetoric to segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace’s rhetoric.
Palin: “Voters are sending a message.” Wallace: “Send them a message!”
Palin: “The soul of this movement is the people, everyday Americans, who grow our food and run our small businesses, who teach our kids and fight our wars…. The elitists who denounce this movement, they just don’t want to hear the message.” Wallace: “They’ve looked down their noses at the average man on the street too long. They’ve looked [down] at the bus driver, the truck driver, the beautician, the fireman, the policeman, and the steelworker….”
Palin: “We need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.” Wallace: “We have a professor — I’m not talking about all professors, but here’s an issue in the campaign — we got these pseudo-theoreticians, and these pseudo-social engineers…. They want to tell you how to do.”
Palin: “What does he [Obama] actually seek to accomplish…? The answer is to make government bigger; take more of your money; give you more orders from Washington.” Wallace: “They say, ‘We’ve gotta write a guideline. We’ve gotta tell you when to get up in the morning. We’ve gotta tell you when to go to bed at night.’ “
Wallace was not a libertarian. In Alabama, he expanded the state government and built the junior college system. He never presented a program to shrink the government in Washington. That never stopped him from attacking Big Government, at least on the federal level. He called for “freedom from unwarranted, unwise, and unwanted intrusion and oppression by the federal government” and said, “I think that what they ought to do is cut down on federal spending.” But he never put his money where his mouth was.
I thought there was something familiar about Palinism.
Elitist denounce people who grow their own food? I guess she hasn’t seen the WH garden or the thousands of urban gardens across the country – some of which are run by…community organizers.
I never really warmed up to the ‘vote for me cuz I’m stupid like you’ argument.
Well, considering how smart I am, it might be difficult to find a candidate smarter than me 😉
Creepy similarities.
I’m very unimpressed with Rauch’s analysis.
To the extent there is such a thing as Palinism, it’s a collection of standard conservative sound bites, run through the blender of her poorly educated mind. If she sounds like Wallace it’s only because those phrases are now boilerplate Republican rhetoric, not because she’s making a conscious choice to resurrect Wallace’s ideas.
I didn’t get the impression that he was advancing an argument any different from yours.
other than his repeated assertion that the repubs aren’t racist?
I think it makes his point more effective. Rather than accusing the modern GOP of being racist (which they are, but which is not the main message) he proves they aren’t conservative in the traditional sense, but just demagogues.
Booman, I agree. It seemed like Rauch was taking race off the table in hopes of getting Republicans and conservatives to engage his main point. I wish him luck (seriously, it’s an important conversation).
It’s something we liberal elites ignore or forget at our political peril: most voters spend much of their lives being looked down or condescended to—and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.
They can’t get angry at the boss, because they might lose their job. They can’t get angry at the bank about their overdraft fees, the insurance company about their claims rejections, the utility companies about their rate increases, the minister or priest about their holier that thou sermons.
Actually, they can get angry…but they can’t do anything about it. They have no power to change the situation.
But an elected politician who seems arrogant or out of touch. That’s someone you can go after, and even beat.
The significance of Martha Coakley’s Red Sox gaffes (dismissing Red Sox World Series hero Curt Schilling as a Yankees fan, and then dismissing the importance of her own error) is that it signaled to a large swath of Massachusetts voters that not only did she not care about “people like them”, but that she didn’t care that she didn’t care. (Arrogant. Elitist. Out of touch.)
In Obama’s brief organizing career, he would have learned a healthy respect for people’s anger, and the importance of:
It’s a lesson we progressives need to keep reminding ourselves of.
people who look different just happen to be others. 🙂
I did not much like the article. I suppose in essence he is correct. But it has two rather glaring flaws.
Right off the bat he says;
“Nothing in this article implies that the GOP is a racist party.”
Then he constantly says stuff like this;
“But there was much more to George Corley Wallace than race.”
“Wallace’s national appeal came neither from the racial backlash he exploited ….”
I would assume Rauch was not old enough to watch Wallace in person during his campaigns. EVERYTHING was about race with Wallace. His whole routine was ‘look what they are doing to our country, let’s take it back.’ There were not many people who voted for him that did not know perfectly well that there would be a push back against african americans. Rauch is either VERY stupid, or he is afraid to make a racial comparison to the Republicans.
Which brings us to the first comment.
“Nothing in this article implies that the GOP is a racist party.”
Wallace was all about race. To ignore or dismiss that is not intellectually honest. So if his comparison is true, then of course the GOP is racist. The basis for the article is dishonest.
Just another author afraid of the shadows.
nalbar
taking stuff away from Hard Working Americans.
This is exactly what the subtext of Chris Christie’s win in NJ is all about and the pretext for the wild axe he is now swinging at state government and the public sector unions.
Went over to Wikipedia to look up George Wallace.
I remembered hearing somewhere that he was a moderate first and then switched to extreme conservatism to win the votes of the racists.
A little quote:
“After the election, aide Seymore Trammell recalled Wallace saying, “Seymore, you know why I lost that governor’s race?… I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.”
Wallace apparently had a complete change of heart in later years, according to his daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy. She openly supported Obama in 2008.