The Devil's Bride

Sarah Palin is fascinating, I'll give her that. Not endlessly fascinating, because while there's a certain shrewdness there, her brain seems to be generating a lot more heat than light. But fascinating.

Politically, all she says are the most basic of talking points sprinkled with Aw-Shucks, cornpone imaginary American-ness...small towns good, cities bad. Government bad, business good.

Noting that some of the deepest roots of quasi-socialist American populism lie in the small towns and farms of America now seems pretty much unbelieveable. A portion of the Republican Party seeks to appeal to the descendants of people who organized against them. And succeeds. America's imaginary rural past has replaced the real one. I don't mean to say that there weren't Republicans in small towns and farming communities. But not universally.

Populist candidates on both sides of the American political divide have always tended to be anti-intellectual, anti-big city. Palin's not new -- she's just far less experienced as a political operator than most former prominent populists, and her goals are very high, very soon: a presidential run in 2012.

And yet Palin is also set up to be a victim of this new world of lightless political heat. Polls show she appeals to a much smaller fragment of the right-wing than one would gather from all the attention she gathers in the media. Regardless of what problems Obama faces in 2012, if Palin runs for President, I'd bet $20 Obama wins the biggest landslide for an incumbent since Reagan in 1984.

She may even succeed in splitting the Republican Party in two, as the Palin-led Republicans who'd gladly suck the devil's fiery, pus-jetting cock to seize and hold power break off from Republicans of good conscience. We'll see.

Reagan and Bush I were a lot of things, but I never got a feeling of supreme, gormless malignity from them. For some people (myself included), Palin exudes that sort of malignity -- a self-pitying person who blames everyone else for any of her failures, who seems possessed only of a desire for power and a desire to crush her enemies one way or another.