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Is Palin the Rev. Jackson of the GOP?
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Candidate
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| Contributor | karin1492 |
| Last Edited | karin1492 Apr 20, 2009 03:45pm |
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| Category | Analysis |
| News Date | Monday, April 20, 2009 09:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Republicans have a big problem coming up: Sarah Palin.
How can a telegenic woman with a fervent following in the party, fundraising skills and a greater ability to fire up a Republican audience than any other GOP politician be such a liability? It’s not just because she’s unelectable as a presidential candidate.
Many leading Republicans and Democrats are, for one reason or another. The problem is, Palin doesn’t know she’s unelectable, and neither do her followers.
If she and her Palinistas have to find out this hard truth on the 2012 primary campaign trail, it will be bad news for the GOP.
It’s precisely what Democrats went through from 1983 to 1992, when the specter of Jesse Jackson hung over the presidential hopes of the party.
Like Palin, Jesse Jackson was the best crowd rouser in his party. No Democrat until Bill Clinton, with the possible exception of Mario Cuomo on his best night, could compete rhetorically with Jackson.
Lack of political experience wasn’t Jackson’s only barrier to the Oval Office. He’d embraced Fidel Castro in Havana and shouted “Viva Fidel!” He’d also kissed Yasser Arafat and said some explosive things over the years about Jews and Israel.
On top of all that, Jackson has still never explained his multiple stories about what happened the day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. And his organizations always seemed to run into tax and financial problems that the media would investigate with glee.
Those things didn’t come up much in the Democratic primaries of ’84 and ’88 because every white Democrat in the race knew that to attack Jackson head-on risked losing the
black vote.
It was impossible for a white politician to say what then-D.C. Mayor Marion Barry articulated, rather cruelly: Jackson had never run anything but his mouth.
For the same reason, if Palin chooses to run in 2012, no Republican will be able to go negative on her without losing right-wing Christian populists. |
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