Sarah Palin won’t run for president

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 7:23 PM - 1 Comment

Sarah Palin announced today that she will not be running for President of the United States in 2012. The former Alaska governor and John McCain’s 2008 running mate had been the subject of intense speculation about her plans, due to her large Republican fan base and fundraising capabilities. But on the show of conservative talk radio host Mark Levin, Palin read a prepared statement saying that she has decided she can “be more effective in a decisive role to help elect other true public servants to office.” She added that she will continue to fight for her favoured policies, including lower taxes, in a non-elected role.

ABC News

Whistle stops and tweets

By Chris Sorensen - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Sarah MacKinnon

Twitter has emerged as a favourite tool of U.S. politicians trying to get their message out, even if that message is former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin telling people to “refudiate” something. And with US$6 billion expected to be spent during the 2012 U.S. presidential election campaign, executives at Twitter have decided it’s a good time to cash in on all of the partisan bickering flying back and forth in 140 characters or less. Twitter recently said it will start selling political ads through its “promoted tweets.” The tweets won’t appear in users’ regular feeds, but will show up during searches. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is said to be one of the politicians included in Twitter’s pilot project. Perhaps he’s hoping to boost his 100,000 Twitter followers—a far cry from Palin’s 655,000, not to mention U.S. President Barack Obama’s 10 million.

Newsmakers: Sept. 22-29

By Colby Cosh, Jaime J. Weinman, and Richard Warnica - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Jason DeCrow/AP

No, they didn’t walk home

Two American hikers convicted of espionage in Iran were released after the sultan of Oman posted US$930,000 bail for them. Shane Bauer and Joshua Fattal, 29-year-old pro-Palestine activists and former Berkeley classmates, were seized along with a female friend while on holiday in 2009; Iran claims they illegally crossed their border on foot. The woman, Sarah Shourd, Bauer’s fiancée, was freed last fall on medical grounds. Bauer and Fattal’s release, with both in apparent good health, is seen as a political victory for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over hardline clerics in the Islamic republic.

Burqa fine

Only in France is having it and not flaunting it a crime. Last week, a court outside Paris fined two women for refusing to show their faces in public. Hind Ahmas and Najate Nait Ali were the first Frenchwomen charged under a law that bans full facial coverings outside the home. Passed last spring, the ban was aimed, rather transparently, at France’s substantial Muslim minority. It may also have been an attempt by President Nicolas Sarkozy to shore up his vulnerable right flank. But if anything, the law has galvanized supporters of the niqab. Ahmas told reporters she intends to challenge her fine in the European Court of Human Rights—while Kenza Drider, who also wears the niqab, now says she intends to run against Sarkozy in the presidential election. “When a woman wants to maintain her freedom she must be bold,” Drider told the Associated Press.

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More Palin-tology

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:35 PM - 7 Comments

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Finally, conclusive proof that good fences do not in fact make good neighbours. Even 14-foot high ones, like the monstrosity Sarah Palin’s husband, Todd, and his buddies hastily erected on the edge of the couple’s Wasilla, Alaska, property in the spring of 2010. What the Palins were famously trying to block, of course, were the prying eyes of author Joe McGinniss, who had rented the house next door while researching a book about the Republican party’s foremost shopper. Having a writer best known for his critical take on politics and politicians in such close proximity was a “creepy” infringement on her family’s rights and privacy, the former vice-presidential candidate complained. It was a desperate attempt to gather dirt for a “hit piece,” she said.

McGinniss’s newly published tome, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, proves that his target’s instincts were correct. But she needn’t have gone to such trouble to obscure the sightlines. However close the author’s view, it wasn’t all that perspicacious.

Sure, there are some titillating bits of gossip, like the tale of Palin snorting lines of coke off the bottom of an overturned oil drum during a snowmobiling expedition, at some unspecified point before she became governor. (An anonymously sourced allegation that first surfaced on a blog in 2007.) Or the revelation that she slept with Glen Rice, a college basketball player who went on to play for the NBA’s Miami Heat, back before she married Todd. (A one-night stand that McGinniss uses to advance the thesis that Palin had a “fetish for black guys,” just four paragraphs after suggesting she transferred from Hawaii Pacific University to a small Idaho college because of her discomfort with “people of colour.”) The self-described “Hockey Mom” is also, apparently, an indifferent parent who hardly ever goes to games, has a loveless marriage, and is a completely hopeless housekeeper. “She couldn’t do grilled cheese. She’d burn water,” quoth someone described as “an old friend.”

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When Mars really attacks

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 11 Comments

Everett Collection; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Economist Paul Krugman has found a novel way to illustrate his view that more stimulus is required to jolt the U.S. economy to life. “If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack,” he said on CNN, “and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat . . . this slump would be over in 18 months.”

So it has come to this: the best hope for the U.S. economy is that Independence Day turns out to be a documentary.

But is Krugman right? In a time of unprecedented partisan rancour, how would today’s America really respond to an interstellar invasion?

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The Palin family fishbowl

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 3 Comments

iStock; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

“You know, she definitely knows,” Bristol Palin said when asked if her mother had made up her mind about running for the highest office in the U.S. “We’ve talked about it before. Some things just need to stay in the family.” The daughter of Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and possible U.S. presidential candidate, said this on Fox News, as part of a countrywide media tour to promote her book, Not Afraid of Life. It seemed appropriate somehow that she would say that only the decision to run for president was private and off-limits. Everything else with the Palin family is open to the public in a way we haven’t seen since English aristocratic families allowed tours of their houses. We’ve seen the Palins on reality shows, and in tabloids fluffy and ferocious alike, and soon they’ll be starring in the upcoming documentary The Undefeated, a film director Stephen K. Bannon created to defend Palin against her enemies. The Palin blitz even involves a case of duelling books: Bristol’s just-published memoir, in which she trashes her child’s father, Levi Johnston, will be followed in September by Johnston’s own book, Deer In the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs. Sarah Palin is famous for her dislike of what she calls the “lamestream media,” meaning every news outlet except Fox News. But when it comes to other types of media, she and her whole family have built up an empire that most political families can’t compete with.

No one knows if this kind of media attention will translate into a presidential campaign, particularly with recent polls showing President Barack Obama beating Palin even in her home state. It might not even matter. Sarah Palin is considered popular enough with ordinary Republican voters that she can still be a formidable presence in the nomination race if she chooses to enter. Still, some of her thunder has recently been stolen by Michele Bachmann, another former beauty contestant with ties to the Christian right. Though the Palin family seems to consider her an upstart (“I think she dresses a lot like my mom,” Bristol told Popeater.com), Bachmann is more popular with journalists, holds a full-time political job, and can recite political talking points more fluently. That loss of the spotlight may have made it harder for the Palins to sell books, the tool a political dynasty uses to promote itself. Jessica Lussenhop of Minneapolis City Pages reported that when Sarah and Bristol showed up in the heart of Bachmann’s native Minnesota to promote Bristol’s book, “one estimate put the number of autograph seekers at about 300 people,” and the autograph signing session ended “at least a half-hour early.”

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Newsmakers: June 9 – 16, 2011

By Nicholas Köhler and Ken MacQueen - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Isaac Brekken/Getty Images

Done in by the velluvial matrix

Grads from the University of Alberta’s faculty of medicine were enjoying an after-dinner speech at their banquet last week when the words of Dr. Philip Baker, dean of the medical school, sounded vaguely familiar. “A couple of students recognized the term ‘velluvial matrix,’ ” class president Brittany Barber told the Edmonton Sun. “They googled it on their phones.” It showed Baker has borrowed heavily from a speech delivered last year at Stanford by Dr. Atul Gawande, a Boston surgeon and a writer for the New Yorker magazine. Accusations of plagiarism prompted an apology from Baker, who said he was inspired by Gawande’s speech, which “resonated with my experiences.” Baker added that he’s since spoken to Gawande, who “was flattered by my use of his text, took no offence and readily accepted my apology.” The university is investigating.

Dementia’s painful toll

It’s only been a few weeks since Ralph Klein and his wife, Colleen, revealed that the former Alberta premier is suffering from progressive dementia. Although the couple is said to be heartened by the good wishes they’ve received from across the country since then, Ralph’s decline, at age 68, has been rapid and devastating. “He’s starting to get a little bit worse,” Colleen told Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid. “I’m not sure he always recognizes me anymore. He never says my name.”

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Sarah Palin's long road back

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment

Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Keystone Press

Sarah Palin has burst back onto the national stage at the time when her brand of combative, small-government conservatism is reeling from its first political defeat of the Obama era, when Republicans lost what was considered a safe seat in a byelection where Medicare reform was a major issue.

Clad in a black leather jacket, the former Alaska governor and Tea Party darling rumbled through Washington over the Memorial Day weekend on the back of a Harley-Davidson, part of Rolling Thunder, an annual motorcycle rally to honour fallen troops, and then posed for pictures with burly men in leather vests and tattoos. Her tour of the northeastern U.S. has included a viewing of the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives, the estate of the first president, George Washington, at Mount Vernon, and battlefields of the Civil War.

A regular all-American family vacation? Maybe, albeit one in a tour bus emblazoned with images of the Liberty Bell, the Declaration of Independence, Alaskan mountains, and the words from the Pledge of Allegiance, tied together by the theme of “fundamentally restoring our country.” Restoring it from what? Presumably the Obama presidency. At a stop in Fort McHenry, site of an American victory in the War of 1812, Palin rebuked Barack Obama, who called the U.S. military “one of the finest fighting forces the world has ever known.” Said Palin, “It’s not just one of the greatest fighting forces. And I sure hope our President recognizes that. We’re not just one of many. We are the best.”

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Is the GOP willing to obey a leader?

By John Parisella - Monday, May 30, 2011 at 5:56 PM - 2 Comments

The latest poll puts non-candidate and former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani at the top of the heap of Republican presidential contenders. A month ago it was Donald Trump. And earlier this year it was Mike Huckabee. In a month’s time, perhaps Sarah Palin’s bus tour of the Northeast will have catapulted her to the top. (Probably not.)

Meanwhile, more serious candidates like former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty (who announced last week) and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (who will announce this week) will be among the frontrunners and will most likely battle each other through the primary season. Yet neither of them polls particularly strongly against the marginal/celebrity personalities the GOP is attracting. Newt Gingrich, an otherwise strong candidate, has had a disastrous start since declaring. His stumbles only add to the party’s woes. Why is the Republican field scoring so badly among the GOP’s supporters? Barack Obama is a formidable opponent, but the economy will likely emerge as the deciding issue come November 2012, and here the president is vulnerable. Continue…

Review: The lies of Sarah Palin

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 10:25 AM - 27 Comments

As the title makes very clear, this is no “on the one hand, on the other hand” summation of the 2012 Republican presidential prospect. For Dunn, an award-winning investigative reporter who is a frequent contributor to the liberal Huffington Post, there is no other hand to Palin. (Except for one acknowledged factor, with which any fervent Palinite could agree. That sine qua non of presidency seekers, that all-consuming drive? She has it in spades.) Dunn has that quality too: his 400-plus pages setting up the case for Palin as a pathological liar, an “approval-seeker on steroids” and someone almost universally considered—by former supporters, let alone enemies—to have some sort of mental disorder, is backed by more than 100 in-depth interviews. It’s probably more than he needs; Dunn’s subject, after all, is the woman who signed her email announcing the birth of her fifth child, Trig, not with her name but with “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”

The early Alaska material is interesting but probably too insider for most readers. Things pick up when Dunn gets to Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s manifestly inadequate vice-presidential vetting procedures in 2008. Everyone present at Palin’s last-minute audition for the job agrees that she was “direct and specific” on her belief in the theory of evolution. Everyone but Palin, that is—in her memoir, Going Rogue, she asserts she was forthright about her creationist beliefs. Given that McCain was adamant that any VP candidate wasn’t to bring more controversy—over intelligent design, for example—to a campaign that already had more than enough, it’s far easier to believe his staffers that an honest declaration of creationist beliefs would have sunk Palin’s chances. Those were early days in Palin’s national celebrity, but Dunn is just getting warmed up. For the rest of his book, in a stupefying and depressing parade, Palin and the record contradict each other as steadily as her popularity levels slide.

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Gingrich goes to New Hampshire while Palin heads for India and Israel

By John Parisella - Monday, March 21, 2011 at 5:44 PM - 11 Comments

This is a tale of two potential front line candidates for the Republican nomination in 2012: Newt Gingrich, who may be announcing soon, and Sarah Palin, who may not announce at all. It is an illuminating story because it illustrates the current pitfalls facing the Republicans and the effect Gingrich and Palin are having on the early stages of the race by dominating news coverage of the GOP.

What it also shows is how the approach most often adopted by the Republicans is not to offer an alternative and or a compelling vision. Rather, it is behave in a way that works to the advantage of the White House incumbent.

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Wanted: a Republican leader for 2012

By John Parisella - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 4:51 PM - 21 Comments

You would expect someone to have declared their intention to run for the 2012 Republican nomination by now. After all, in recent election cycles, the campaigning began shortly after the mid terms. For instance, Barack Obama announced in February 2007—and he wasn’t even the the first. It is strange that no one on the Republican side appears to be feeling the wind in his or her back in this cycle. With the economy recovering slowly and Obama’s approval ratings split nearly straight down the middle, shouldn’t Republicans be feeling like he is vulnerable? And if that’s not the case, then what, exactly, is happening? Continue…

Take cover, friends, the end is nigh

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 3:16 PM - 3 Comments

Getty Images; Istock; Photo Illustration By Taylor Shute

Everywhere we turn, there are ominous signs. Birds by the hundreds falling from the sky. Fish by the thousands washing up on shore. Ears by the millions bleeding from the Super Bowl halftime show. This seems like a good time for another edition of: What’s Killing Us Now?

Superstorms. The Earth’s northern magnetic pole, which usually moves around a little each year, is suddenly making a beeline for Russia—possibly because Sarah Palin yelled at it from her porch. Pick a side, magnetism!

Whatever the reason, some experts believe the shift is causing havoc with the weather and may ultimately set off a cycle of dangerous superstorms with winds as high as 600 km/h. Gusts of that magnitude “would likely destroy anything they come into contact with,” said one report, which I believe was published in the Journal of Duh.

The implications are many. Mass death. Untold destruction. Plus, CNN is running out of time to Continue…

Happy 100th birthday, Mr. Reagan!

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Saturday, February 5, 2011 at 8:16 AM - 8 Comments

Celebrations: The Reagan centennial is being marked by symposiums and conferences

As his 100th birthday approaches on Feb. 6, the ghost of Ronald Reagan continues to loom large over America. He is one of the most admired and most popular presidents. The centennial is being marked by a variety of conferences, university symposiums and ceremonies. But it is in the political trenches where the legacy of a president who left office 22 years ago continues to be hotly debated and redefined. Republicans are taking their veneration of the 40th president to new heights. Democrats, meanwhile, are finding that the more time passes, the more there is to like about the man they once caricatured as a doddering B-list actor who built a military colossus on the backs of the poor.

Sarah Palin herself discovered just how jealously her party guards Reagan’s legacy when she had the temerity to compare herself to the former actor and California governor. Smarting from criticism that her decision to star in a television show about Alaska appeared un-presidential, Palin quipped on Fox News in November, “Like, um, wasn’t Ronald Reagan an actor, wasn’t he in Bedtime for Bonzo—bozo, something… ” The backlash was immediate. “Excuse me, but this was ignorant even for Mrs. Palin,” wrote Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan in her Wall Street Journal column. She went on to lovingly catalogue Reagan’s lengthy career from actor to union leader to two-term governor of the most populous state, and to standard-bearer for conservative political philosophy. “The point is not, ‘He was a great man and you are a nincompoop,’ ” Noonan concluded. “Though that is true.”

Rush Limbaugh calls him “Ronaldus Magnus.” During the debate among candidates for the post of Republican National Committee chairman in January, the six people running were asked to name their favourite Republican president. Not one mentioned Abraham Lincoln. “Okay,” declared the satisfied moderator, Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, after all cited Reagan. “Everybody got that one right.”

For many Democrats, Reagan is no longer a president to scorn, but to study. President Barack Obama let it be known over the holidays that he was reading a biography of Reagan. Their first-term situations are similar: both took office amid a recession, in a moment of national demoralization. Both saw their approval ratings plummet in their first year ahead of mid-term elections, in which their respective parties lost seats. And now as Obama faces an Egypt in turmoil, commentators are recalling Reagan’s dealings with the Soviets and asking, “What would Reagan do?”

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Sarah Palin's hold on the Republican party

By John Parisella - Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 1:18 PM - 28 Comments

With President Obama’s approval ratings once again cracking the 50 per cent mark, it is interesting to see how a newly emboldened Republican party will deal with its next big quest, the presidency. Ousting the controversial Michael Steele as RNC president was the first step in that process. Establishing its authority in the new Congress will be next.

With the presidential candidate primaries just a year away, Obama is already putting together his campaign team. His inner circle has been revamped significantly with the arrival of a new chief of staff and a new national economic advisor. Obama clearly has his eye on 2012.

On the Republican side, the arrival of the Tea Party is unsettling the terrain. An improving economy and the voters’ desire for more bipartisanship politics is further complicating the political calculation for prospective candidates. The tragic shootings in Tucson less than two weeks ago may not ultimately result in major change, but it is affecting the political discourse and the nature of political debate.

The field of potential Republican candidates includes high-profile personalities who have published books and intervened regularly on everyday issues; there’s even a reality TV star. Yet, no one seems to be on the verge of declaring despite their relative notoriety. Palin, coming off a tough week—some would say a bad week—is in the public eye as much as ever. Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has just launched a book tour. Governor Mitt Romney is on a foreign policy tour. Others like Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee have played coy in recent weeks, while Governor Haley Barbour has not yet gotten his footing due to some controversial remarks, and both New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels claim no interest in running in 2012.

The biggest factor for the GOP, though, is the silencing effect Palin is having on the Republican race. She is not a conventional politician. The current controversy about her remarks surrounding the Tucson tragedy shows her to be unpredictable, yet highly vocal and persistent in defending herself. She is clearly appealing to her base. There appears to be an emerging consensus among backroom establishment Republicans that a Palin nomination may not be their best hope for 2012, with Pawlenty, Gingrich, Huckabee, and Christie expressing mild criticisms of late. But so far, even Palin’s most vocal rivals seem at a loss in figuring out how to deal with her.

What to look for in U.S. politics in 2011

By John Parisella - Thursday, December 30, 2010 at 12:34 PM - 20 Comments

What will a New Year in Washington, D.C. bring? In a phrase: more politics than ever.

It is true this year will end on a bipartisan note. But with the arrival in Washington of a contingent of Tea Partiers, watch for a lot of Congressional posturing. Despite their long-standing affinity for each other, Tea Partiers will test the leadership skills and patience of House Speaker John Boehner as the Republicans try to find a viable political platform. Will the GOP stick to an agenda of smaller government which they promised under Reagan and Bush, but failed to deliver? Will they tackle the hard issues of entitlement and defense spending? Can the GOP retain its pro-free trade stance in the face of the Tea Party’s isolationist tendencies?

The Democrats, meanwhile, are still licking their wounds from the mid-terms, and the party’s liberal-progressive wing is still smarting from the deal on the Bush tax cuts. Are they prepared to tackle reforms to the types of social programs that are dear to their liberal-progressive roots? And even though Barack Obama ended on a relatively high note, with polls showing some rebound at the end of the year, can he carry the remainder of his agenda forward with a divided Congress and Republicans eyeing the White House?

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Mars and Venus on Earth

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 3:55 PM - 36 Comments

Elizabeth May talks to Newsweek about the differences between men and women when it comes to the environment.

It’s always risky to speak about how women and men are different. But it would be wrong for me to ignore that a lot of the good that comes in the world is from motherly instincts. We cannot have any notion that our children are going to have a livable world if we don’t apply ourselves to political decisions—like making sure our governments ease our addiction to fossil fuels. A big part of urban concerns is to have healthy, locally grown food—a lot of that comes from moms going to the stores and seeing that the food is full of pesticides and doesn’t come from around here. Perhaps it is motherly.

A fierce desire to protect the vulnerable certainly comes from wanting to protect kids, but I wouldn’t want to portray women in green politics as more caring than men. Many men are great feminists, and many women are not. I see [Canadian politician] Stephen Lewis as a strong feminist, then I look at Sarah Palin and I think, oh dear, oh dear.

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, October 17, 2010 at 3:35 PM - 0 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

Stardom and politics

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Rush Limbaugh; Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin; Christine O'Donnell/ Mark Peterson/Redux/ Nicholad Kamm/AFP/Getty Images/ Jessica Kourkounis/The New York Times

Politics and entertainment have always been close cousins—both pursuits require a measure of charisma and a talent for self-promotion. Ronald Reagan was an actor before he was a president. So was Arnold Schwarzenegger before he was “the governator.” Hollywood stars have long made appearances on Capitol Hill—where Angelina Jolie has testified about the plight of refugees and where in 2002 the House of Representatives education appropriations subcommittee took testimony on funding for school music programs from the Muppet Elmo. But this political season has seen the rise of a new hybrid of celebrity politics that blurs the lines between politician and entertainer, and the line between hustling for votes and hustling for dollars.

Exhibit A is Sarah Palin, who, after rising to celebrity on a failed vice-presidential bid, resigned her job as governor of Alaska to become a full-time celebrity. She looks and sounds like a politician, and raises money (her political action committee, Sarah PAC, raised $1.2 million in the last quarter). But since leaving the $125,000 (all figures in U.S. dollars) per year governor’s office, Palin is making a bigger personal fortune—an estimated $12 million—selling books, appearing as a commentator on Fox News, hosting her own reality television show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, and giving speeches for up to $100,000 a pop.

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Don't count her out, yet

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Mark Thiessen/AP/CP

When Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska, recently conceded the primary to her opponent Joe Miller, her loss was considered a victory for former governor Sarah Palin—and the Tea Party movement that’s sweeping America. Murkowski, 53, was expected to win. After all, she’s a Republican power player from one of the most prestigious families in Alaskan politics, and part of the GOP leadership in Washington. She had more than 10 times as much money for her campaign as Miller, and the political clout and experience to match her war chest.

But Miller—a 43-year-old attorney and virtual unknown in Alaskan politics until Palin endorsed him—managed to upset Murkowski’s 30-year family legacy in that Senate seat. (Murkowski’s father was a former governor, and senator for Alaska.) The Tea Party Express pumped some US$600,000 into an advertising campaign that attacked Murkowski, erroneously claiming that she supported President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package, and that she did not want to repeal health care reform—even though she does.

Since then, the Republican Party has been throwing its support behind Miller, a hardline conservative with little political experience. Said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, “I have no doubt that he will be elected as the next U.S. senator from Alaska.” And this narrative of a little-known politician toppling an incumbent senator from the Republican establishment is not exclusive to Alaska. Miller is part of a group of Tea Party candidates who have been emerging as the Republicans of choice in Senate races this year from Florida to Colorado.

However, Murkowski, with GOP blood running through her veins, is not one to easily give up. Just over a week after her defeat, she announced she’s still ready to fight for her seat in the race for the November general election, should Alaskans want that. Supporters have overwhelmed her with a flurry of emails and phone calls, requesting that she does not step down. She said, “I’m not a quitter, never have been. And I’m still in this game.”

If she decides to run, she could announce her candidacy as early as this week. Her friend Andrew Halcro, an Anchorage politician, said this would be “the kind of campaign you should have seen in the primary”: “no-holds-barred, pedal-to-the-metal stuff.”

But this would be an uphill battle for Murkowski. She has lost support from the Republican establishment, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which now backs Miller. The moderate Republican has already met with the Alaska Libertarian Party to see if she could run on their ballot, although their politics were too disparate. Her other option would be an independent write-in candidacy, but few national candidates have been elected by convincing voters to write their names at the bottom of their ballots.

Of course, Murkowski could also stay out of the race. For now, she says she’s listening to the people of Alaska, and giving “considered thought” to what they want. And it just could be that what Alaskans want may have more of a Sarah Palin flavour.

Will Palin run in 2012?

By John Parisella - Saturday, July 24, 2010 at 10:44 AM - 0 Comments

Like her or not, Sarah Palin will play a decisive role in who gets the Republican nomination in 2012. Since being plucked out of relative obscurity by 2008 GOP nominee John McCain, Palin has emerged as a celebrity in her own right. Anyone longing for the nomination will have to deal with her persona, her influence, and her supporters.

Along with Palin’s notoriety, the rise of the Tea Party movement has created a number of inviting venues for the Palin message. She is now a regular commentator on Fox News, adroitly uses social media to comment on current issues, and has a knack for picking eventual winners, even among opponents of Republican incumbents (the only exception being New York’s 23rd district, where Democrat Bill Owens benefited from a GOP party split ).

Does that make her the obvious Republican pick for 2012? Not quite.

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That awkward “lesbian question”

By Colby Cosh - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 6:16 AM - 46 Comments

Andrew Sullivan isn’t winning a lot of friends by challenging Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan on her sexual orientation. If all you see is headlines like “Answer the lesbian question, Ms. Legal Eagle”, you’re likely to write this new crusade off as evidence of the brain-porridgification Sullivan exhibited during his earlier “Show us the afterbirth, Madam Vice-Presidential Candidate” campaign. Not (quite) so fast!

…the White House reiterated last week that questions about sexual orientation “have no place” in judging a nominee (but her gender most certainly does). Quite how you defend this argument—from a president whose own criterion for nominees is a real experience of how law can affect ordinary people—is beyond me. It is also beyond most ordinary people out there.

The Obama administration embraced identity politics with the appointment of the “wise Latina” Sotomayor; now, with Elena Kagan, it is putting forward a Supreme Court candidate who appears to have almost no relevant public identity of any kind at all. It would be one thing if she had a long and detailed record of legal philosophizing or judicial rationes, but it appears that even Kagan’s friends aren’t too clear on her principles or on the fine details of her personal life. It’s a little weird; we not only don’t know whether or not the Republic is getting a “wise lesbian”, we don’t know what her basic ideas about the rule of law or the Constitution might be. (It’s only weird because it is happening south of the 49th parallel, of course. Up here senior appellate judges tend to explode instantly into being out of an impenetrable biographical void.)

This is naturally frustrating for Sullivan, who doesn’t, deep down, appear to believe there is any kind of politics other than identity politics. He is serving, and not for the first time, as the wild-eyed radical who takes a popular idea to its logical conclusion and tests it to destruction and beyond. Americans, by and large, probably don’t want a system in which a candidate for the Supreme Court is quizzed on the most intimate details of her life and personality. “Madam Solicitor-General, have you ever allowed a biologically male person to fumble awkwardly with the clasp of your brassiere, and if so for how long and on what dates?”

But Sully’s on board! Having faced odious intrusions into his own privacy, he is willing, even eager to extend to everybody the rules under which he has hitherto been forced to live.

And, ultimately, he has a point: if we accept the premise of identity politics, then we are going to need honest, detailed information about the identities of those who propose to rule—about the “life experiences” that they “bring to the table”, to use the childish liberal argot. Sotomayor was a fountain of such dreck until she came, unprepared, to the attention of an audience skeptical of identity politics—an audience, that is, who sees the “wise Latina” stuff not as a harmless toasty-warm piety, but as a tendency that would, if unopposed, turn government into an irrational contest of identity groups, an exercise in token-counting.

Sullivan’s Palin issues make more sense once you see him as an identitarian ultra-radical. He was unwilling to take Palin at her word concerning matters in which there was no really good evidence of lying and no convincing natural explanation for lies. He smelled a specific rat that almost no one else has yet detected. Why, even granting appropriate leeway to his editorial intuition, would he react so strongly to the sort of distasteful childmongering we’ve accepted from politicians for a hundred years or more?

Simple: if identity is to be everything in politics, then lying about one’s identity, adding artificial “richness” to one’s experiences, is the gravest sin. It makes the golden ticket of victimhood/otherhood available for a dangerously small price to brazen liars. The scrutiny to which we subject candidates for office—especially if they have no objective way of demonstrating their talent, intellect, or seriousness—must correspondingly be very intense, in a Sullivan World.

Sarah Palin is unstoppable

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 196 Comments

Photograph by Sally Ryan/The New York Times/ Redux

John McCain thought he needed to spring one more surprise on America.

In August 2008, his presidential campaign against Barack Obama was listing badly. Some of this was his fault. But after eight years of George W. Bush, anyone representing the Republican party came with a lot of baggage. McCain needed to choose a candidate for vice-president who underlined his reputation as a maverick within the party and who was untainted by close ties to the previous administration. The stakes were high. As John Heilemann and Mark Halperin write in Game Change, their book about the campaign, “If McCain’s running mate selection didn’t fundamentally alter the dynamics of the race, it was lights out.”

McCain’s original plan was to partner with Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic nominee for vice-president. McCain hoped such a choice would prove his bipartisan credentials, steal thunder from his opponents, and back-foot the press­—allowing his campaign to regain some momentum. But when word of the Lieberman plan leaked, much of the Republican party rebelled, and McCain was forced to scramble. “We need to have a transformative, electrifying moment in this campaign,” McCain strategist Steve Schmidt said. No one on the short list of alternative candidates could deliver this. Schmidt suggested a new option: Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

There wasn’t time to vet Palin properly, or to probe her thoughts on foreign and domestic policy. Picking Palin was a Hail Mary pass in the dying seconds of a championship game. But McCain met and liked her. She was confident and calm. She wasn’t afraid to burn bridges and upset people, even in the Republican party. She was an outsider, like him. Steve Schmidt told McCain choosing Palin could hurt him. But a safer candidate, he said, wouldn’t help. It would be better to go for the win and lose big than to tiptoe to a narrow defeat. “High risk, high reward,” another one of McCain’s advisers cautioned. “You shouldn’t have told me that,” McCain replied. “I’ve been a risk taker all my life.”

Continue…

American Idol: the beautiful, but not too beautiful

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 15, 2010 at 11:03 AM - 6 Comments

Herein, the seventh in a semi-regular series chronicling the ninth season of American Idol. You can read the first installment here, the second installment here, the third installment here, the fourth installment here, the fifth installment here and the sixth installment here.

The last two weeks of American Idol competition have been, at best, weird and disappointing. Where once it seemed we had the makings of a uniquely great season, we may now be faced with one of the worst in Idol‘s nine years. Though no one will remember much of any of this if the winner goes on to even a moderate level of stardom.

To review, the frontrunner (Katie Stevens) imploded, but has somehow avoided elimination. An unlikely pop star (Lilly Scott) emerged as the most self-assured contestant, only to be inexplicably cut. A candidate who didn’t make the final 24 (Tim Urban), but was brought back when another contestant was disqualified, is now among the final 12. A glass blowing apprentice who admires Courtney Love (Siobhan Magnus) is now the leading female. The leading male, and perhaps the current overall favourite, is a massive human being (Michael Lynche) who would appear better suited to the NFL draft combine.

With the final 24 now cut in half, it’s entirely debatable whether the dozen that remain are collectively as talented and interesting as the dozen that are gone. So maybe now is as good a time as any to ask an important question: Is it possible to be too good-looking?

The question must be asked because of the continued presence of Casey James, a 27-year-old blues singer from Fort Worth, Texas, who was first celebrated this season for taking off his shirt at the behest of judge Kara DioGuardi. He is blessed of curly golden locks, blue eyes and a southern twang. He somehow maintains a constant two-day growth of whiskers and scruff without appearing lazy or homeless. He is vaguely reminiscent of the late-90s Matthew McConaughey (before McConaughey stopped trying). He is, by most accepted definitions, a good-looking man.

He can also, for the most part, sing: not quite brilliantly, but well enough that he entirely deserves to have made it this far. And yet, while necessary, his ability to sing will not necessarily determine his fate. All things being equal, if he ultimately wins, it will be, in large part, because he’s so good looking. If he is eventually eliminated, it will be, in at least some way, because he’s so good looking.

Conventional wisdom has it that the better looking you are, the more likely you are to “succeed” in life—or at least the easier it is thought to be for you to find what would generally be considered success. But it is maybe not quite so simple if your life is public life.

Consider politics. Attractive politicians—especially attractive female politicians—are often quickly celebrated for their potential, only to disappoint or otherwise fail. Sometimes, granted, the beautiful in politics are too quickly promoted or advanced to positions of prominence they are not yet prepared to handle. Some though may simply be doomed by their attractiveness and the expectation that attractiveness creates. The good-looking candidate is almost implicitly expected to be as eloquent or adept as they are attractive: the better looking they are, the more likely their other attributes are to pale in comparison.

Take, for instance, Sarah Palin. In a study released last year, participants who were asked to first consider Palin’s physical appearance were subsequently less likely to consider her competent. The study did not draw a straight line between attractiveness and perceived ability, but did suggest that a focus on physical appearance—objectification, essentially—ultimately limits a woman’s ability to be taken seriously otherwise.

This does not necessarily have anything to do with American Idol. But as much as Idol is about pop music, entertainment and celebrity, it is a political exercise: a test of one’s ability to appeal widely and motivate support from the public at large. It is not quite the same as succeeding in music or movies, pursuits in which the best-looking are often the most successful. Idol contestants don’t need to be admired or lusted after so much as they need to be endearing. They need a narrative. They need you to want them to succeed. And it is maybe not coincidence that none of the previous winners were overbearingly beautiful. Idol hasn’t anointed an ugly winner, but it also hasn’t elected an underwear model.

Casey James could, conceivably, have a career in underwear modelling. And in an uneven, inconsistent competition, he is, on the strength of a decent voice and identifiable style, a legitimate contender. As Kara DioGuardi noted recently, he would seem, “on paper,” to have everything going for him. But that might not be enough. Or, more specifically, that might be too much.