Sarah Palin Nixon with Lipstick
What's the difference between Richard Nixon and Sarah Palin? Lipstick. (Well, that and military service, graduate education, a keen intellect, years of national political experience and a proven grasp of policy foreign and domestic.) But as a fellow "serial collector of resentments", the half-term Alaska governor is Nixon's heir. When it comes to the paranoid style, the politics of payback, the perpetual war on the press and the championing of "real Americans" versus supposed elites, the Mama Grizzly is the second coming of Tricky Dick.Palin doesn't have to master Nixon's adopted victimhood. She is positive everyone is out to get her and she must respond with her own petty bag of grudges against those "elites" who have done her wrong. Those would be the same elites and media that magnify and sometimes invent every little gaffe of President Obama. Palin would certainly have a hectic presidency, 25% of her day devoted to trying to understand the intricacies of odmestic and foriegn policy and the other 75% devoted to singling out for a vendetta campaign anyone who dares disagree with her.
On Thanksgiving of all days, Sarah Palin was her Nixon best in attacking the president and the press. Furious about the understandable media reaction to her gaffe about "our North Korean allies," the pitbull in lipstick took to Facebook to again complain that the media did not show "some consistency on this issue" and "completely makes things up without doing even rudimentary fact-checking."
That online outburst followed her declaration on Fox News earlier in the week that:
"I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism. And I have a communications degree. I studied journalism, who, what, where, when, and why of reporting. I will speak to reporters who still understand that cornerstone of our democracy, that expectation that the public has for truth to be reported. And then we get to decide our own opinion based on the facts reported to us."
As it turns out, Sarah Palin is just reading from the Richard Nixon playbook. In 1972, just one month after defeating George McGovern in an epic landslide, Nixon summed up his press bashing Henry Kissinger. As CBS recounted:
"Never forget. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy." Almost shouting he repeated, "professors are the enemy!" He told former Harvard professor Kissinger, "Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."
And to be sure, those professors are just part of the "elite" supposedly out to get Nixon and Palin alike.
Just days after her nomination by John McCain, Palin set the tone by protesting, "I've learned quickly these past few days that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone." Launching her Going Rogue book tour last year Palin told Rush Limbaugh, "I'm not trying to reach the liberal elites in this country, and it's a good thing I'm not trying to, 'cause I'm not succeeding there." And after Barbara Bush said of Palin, "I think she's very happy in Alaska, and I hope she'll stay there," the average hockey mom punched back:
"I don't want to sort of concede that we have to get used to this kind of thing because I think the majority of Americans don't want to put up with the blue bloods -- and I say it with all due respect because I love the Bushes -- but the blue bloods who want to pick and choose their winners instead of allowing competition to pick and choose the winners."
(Ironically, Nixon himself said of Barbara Bush, "she knows how to hate.")
Of course, from the beginning those same blue bloods were the bane of Richard Nixon's existence. As Aaron Astor explained last year in his review of Rick Perlstein's excellent Nixonland:
At Whittier College, Nixon's alma mater, there was the social "in" crowd that formed an elite social club called the Franklins. Only the wealthiest students could deign to join the Franklins. Young Nixon, ever the outcast in this circle joined with his fellow shunned lumpenproletariat and formed a rival group called the Orthogonians. The word implied that the group rejected the elitist assumptions of the Franklins and refused to cede social authority to the well-to-do.
That proud chip on the shoulder, on display at Whittier and later at Duke law school, would be a hallmark of Nixon's politics. But if "Richard Nixon mastered the art of self-pity and resentment," after her journey through five colleges Sarah Palin mastered it as well.
When conservatives get up in the morning darn sure that Democrats are all socialists that is weird and dead wrong all on its own. Even stranger because it is Republicans and conservative libertarians who most resemble Marx, Stalin and Mao - Deluded Tea Partiers, Ayn Rand and How the U.S. Is Like the Soviet Union
