The Bombshell from Alaska

In the news business they’re known as the Friday Night Follies – a politician has something that needs to be made public, but it will cause no end of trouble, so you announce it after five in the afternoon, Eastern Time, on a Friday. As a rule, you manage the news by keeping the startling stuff under wraps until late Friday afternoon. The national broadcast news shows for Friday have by then been set in stone – timed and rehearsed for the twenty-two available minutes in the half-hour. The nifty graphics have all been worked out. And the cable news shows for the whole weekend have all been booked and set up – Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney’s daughter will be on all of them. And of course Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” doesn’t air on Friday night. And too, no one much reads the newspapers Saturday morning, and even if a big story breaks, there’s no broadcast echo chamber to keep it alive – the cable news folks know that people, if they are in on the weekends, watch sports if they watch anything at all, so they run “in-depth” backgrounders or light fare – stuff about celebrities or travel or health. MSNBC has booked endless hour-long prison shows. “Saturday Night Live” might offer some political satire, but that’s material that has been rehearsed all week, and not that very topical. And, at present, sixty percent of all news broadcast and in print concerns the death of Michael Jackson.

So Friday evening is always safe, and Friday, July 3, 2009, the whole day, was even safer – a national holiday, with people out and about doing other things. You release bad or puzzling news and hope that, by Monday, other matters will have come up and no one will notice. Or they’ll be talking about those other things. You’ll be old news. There won’t be much to say. Whatever it was on Friday, by Monday, when people are paying attention again, it will be a done deal.

It works in politics, and in business – all major markets are closed – and, on Friday, July 3, 2009, it worked for Sarah Palin:

Sarah Palin made a surprise announcement Friday that she will resign as governor of Alaska in a few weeks, saying she will try to “effect positive change” from outside government.

The former Republican vice presidential candidate hastily called a news conference at her home in suburban Wasilla, giving such short notice that only a few reporters actually made it to the announcement.

And she did not allow questions, so the few reporters who actually made it to the announcement were, in effect, stenographers. And it was a bizarre and rambling announcement (full text) – grammatically a Rube Goldberg mishmash and no one quite knew what she was saying, as MSNBC summarizes:

Palin was vague about why exactly she is stepping down rather than finish out her first term, which ends in 2010. “We know we can effect positive change outside government at this point in time on another scale and actually make a difference for our priorities,” she said. She added that she was tired of what she described as “superficial, wasteful, political bloodsport.”

Some have speculated in the past that Palin may be interested in a run for president in 2012, but she did not mention running for another office at her press conference. Sources told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that it appears Palin is out of politics for good.

Or she isn’t. Democrats up in Alaska were making the most of this:

“Sarah Palin’s decision to step down as governor is a shock to Alaskans, coming at a time when leadership is needed secure a gas pipeline and address rising unemployment,” said Patti Higgins, chair of the Alaska Democratic Party. “Palin’s lack of commitment to her sworn obligation to serve her term to the best of her ability is a betrayal to all Alaskans.”

Everyone else was somewhere between puzzled and shocked, but, as MSNBC notes, not exactly surprised:

The 2008 vice presidential nominee was seen as a likely presidential contender in 2012 and had proved formidable among the party’s base. But the last week brought a highly critical piece in Vanity Fair magazine, with unnamed campaign aides questioning if Palin was ever really prepared for the presidency.

The backbiting continued through the week, with follow-up articles recounting the nasty infighting that plagued her failed bid. Her advisers sniped with other Republicans, underscoring the deeply divided GOP looking for its next standard bearer.

Perhaps she wanted to change the subject, but Newsweek’s Howard Fineman had a different take:

I have covered politics for a long time. I can tell when someone is running for president. Sarah Palin is running for president.

On a sunny (slow news) day in Wasilla, Alaska, the governor and former GOP vice presidential candidate appeared before the cameras and announced that she was stepping down as the state’s chief executive 18 months before her term expires.

Just like that – like the distant sound of a chain saw in a stand of northern pines – the 2012 Republican race lurched into gear.

Fineman concedes that Palin is not the front-runner, but then no one is. He doesn’t say it, but it’s almost as if she’s declared. No one else has, and that puts her in front – way in front.

And he examines the timing – not just a Friday, but this one Friday:

Well, perhaps there is scandal lurking in the Great North that we in the Lower 48 don’t know about. Maybe there is video of the Palin family setting a polar bear adrift on ice floes. But there is no reason to suspect so and, in the meantime, it’s worth noting that both the timing and the manner of Palin’s announcement were pretty shrewd.

She picked a long holiday weekend at the onset of summer (when, by the way, “Meet the Press” is pre-empted by Wimbledon tennis) to issue her stunner. She took no questions after her announcement and then disappeared into her house. As a result, she controlled the message, which was: I’m the scrappy “point guard” (her basketball position on a state-champion team long ago) and I’m gonna take it to the hoop of freedom for ya!

Now she will be free to travel the country, rake in a lot of dough as a speaker, work the GOP and conservative dinner circuit, hawk her book once it comes out – and see how the game develops.

No one else is claiming to be the head of the Republican Party, ready to start work right now to wrest control of the country from the hands of the terrorist-loving secret-Muslim closet-socialist Obama and the godless liberals, and return it to the real Americans – rural, evangelical Christian and white, and proud to have rejected all that book-learning stuff long ago. Someone had to do it. She stepped up.

Of course Fineman offers what he calls “a trawler-full of caveats.”

Scrappy though she is, Palin is no rocket scientist. Her knowledge of the issues and of the wider world remains shallow and incomplete. In some respects, her family life is a monument to confusion, if not hypocrisy, about Traditional Family Values. The cutesy-pie thing is fading fast, and isn’t the route (as Tina Fey proved) to Margaret Thatcher-hood. Her performance on the national campaign trail (after the first scripted moments in St. Paul) was, for the most part, not only laughable, but also cringe-worthy. She was in over her head.

But that may not matter:

She is popular with core Republicans and conservatives for her emotional approach to abortion, for her Alaskan devotion to guns and hunting, and for her libertarianish theory of government whose last true devotee was Barry Goldwater.

Palin comes from the core of the core GOP demographic: rural, Protestant, married and churchgoing. She is in THAT mainstream.

Some of her potential rivals are just as busy making fools of themselves as she ever was during the 2008 campaign. At least she hasn’t been caught doing the tango in Buenos Aires (Mark Sanford), or having sex with a staffer (John Ensign) or calling Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a “racist” (Newt Gingrich) or disappearing to an ambassadorship in China (Jon Huntsman).

She’s made her move. And by Monday it will be a done deal. And Fineman likes the timing:

Early polls show that none of the other men left standing – Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, to name two – is exactly a colossus. To be blunt, the GOP is in such a shambles that in that land of the blind, even this one-eyed woman could become queen.

And Fineman argues she has the juice:

And as simplistic as she is, her reductionist view of the role of the federal government could be appealing to a GOP grassroots that is already apoplectic about the aggrandizements of the Obama administration in health care, environmental control, education and other aspects of our lives.

And expectations are on her side, because there are none:

…at least among the media elites she already has, in Nixonian fashion, made her foil. She may not have a Phi Beta Kappa key, but she knows how to play a victim of the people who do – and that is popular among the conservatives she now courts.

David Kurtz flags this from Palin:

Life is too short to compromise time and resources… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out.

Kurtz simplifies that – “Quitters stick to it. Winners quit.”

No, it doesn’t make sense. But not much of it does, as Josh Marshall notes:

For the moment there’s no clear evidence of or explanation for some massive political or scandal bombshell that would have driven Palin from office. And it can be difficult not to allow the preposterous to become credible when many supposedly rational people are saying it.

But logic and common sense seldom fail as a guide to understanding politics. And the idea that Gov. Palin just up and decided for no reason in particular to resign her office little more than half way through her term, with a hastily assembled press conference and a rambling and histrionic speech, is just too silly for serious consideration. Another sign of the confusion on the inside are the comments reporters are getting from supposed Palin insiders. Palin insiders told Andrew Mitchell that Palin was “out of politics for good.” But she told the Executive Director of the Republican Governors Association that she’s resigning to campaign for more candidates in the continental US, work on her book, all with an eye to gearing up for her run for president in 2012. Call me cynical but it seems hard to reconcile those two explanations.

As with her speech itself, the tell is that the decision was apparently so rushed and sudden that there was not enough time to come up with a plausible cover story or to get out the word about what it was.

It looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. Either Palin is resigning ahead of some titanic scandal (which should emerge in short order if it exists) or her resignation was triggered by an even more extreme mental instability than we’d previously suspected.

Or else, as Kurtz notes, just as all her media fans says, she’s not unstable, she just a fighter:

BEFORE:

Rod Dreher, Dallas Morning News, Sept. 7, 2008: “She’s a fighter, this one. And worth fighting for. Come what may in November, we now know what the future of the GOP and the conservative movement looks like.”

Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 4, 2008: “Sarah Palin may come from the backwoods of Alaska, but she has the heart of a street fighter.”

Jim Wooten, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sept. 3, 2008: “Republicans want a fighter. I do believe they have one in Gov. Sarah Palin.”

AFTER:

David Brody, CBN, today: “Oh and by the way, the last time I checked, her nickname is ‘Sarah Barracuda.’ Palin is a fighter.”

Palin spokesperson Meghan Stapleton, quoted by the AP, today: “Palin remaining as governor is not good for Alaska, given the ‘political bloodsport’ by her critics, Stapleton said. Stepping down is a ‘fighter’s move,’ Stapleton said, essentially Palin stepping around political barriers in her way and pursuing her vision.

But some on the right aren’t happy, like Allahpundit at Hot Air:

Placing your ambition over your commitment to the state looks shady, especially for someone who won’t have a single full term as governor under her belt for the primaries.

On the moderate left, Josh Marshall:

Okay, we’re getting our first indication of what happened. It seems like a colossal sulk on Palin’s part, or perhaps better to say an effort on her part to ingeniously combine anti-liberal media bias agitation with Christianist politics by portraying herself as having been crucified by the liberal media.

On the hard left, at Daily Kos, Jed Lewison:

Unless she’s a total moron, there’s no way she’s running for president. Then again, maybe she is a total moron.

In short, this is the sort of thing you announce late Friday, without taking questions. People just get confused, even at the flagship magazine of the right, the National Review. See Jim Geraghty:

David Schuster is offering a typical sneering tone, but it doesn’t make it any less accurate: “If it’s true that she’s leaving the governorship before her first term is complete, her national political career is done.”

Ace of Spades agrees – “It’s over. You can’t resign from a governorship and then run for higher office. Barring some strong reason, like needing treatment for cancer.”

That sounds like, on the left, Steve Benen:

Palin is making a terrible mistake. The lure of the national spotlight is strong, and the day-to-day challenges associated with running the executive branch of a state are no doubt difficult. There are probably plenty of far-right activists and donors whispering in Palin’s ear, telling her to ignore the naysayers and realize she’s ready to lead the nation, but she’s listening to the wrong people. Walking away from the governor’s office after one term is incredibly foolish – but walking away from the governor’s office after two and a half years in office is stupefying.

On the other hand, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers argues that Palin does have her own base, and whatever she does, even if it makes no sense, is just fine with them:

Her appeal has less to do with her personally than with those who follow her. She is simply an attractive empty vessel into which her followers pile grievances. Her followers feel aggrieved, by the government, by the media, by Pelosi and Reid, by the gays, by the greens, and by the ever lurking extreme liberal left. Real or imagined, Palin’s followers view her as a symbol of their world that these lefties have unfairly attacked.

So when it’s obvious she doesn’t know something, or much of anything, or is caught in this lie or that, her supporters deflect all of it by citing liberal media bias:

They never address the facts because the facts are largely incidental. They immediately point to one of these nefarious forces.

So you just have to understand what’s really going in here:

A fairly persuasive theory of leadership called the “Social Contagion” theory, postulates that leadership functions not through the leader but through the followers. Ideas spread like the flu (a contagion) that the followers catch. In order for a movement to break through to a larger audience, the followers require a figurehead. Palin is that figurehead for the aggrieved fundamentalist right.

If it wasn’t her, they’d find someone else. But her carefully constructed physical appearance, which includes her family, makes her figurehead status all the more appealing. She represents the ultimate looking glass self for the fundamentalist right at least in the sense that she looks the part. They ascribe everything else to her whether it fits her or not. That’s why she can say or do anything that she wants because in the end it does not matter to her base.

But the pure fundamentalist and know-nothing base may not be enough to win the big prize in a few years. Time ran an item that cites others in the party:

If her goal is to position herself for higher office, the stagecraft and timing of her announcement left Republicans scratching their heads. The Friday before Independence Day, when media attention is at its lowest, would be a more appropriate moment for a scandal-plagued politician to slink from the national stage. Palin made the announcement with no fanfare, no teleprompters, no prepared remarks. Waterfowl in the background at times challenged her for the microphone. “To step down on a Friday before a three-day holiday, people are going to scrutinize it: why is she doing it, question her judgment,” said Ed Rollins, who ran former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign last year. “It leaves her with less than three years as governor on her resume – not a very strong argument to run for president. The way she did it – the fact she did it – damages her, damages her immensely. People aren’t happy about a governor quitting, unless you’re Governor Sanford. Her doing this adds to the Sarah Palin mystique, but not in a good way.”

And the party hasn’t been happy with her:

Palin’s had a rough 2009 thus far, drawing headlines often more suitable for Britney Spears than for a serious politician and gracing the covers of more tabloids than news magazines. She’s picked heated public battles with Levi Johnston, the father of her teenage daughter’s baby, and with late night comedian David Letterman for crossing the line in mocking her daughter’s sex life. In the last week, she’s been eviscerated in a Vanity Fair article that has reduced the Republican Party into two camps, Palin supporters and detractors, who slug it out on the cable shows. She’s also rankled Republican insiders by accepting two high profile speaking engagements and then bailing out. And then she twice bolted a congressional dinner before finally agreeing to appear, but declining to speak. Such fickle behavior has not endeared her to many party stalwarts, and her name is consistently left off the list when reporters ask the likes of John McCain and former Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush for ideas on who could be the next leader of the party.

Perhaps because of these missteps, many GOP advisers have urged Palin to keep a low profile, to follow the Ronald Reagan trajectory by studying up on the issues, maybe do a listening tour and spend time building relationships behind the scenes. After finishing out his term as Governor of California, Reagan spent four years traveling the country, speaking to groups, building support, says Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the conservative Eagle Forum. Palin “certainly is the most sought-after speaker on the Republican side at this time. She draws big crowds; anywhere she goes, she’s a star. I hope she’ll continue that – we need good speakers,” Schlafly said in a phone interview. “It’s what Reagan did to great success.”

But by quitting her governorship, she relinquishes her best platform. “I wouldn’t call this a strategy,” said John Weaver, a former top adviser to McCain. “This makes no sense. The way for her to increase her chances in 2012 is to be reelected in 2011.”

Everyone is puzzled. But at Slate, John Dickerson isn’t puzzled:

The larger reason for Palin’s early departure was that she was having no fun. Ever since she returned to Alaska from the national stage, being governor has been a chore. Her political opponents have launched 15 ethics charges against her. The state economy has turned sour, and she got into an ugly squabble over federal stimulus funds. It’s much more enjoyable to travel the country waving to adoring crowds of GOP activists.

So Palin decided to chuck her office for the limelight.
She can now tour the country as the only superstar in a party that desperately needs one. Because she can pack bleachers, she can raise money. In addition to boosting party morale and filling its coffers (and her own), she can build relationships nationwide that will be crucial if she really is interested in running for national office again.

As they say, girls just want to have fun. Or maybe she just loves to be a maverick:

That’s certainly how she framed her departure. To stay in office as a lame duck would have been to do the predictable thing, she said. But the challenge for Palin in the 2008 presidential campaign and again now is persuading voters that her maverick instinct isn’t just unpredictability and erratic behavior – qualities that can turn maverick-ness into a liability.

Or maybe unpredictability and erratic behavior aren’t a liability at all – we had eight years of a Bush-Cheney foreign policy based on just that – keep ‘em guessing what crazy thing we’ll do next. The bet could be that Americans miss that.

But of course, as this news was carefully managed, by Monday morning it won’t matter much. We will have accepted that this resignation happened, and what needed to be said was said. And we will settle in and know who will run against Obama next time. Fine. It’s already old news.