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Home » 2008 » #766 » International News » United States: The Republican right’s new face

Alan Maas

“[P]icking Sarah Palin may go down in political history as a masterful stroke of genius by John McCain”, predicted the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody.

After months of grumbling about their party’s nominee and even threatening to sit out the election, leaders of the Republican right were over the moon about Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s choice of a running mate for the November presidential vote, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

The pick was evidence of the hold that the Christian right still has over the Republicans, in spite of McCain, who is viewed as dangerously “liberal” by conservatives, winning the presidential nomination.

“The two constituencies who are most energized by Palin”, wrote Jonathan Martin in the Washington-based Politico, “just happen to be the twin grassroots pillars of the GOP: anti-abortion activists and pro-Second Amendment enthusiasts and sportsmen.”

At the same time, the media’s instantly-arrived-at conventional wisdom was that Palin — as the first woman vice presidential candidate of the Republicans and only the second ever for the two major parties — would help McCain appeal to women voters disgruntled with the Democrats because Hillary Clinton lost the nomination to Barack Obama.

But there’s a problem with that logic: Palin is a Christian right extremist — not what motivated anyone to vote for Clinton.

Palin opposes a woman’s right to abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, which puts her beyond even McCain.

Palin wants the Christian right’s creationist fraud to be taught in schools. Like McCain, she opposes equal marriage rights for gay couples.

Palin seems to have gained prominence in Alaska’s Republican Party as a supporter of Pat Buchanan’s racist, “America first” campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination in the 1990s.

Palin “was a brigadier in 1996, as was her husband”, Buchanan told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “She’s a terrific gal, she’s a rebel reformer.”

Palin has a reputation on the issue of energy — one area where McCain won some support over the summer, thanks to the feeble response from Obama and the Democrats.

McCain managed to shift attention away from oil company super-profits by pushing for offshore drilling to increase domestic oil production.

He has a kindred spirit in Palin, who does him one better by advocating drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — something even McCain doesn’t — given the overwhelming evidence that any oil extracted from ANWR would have a negligible impact on US energy supplies.

Palin apparently clings to a fiction even the current White House has given up: that the overwhelming scientific opinion recognising climate change as the result of pollution shouldn’t be trusted. That’s another difference with McCain, who insisted that the Republican platform this year should at least recognise the reality of human-made global warming.

McCain’s campaign staff tried to turn Palin’s obscurity into a positive by claiming she was a brash outsider, who won the governorship by taking on a corrupt old boys’ network in the state party.

But that’s rhetoric, not reality — for both ends of the ticket. Palin did have to beat incumbent governor Frank Murkowski in the party primary in 2006, and she succeeded by emphasising the scandals embroiling him, such as the multi-million-dollar “bridge to nowhere” federal project.

Yet her conversion to “reformer” was late in coming.

“Public records and her own statements show that the Alaska governor was a supporter of the bridge from Ketchikan to Gravina Island (population 50), but flip-flopped last year in what her political foes have called a bid to catch McCain’s eye”, reported the New York Daily News.

Notwithstanding the spin coming out of the McCain camp, choosing Palin was a concession to the Christian right leaders who were threatening a fight on the convention floor in St Paul if McCain picked a pro-choice running mate.

Instead, McCain may be able to hope for an energised base to turn out votes on election day — the key to US President George Bush taking the White House twice in a row.

Palin is getting more attention for McCain than his other options. And the theory that a “hockey mom” will win support among women voters will have its day among the cable TV talking heads.

But it won’t happen on election day if Palin’s commitment to the Republican right’s most extreme dogmas is properly exposed. Palin is the new face for a political force that is discredited and despised among millions of people.

So the question returns to what the Democrats will do. Will they connect McCain and Palin to an agenda of war, corporate power and right-wing policies that growing numbers of people now reject? Or will they again try to be Republican Lite?

The selection of Palin isn’t a “game-changer”, as the media claimed. It’s still the Democrats’ election to lose.

[Abridged from http://socialistworker.org.]

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