Sarah Palin: The GOP Formula for Keeping its Block Cemented

Sarah Palin.

The very name casts a euphoric spell over anyone who consider “ditto heads”, “hannitized”, Republican, and conservative synonymous. Hurricane Sarah, “The Pit Bull with Lipstick”, is, after all, evidence that the Republican Party is serious about controlling government spending and getting government off the backs of decent, hardworking Americans.

That is, of course, after the current Republican president completes the job of using federal funds to restore solvency to banks that have been funding fraudulent home loans for most of the last 16 years. That is not to be confused with how the previous protectorates of Republican conservatism, Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, supported President Bill Clinton’s use of federal funds to restore solvency to banks after their loans to Mexico had come a cropper back in 1995.

That episode was devoted for the great cause of assuring the whole world could lavish in the blessings of American-style capitalism through free trade. So successful has that been that the whole world, it seems, is lavishing more than is America.

I digress, however.

The GOP vice presidential candidate is everything the superficial conservative could want. She is Pro-Life and pro-war. She is as bold in desiring to stand up to terrorists around the world as she is in confronting the Russians by expanding NATO. She shoots guns and bakes cookies. She has eschewed the term of “soccer mom,” clearly because the phrase encroaches upon America’s hegemony on the sporting culture. Instead, she prefers the label, “hockey mom,” as we all know that hockey is as American as…, uh…, well, she wants to prove that conservatives can stand on a world stage in any category.

Yes, for those of us who’s thoughts are formed by slogans and symbols, Sarah Palin is perfect. She is a woman for the woman voters. She is an attractive woman for the male voters. She is a decent, Christian mother for the female Christian voters. She is a decent, Christian mother who looks good in a parka and mukluks for the male Christian voters.

Herein lies the problem for anyone who thinks the GOP is devoted to restraining the growth in the power of the federal government. Please consider, for just a moment, that in 1994 voters by the millions changed the entire make-up of congress in what Time Magazine called the, “GOP Stampede.” That historic change promised rank and file conservatives that, “…the days of big government were over,” and that the nanny state was destined to fly off into the dusk Mary Poppins-like as a discredited fable.

That was then, before conservatives were transformed into believing that their ideas of government could be spread world wide and the GOP could become the global hegemonic party of the new millennium. The leaders of the Republican Party started believing that America’s success in the Cold War and the GOP’s political ascendancy was due to a partisan political acumen and not because of the failure of communist doctrine and Democrat incompetence. In other words, the rise of the Republican party was due more to the fact that it was less self-destructive than its competitors than it was ideologically principled and functionally stable.

Consequently, leaders in the GOP have been busy proving to the world that their agenda is irresistible and inarguable. All the while the rest of the world has been draining America’s stability, economy, and vigor resisting and arguing against GOP dogmas.

In the meantime, to prove that American conservatism should be a world wide movement, the Republican Party has become everything it has ridiculed. Republican congresses and presidents have carried the federal debt to $10 trillion. The federal government, under Republican oversight, has gotten involved in every aspect of private life from how children learn to read to how adults board airplanes. The Republican strategy of preemptive war has modified the idea of, “more humble foreign policy,” to that of continually surveying the world, “in search of monsters to destroy.”

Sarah Palin has come to embrace all of that, all the while complaining about the “Liberal Media” and the “Washington Establishment”, and promising to, “talk to Americans without the filter.” She proves her patriotism by supporting American military occupations around the world and even sends her son to participate in them. She hits all the right notes for the voter who actually believes the GOP has any interest in restoring constitutional order to the government and self-sufficiency to our economic and social systems.

What Mrs. Palin is, though, is part of a formula to keep social and Christian conservatives in the GOP voting block just as Mr. Obama is keeping the civil rights liberals in the Democrat voting block. Mr. Obama’s hold is not nearly as hypocritical because the people who have voted for his party have looked to the power of government to deliver their agenda for decades. Mrs. Palin, however, has wrapped herself in a facade of moral virtue for the benefit of a political organization that has betrayed everything it has claimed to believe. By doing such she is not much different from a battered wife who humbly submits to her malefactor with the hope that her humility will convert the brute. Instead, it just enables him to become more brutish and domineering

In the self-same way Mrs. Palin, and those who are attracted to the GOP because of her, are enabling the GOP to continue to abandon the principles of government that would serve the benefit of this country. She may be decent, virtuous, and honorable as an individual, but she has sold those qualities to a system that is riding the U.S. over a cliff. Now that she has been at it for a few weeks, even her well-practiced smile is looking a little strained.

Bob Strodtbeck is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Bob Strodtbeck has been writing commentaries for a news weekly circulated in a community 10 miles north of Orlando, since 1993. He has spent professional time in the pharmaceutical industry, radio, and education.

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