Evidence that Democrats consider Sarah Palin a potent political
force for the future continues to mount. A
Huffington Post blogger went rooting around the comments at
the Team Sarah website
over the weekend and emerged to announce that he had discovered
“something very ugly happening out there in the hinterlands these
days — a brewing cauldron of racist anger being directed at
President-elect Barack Obama.”
This accusation of “mean-spirited bigotry” was based on a
relative handful of comments, far less dramatic than the huffy
HuffPoster’s hyperbolic introduction suggested. The Christian
ladies who run Team Sarah — Marjorie Dannenfelser, Jane Abraham
and Emily Buchanan of the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List —
responded immediately with sanctions against commenters who
cross the lines of political decorum. (Of course, decorum is not
even an afterthought at Huffington Post, DailyKos or any number
of liberal blogs where the comment fields routinely boil with
vitriol, but conservatives have long since become accustomed to
this sort of double standard.)
The tactic of blaming Palin for “racist anger” toward Obama
developed as a theme during the fall campaign, evidently based on
post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking within Team Obama.
Threats against Obama increased as the campaign heated up after
Labor Day, and since this followed the Aug. 29 announcement of
the Alaska governor as Republican running mate, Palin herself was
scapegoated.
That claim was distilled in a November
article in the London Daily Telegraph with the
misleading headline, “Sarah Palin blamed by the US Secret Service
over death threats against Barack Obama.”
The Secret Service never said any such thing and the
Telegraph’s story didn’t actually say that they had said
it. Rather, Telegraph reporter Tim Shipman was paraphrasing a
Newsweek account of
the campaign that quoted Obama adviser Gregory Craig in
mid-October expressing concern about “the frenzied atmosphere at
the Palin rallies.” The same paragraph of the Newsweek
story asserted (without attribution) that the Obama campaign had
been “provided with reports from the Secret Service showing a
sharp and very disturbing increase in threats to Obama in
September and early October.”
It was the Obama campaign, not the Secret Service, which
suggested a connection between the “frenzied atmosphere” around
Palin and the threats. Obama himself appeared to believe there
was such a connection, raising it in his final debate with John
McCain.
That accusation evidently stemmed from an Oct. 14 newspaper
report that an audience member at a Palin rally in Scranton,
Pa., shouted “kill him” when Obama’s name was mentioned. The
Secret Service investigated but was unable to corroborate that
account, as Newsweek subsequently reported,
and yet the alleged threat has entered the colloquial
what-everybody-knows version of the campaign.
All this fits within a narrative arc that Democrats and their
media allies are constructing around Palin, portraying her as an
uncouth rabble-rouser leading an angry (and perhaps dangerous)
populist opposition to Obama.
TO WHAT EXTENT can Palin be blamed for this? She was expected to
fill the attack-dog campaign role of running mates that has
become customary in presidential politics, and she filled that
role with considerable gusto. In fact, she got ahead of the
McCain campaign in raising Obama’s ties to former Weather
Underground leader Bill Ayers with her now-famous “pallin’ around
with terrorists” soundbite.
There is nothing to indicate, however, that negative attacks are
Palin’s preferred mode of political discourse, or that she
consciously courts the kind of populist “frenzy” for which she
has been blamed. Because she is a Christian mother of five who
speaks the language of faith, she is seen as an avatar of the
religious right. Yet in interviews, Palin most frequently
describes herself as a fiscal conservative primarily interested
in energy policy, reform, and economic growth.
Democrats clearly aim to expand this gap between the perception
and reality of Sarah Palin by making her an all-purpose symbol of
right-wing menace, an emblem of “oogedy boogedy,” to borrow
Kathleen Parker’s evocative epithet.
The eagerness with which a HuffPo contributor seized on a few
unfortunate comments at TeamSarah.org indicates that destroying
Palin’s political viability is a high-priority progressive
project. The folks at Team Sarah are clearly aware of this, and
moved quickly to declare that the site would “not tolerate
comments that can be perceived as racist or hateful.”
Policing an online network with more than 60,000 members is “a
tough thing,” Dannenfelser told me in a phone interview, because
Team Sarah “has been such an organic phenomenon…utterly
grassroots.” The group has no official relationship with Palin,
except as a “fan club,” Dannenfelser explained.
“A lot of [Team Sarah members] are people who’ve never been
involved in politics before,” Dannenfelser said, describing how
many of those supporters feel “inspired and uplifted” by Palin.
Inspiring and uplifting the grassroots? Or “something very
ugly…in the hinterlands”? Two ways, perhaps, of describing the
same phenomenon.
