The Aged P

I know, I know it’s National Review and Erika Johnsen over at Hot Air will say it’s all part of Romney’s 378 point plan , yes siree, so stay pumped and keep on clicking onto us and don’t get annoyed by that irritating ad that always pops up…….

This Politico story is almost too depressing to contemplate:
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It gets worse, so be sure to read the whole thing to make sure you ruin your week off right.
Meanwhile, it’s a good thing for Romney that absolutely nothing of any interest has been going on in the world this past week, and steady-as-he-goes Mitt can keep reminding the American public, when he bothers to emerge from the foxhole into which the media has driven him, that President Obama’s a nice guy, but by golly he’s in over his head, and gee whiz I saved the Olympics and, dadgummit, a CFO is just what this country needs right now. (Although even that’s not working any more.)

Not to worry..almost certainly within the next two days the Death Star will appear, Romney will step out of his pseudo plastic skin and hurl a rain of thunderbolts onto Obama’s head. The President will crumble and Mitt will shoot into a 20 point lead – it must be true because the people at Hot Air keep on saying that.

Yes folks it will need fire, passion and a clear vision of what the candidate stands for to get those supporters crawling barelegged over broken glass to get out the vote – so thank goodness Sarah Palin wasn’t nominated. If she had been the GOP candidate Obama would be leading in the polls by now….

Mark Mardell is so excited about Obama giving his support for gay marriage. A “courageous act” on this “hot button issue” chirps the Beeb’s man in Washington as he religiously obeys the BBC handbook on brown-nosing Barack Obama at very possible opportunity.

But many Democrats would rather their man led, than followed.
Just because the timing of this announcement was unplanned and unwanted doesn’t mean it was undebated within the White House.
They may have seen little alternative, but also recognise that President Obama gets some kudos for being the first president to support gay marriage.

You see the strategy – yet another OBL type “tough call” for the President with a spine of titanium channelled via Mardell who is clearly consolidating the BBC as the unofficial UK arm of the White House re-election campaign.

Mardell is obviously flagging this up as a gift to Obama’s base. What he conveniently forgets to mention is that the reason why it came out at all was because his “base” appears to be withering away leaving him vulnerable on his left flank. Moreover Mardell’s identification of this as a “hot button issue” is open to question. He quotes poll data but can it be really true that across America this is the number one question in factory, office or store rather than gas prices, Obamacare costs or entitlements?

Perhaps the waspish John Nolte from Breitbart.com hit the nail on the head when he tweeted

John Nolte ‏@NolteNC
Did Obama’s cynical same-sex marriage move energize his base more than our’s? Doubt it. And by “his base” I of course mean the media.

The slavish adulation of the American media elite and their refusal to ask any questions about his background, experience or questionable Chicago acquaintances was a major factor in allowing this man to rise without trace to the highest office in the land. They remain a major bastion of his support – and, to these people in New York, Washington and Hollywood, gay issues are at the top of the agenda.

But to the rest of America, maybe not so much….with the exception, naturally, of Mark Mardell and the folk at the BBC….

cross posted at Biased BBC

Todd Palin has written a letter to American conservatives spelling out why he supports Newt Gingrich for President. It’s short, sweet and to the point and tells us as much about the man who wrote it as it does about Newt.

I don’t know about you but having this man by my side would mean more to me than 50.000 endorsements from politicians, media pundits or assorted social conservative pontificators.

Remember what Mark Burnett, ex Para and TV producer said?

Todd is like Captain America. This guy, this guy is super tough. He can actually do it all.

On the other hand there is always David Frum….

Top American conservative blogger Ryan Streeter, quoting Peter Wehner and Kimberley Strassel, demands that Sarah Palin immediately announce that she will not be entering the primary race for the GOP nomination. She must do this, he says, so that an electable conservative can take on and beat Obama in 2012.

The election is only 17 months away and the polls are clear, according to Streeter. 37% of Republicans and GOP leaning independents go negative on Palin.

These 37% are not inside-the-beltway types but drawn from the voting populace across the country. And surely they get their Palin not through some lamestream media outlet, but most likely through Fox News and many of the same web sites as Palin’s supporters.

Jonathan Jones reaches a similar conclusion for his UK readers.

These people clearly have an inside track into the minds of US voters. They are also telling us that polls taken in the summer of the year before a presidential election are a foolproof predictor of the final outcome.

They are the experts, very close to the brightest and best of the political, academic and media elite, so they must be right.

After all, see what was happening in June 2007.

The 26 polls taken in May and June show yet a different picture. Giuliani still leads, but with only 26 percent; McCain, with 17 percent, is barely ahead of Thompson, at 15 percent, and trails Thompson in polls taken since Memorial Day. Romney stays at 10 percent
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Democrats are more confident this year, with some reason. Polls show that voters prefer a generic Democrat to a generic Republican by solid margins. And Democrats seem pretty settled in their preferences for candidates. Hillary Clinton averaged 34 percent in December-January polls, 36 percent in February, 34 percent in April and 35 percent in May-June.
Barack Obama, at 18 percent in December-January, rose to 23 percent in February-March, then flatlined — 25 percent in April, 24 percent in May-June. John Edwards was at 12 percent in December-January, 13 percent in February-March, 16 percent in April and 13 percent in May-June.

Whoops……

Your President has come and gone. His State visit is over. Naturally the UK media went out of its way to be positive because
1. In 2008 they took their cue from your MSM and accepted the myth without expending any effort on shoe leather so it would be embarrassing to ‘fess up
2. He is a left wing politician and therefore our media and academic elite keep any criticism muted
3. Generally, like you Americans, though we find foreigners a little odd, we are polite to them

State visits are peculiar creatures because, unlike the day to day give, take and insult of raw international politics they are also heavy with symbolism – flags, banquets, parades and visits to the host nation’s icons.

When I was a callow youth I sneered at symbols as empty gewgaws designed to hypnotise the ignorant, like the cheap coloured beads offered to primitive tribal chieftains in the 19th century for a thousand square miles of arid landscape packed with enough mineral wealth to create a hundred western millionaires.

But as I grew through the stages of life and began to learn from experience rather than through text books I realised that symbols were emotional shorthand for a common cultural inheritance that stretches back to ancestors long unknown. It made me also realise that we as individuals can only be short term leaseholders of that inheritance which we must inevitably pass on to generations yet unborn.

So we treat them with respect.

And we treat the symbols of our friends with respect.

And before we venture into a friendly foreign land we do a little homework on those symbols – especially if we hold an office in our own country with its own symbolic constellation. Indeed most leaders of nations have diplomatic advisers and heads of protocol waiting on hand to guide them through what can be a an intimidating maze of expectations.

President Obama failed that test when he attended the banquet given in his honour by our Queen. He stumbled over the toast, did not even attempt to pretend he wasn’t using a cue card and had to be instructed in good manners by his hostess

Earlier that day he visited Westminster Abbey where England’s kings and queens have always been crowned and where, just a few weeks ago, millions throughout the world had witnessed the strange mixture of solemnity and joy that characterised the royal wedding. Here also lies the tomb of The Unknown Warrior, the First World War soldier who represents the sacrifice of all those other British service men and women who have no known resting place and on whose grave was placed Kate Middleton’s wedding posy after the pomp and ceremony of her marriage.

Mrs Obama, who had changed her outfit to a purple dress and blue coat, said: “It’s a pleasure to be here again”, to which her husband added: “She gets to come to all the fun places”, then “so nice to see you, how are you?”

He was there to lay a wreath on the Unknown Warrior’s grave. It is not a fun place. It is a place of dark and brooding majesty, a place where hard men are proud to shed tears of respect and remembrance for those who gave their blood and bone so that we may live outside war and terror.

He was then asked to sign the Abbey’s Visitors Book, a simple but meaningful act of symbolic recognition. He had to seek advice for the date and then got the year wrong.

But maybe the 2008 gaffe is understandable seeing that he already appears to be in full campaign mode. Perhaps he felt that Congressman Clyburn would be more impressed by a visit to a multi ethnic school in South London rather than meeting up with the brightest and best of Britain’s young scientists. After all we are contantly being told that Obama has a towering intellect – so what can he learn from a handful of test tube shakers….

Excused as “slips” these blunders appear to be manifestations of his real world view. That traditions and symbols and threads towards the past are the cobwebbed residue of meaningless images irrelevant to the vision of a socially engineered reconstruction of society where there is a place for everyone and everyone is in their place and woe betide any village Hampden who refuses to conform.

As for protocol – I guess the only protocol needed for any young politician on the make in Chicago at the turn of the century was to find the most suitable part of Mayor Daley’s posterior to kiss in order to get further up the ladder.

A sad day for both our lands.

In her icy lair she waits while perplexed scribblers try to convince themselves that beside a distant northern lake there is no shadow roaming free beyond the parameters of their prescribed calculus and ingrained ritualistic incantations.

But it is only pretence because in reality they are ever glancing over their shoulders for although they publicly voice disdain they are privately nervous of someone who refuses to engage within the rules of their vaunted choreography

That is why in several of the pieces that emerged in the aftershock of Huckabee’s withdrawal the name of Sarah Palin was either left out or allowed but a cursory nod. Of course they might merely have been falling in line behind the grand panjandrum of prognostication George Will who returned from his visit to the Delphic Oracle and proclaimed that in 2012 the GOP nominee lacing up armour to enter the lists against Obama would either be Daniels or Pawlenty.

Time was, of course, when George’s diktat would have been enough to seal the deal. Pundits and their media masters controlled the slip road to the information highway and the most that any ordinary Jane or Joe could do was to splutter over their morning cornflakes and shout abuse at the cat in order to let off steam.

But now the GWs of the world are left preaching to an empty chapel as the world and his wife are surfing along the information highway themselves.

Poor George – how frustrating it must be to have your once booming voice reduced to a constricted squeak.

With all the other candidates and pseudo candidates there is blather about exploratory committees, raising money, hiring consultants and strategists, testing the waters in Iowa, fluttering their eyelids at an assortment of governors, politicians and celebrities and, above all, dancing to the musical pipes of the self proclaimed kings and queens of the media.

The result? Allahpundit goes orgasmic.

But, if she chooses to enter the GOP race, it is possible that Sarah Palin could decide to dance to her own tune.

Exploratory committee? A prayer, chat with Todd and the family and a couple of spiders who live in the Palin garage = job done!

Raising money? As one Hot Air comment pitched it

If Palin enters the fray, everything changes. Romney might be able to generate truckloads of money, but Palin can make it rain from the sky on demand.

Consultants/strategists? Here’s Matthew Continetti

Palin’s entry would completely scramble the presidential campaign. She’s quite simply the most famous Republican woman in the world, with shrewd instincts, charisma, passionate supporters, and no fear

Why would someone like that need a consultant? Why would anybody with an ounce of savvy need a consultant?

A consultant is a person who borrows your watch and then charges you to tell you what time it is

Iowa? Once every four years thousands of “consultants/strategists” parachute into Iowa alongside legions of media hacks and their support staff. For several weeks this international assortment of scribblers and voiceovers pretends to take an interest in ethanol subsidies and the Waterloo Black Hawks. Once the caucuses are over they all rush back to their big city apartments and forget about Iowa until the year of the next Olympics – including the candidates who have been pimping themselves to Iowans for several months.

But in Iowa, just as there is in every state, below the first and second tier of GOP apparatchiks who love to sound off to any out of state hack with a mike or a blackberry, there are probably more than a thousand lower level enthusiasts who will gladly crawl barelegged over fifty miles of broken glass to work for Palin.

As for endorsements, she is probably the only political figure in America who walks alone. If they come, then fine. But after the heavy lifting she did for so many candidates in 2010 the lack of reciprocity after the Gifford shooting was quite an eye opener. But then the mathematics of the GOP political equation became clearer. The Republican Party needs Sarah Palin. But perhaps she does not need the Republican Party.

Indeed, if she decides to stand she gave Sean Hannity a clue of how she might position herself towards the end of their recent interview. (10.00-10.55 in the clip)

When he asked her about her views on the current speculation of who might be throwing their hat into the ring she became rather dismissive of such antics so early on in the game. She used the phrase “both sides of the aisle”, talked of “fighting for Family, Faith and Freedom” and, the money quote, declared she was not a real fan of politicians.

This is trademark Palin. Though she wears the Republican label she really puts herself forward as being above party politics. This is how she won and governed in Alaska – and why she continued to be so unpopular with the official GOP establishment up there.

This is why the national GOP elite and their battalions of consultants, lobbyists and media drones loathe her as much as the liberal/left. Positioning oneself above the party disengages power from the cogwheel of the spoils system – the jobs for the boys, the waivers, the sweet government contracts, the backroom deals. The party structure feeds on this and for many it is the raison d’être for the whole mechanism of politics. She briefly broke that culture in Alaska and would do the same in Washington.

Quite a while ago, soon after the dust of 2008 had settled I wrote a comparison between Sarah Palin and the French leader Charles de Gaulle and I still stand by that.

As an Englishman I was always naturally suspicious of anything that de Gaulle did because I knew that he would never fail to place the interests of France above everything else. But I also admired him for it and yearned for the day when we might have such a leader (to my astonishment, in 1979 when the UK had sunk to its lowest depths, she came.)

De Gaulle was one of the most brilliant political operators in any modern democracy. But he achieved success by offering himself to the French people as an anti-politician, concerned only for the future of France.

De Gaulle was relatively unknown to the French people in 1940 but millions of them heard his broadcast from London at the moment of their deepest despair and in those few minutes he became the inspiration and hope for so many. Governor Palin walked onto the stage at the Republican Convention, electrified millions and stole their hearts forever with her grace, her honesty and her love of life sealing there and then a contract and covenant of support through fire and flood whatever may happen

I wrote that in March 2009 at a time when on both sides of the pond “those who know best” had her already shredded and dumped into the dustbin of history. But I had a sense that there were a lot of ordinary Americans who had sealed that contract and covenant – and I was right.

So now my American friends wait and wonder. The runes have been thrown but have yet to be read.

Who knows what the future holds….