The secret to her success: neither the left nor the right can get enough of her.
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This excerpt from Going Rouge: Sarah Palin-An American Nightmare appears in the November 30, 2009 issue of The Nation.
...she somberly raised the decision to move the "In God We Trust" motto to the edge of the presidential dollar coin. "Who calls a shot like that?" she said, insinuatingly. Actually, George W. Bush did. It was an embarrassing gaffe that also neatly captures the key elements of Palinism: fact-free conspiracy, hollow patriotism and public religiosity--the very coins of Republican populist rage.
Consider the role Palin played in the "death panel" hysteria. The source was Betsy McCaughey.... But it was Palin who popularized the term on Facebook. "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide.... Such a system is downright evil." Palin put a face on its supposed victims (her baby, Trig), contrived the expression "death panel" (linking it directly to Obama), raised the specter of euthanasia in the service of a state-run economy.
Palin's power lies not in her capacity to write legislation or win national elections but in her ability to torpedo the democratic process.
In the Palin universe, her unwed pregnant teenage daughter, Bristol, is somehow a poster child for abstinence-only education. An aggressive advocate for opening up oil reserves to drilling, she labels herself pro-environment, a stance exemplified by her love of shooting animals or her husband's hobby of racing snowmobiles across the tundra.
The secret to her success: neither the left nor the right can get enough of her.
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