Palin fire: Alaska's governor inspires conservatives; but can she lead them?

THERE was a time not so very long ago--around the last week of August, in fact--when it was possible to imagine that Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, might be one of the least polarizing choices for vice president that John McCain could make.

Here was a politician with the conservative street cred to avoid the sort of intra-party civil war that would have greeted a McCain-Lieberman ticket, but whose ties to Bush Republicanism were weak enough that the media and the Democrats would have a tough time marrying her to the GOP's unpopular brand. Her chief political enemies were corrupt Alaska Republicans beloved of neither party; she had declined to endorse any candidate in the GOP primary; she had spoken favorably about Barack Obama's popularity in Alaska during a summer New Yorker interview; her record and signature issues--ethics reform, a natural-gas pipeline--were light-years removed from the debates that consumed the Beltway during the Bush administration. The most controversial aspect of her nomination would be her lack of national-security experience--but this disadvantage would be more conducive to fretful Sunday-talk-show chin-stroking than to media feeding frenzies.

In hindsight, this take on Palin's candidacy looks downright crazy. It misses the extent to which America's culture war really is about culture--and thus the way that Palin herself, independent of her record, public statements, or policy positions, is a hand grenade lobbed into what was shaping up to be a rather dull campaign season. Watching the Left and the mainstream media respond to Palin's nomination was like watching a bull react to a flapping scarlet bathrobe. They just couldn't help themselves. The whole Palin menage was just ... too ... much. Her five kids! Her five kids' names! Her Down syndrome baby! Her guns and snowmobiles ... sorry, make that snowmachines! Her evangelical church! And then, in the twist that launched a thousand bloviations ... her pregnant teenage daughter!

It was Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas all over again, except this time around the mommy wars were rolled into the mix, and the blogosphere was on hand to feed a steady stream of lies, innuendo, and half-truths to credulous news outlets and talking heads. Nothing encapsulated the hysteria quite like the moment when Mort Kondracke--Mort Kondracke!--greeted the news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy with an outburst about how this should persuade the poor girl's mother to rethink her (fictive, but never mind, it was too good to check) support for abstinence-only education. It was downhill from there: By the time Palin's big St. Paul debut rolled around, one half-expected Ted Kennedy to rise from the gallery thundering about the back-alley abortions and segregated lunch counters that we could expect in "Sarah Palin's America"--except this time the speech would be set to the percussion of a thousand Daily Kos diarists typing frantically in the background.

Yes, it was Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas all over again ... except that somebody rewrote the ending. Palin wasn't vanquished, like Bork, and she didn't limp to a victory that left her forever stereotyped by the chattering classes as an embittered troglodyte, as Justice Thomas did. Instead she gave a speech--and the world turned on a dime. Instead of the Borking of Sarah Palin, conservatives found themselves celebrating Palinmania '08, with much of the press, however temporarily, cheering along.

While pondering exactly how this happened, conservatives should be honest with themselves about The Speech, which was good but not all that good--not Reagan good, by any stretch, and arguably not even "Barack Obama at the '04 Democratic Convention" good. Certainly there was nothing in the text or in Palin's delivery to justify the representative case of whiplash experienced by the Washington Post's Sally Quinn, who went from fretting about the Alaska governor's ability to put her country first while serving as a mother and a vice president to telling a national television audience that she had badly misjudged Palin, and regretted it--all in the space of just 24 hours, and after watching a single 45-minute speech. But then logic had little or nothing to do with what happened. In its effect on Quinn and countless others, Sarah Palin's address to the GOP convention was the equivalent of Toto's yanking back the curtain on Oz the Great and Terrible. The media mob looked daunting enough, but that was mainly smoke and mirrors; all it took for them to drop from Palin's throat to her feet was a quick wit, a happy-warrior attitude, an intuitive feel for the rhythms of public speaking, and a spine of steel underneath all the charm. Somewhere in the next life, no doubt, the Gipper was nodding approvingly; somewhere in this one, meanwhile, Robert Bork was probably wondering if he should have invested in rimless glasses and a razor before his confirmation hearings.

CONSERVATIVE ICON

Since that night in St. Paul, Sarah Palin has entered uncharted territory for a right-of-center politician. She's become the first conservative ever to benefit from a full-scale Borking and to emerge from the media gauntlet stronger than when she entered it. Within 48 hours of being picked as John McCain's running mate, it was clear that the governor would become an icon to conservatives, who fell instantly in love for the same identitarian reasons that drove the online Left around the bend: She embodies a right-wing archetype of the Real America in much the way that Barack Obama embodies a leftwing archetype of Multicultural Man. Conservatives then had their affection cemented by the ugliness of the media's "vetting" process. But most conservative icons since Reagan haven't become national icons: Only George W. Bush, floating on post-9/11 enthusiasm, achieved that lofty perch, and he just as quickly lost it. This is the opportunity that remains, for now, within Palin's grasp, should she have the wit and luck to seize it. Any Republican can polarize the country, but she might have the gift for positive polarization, which is a considerably rarer thing.

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Of course there's a sense in which this sort of analysis is running way ahead of events. As of this writing, Palin has spent less than three weeks on the national stage, and there may be gaffes beyond counting in her future or a gang of skeletons waiting to clatter out of Alaska's frosty closets.

But the primal bond she's forged with the conservative base, and the extent to which this bond seems to transcend the usual intra-movement divides, is a remarkable achievement regardless of what happens to the McCain-Palin ticket this fall. And should she come through the campaign in one piece, it's an achievement that bodes very well for her future in national politics. Alone among the current crop of prominent GOP politicians, she isn't on probation with the rank-and-file, and that affords her a freedom that no Republican since the post-9/11 Bush has enjoyed: the freedom to work toward a new conservative majority instead of just trying to prove her loyalty to the last one.

This is a great gift, given the party's present straits. David Brooks recently observed that "political parties usually reform in the wilderness. They suffer some crushing defeat, the old guard is discredited and the pain compels turnover and change." But today's Republican party, he noted, is trying to revamp and modernize after years in the majority without going into the wilderness--"with the old guard still around, and with a party base that still hasn't accepted the need to transform."

The strain of this task was evident throughout the primary season, in which a slew of interesting candidates, many of whom had the potential to re-brand the GOP in various ways, spent most of their time struggling to fit their records and personae into the same constrictive "Mr. Conservative" box. And it was evident at the convention itself, where those same candidates--the Romneys and Rudys and Huckabees--were assigned to preach to the choir rather than seek the conversion of whatever curious unbelievers might have happened to flick on CNN or Fox at 8:42 P.M. or so. The pathos of Romney, in particular--an immensely talented man whose "I'll be Reagan, if that's what you want!" campaign earned him the contempt of the media and the suspicion of swing voters without winning him the affections of the base--was a reminder of just how hard it is to be a politician in a party that needs to change but isn't ready to.

But Palin doesn't have to prove anything to the voters who raised their eyebrows at Romney and Huckabee, nodded politely along with Rudy and McCain, and pined for Fred Thompson to show a little belly-fire. She has been bound to right-wing America, and right-wing America to her, by the experience of that three-day Borking. And whether she's working out of Juneau or the Naval Observatory come January, she'll have the freedom to create a new conservative portfolio without constantly looking over her shoulder, worried about whether she's straying too far off the reservation and whether she's about to get an earful from the Right for deviationism. Identity politics can be constraining, but in the right circumstances it can be liberating as well--and the "she's one of us" factor may end up giving Sarah Palin more room to maneuver than any conservative leader since Reagan.

WHAT IS PALIN'S AGENDA?

If she wants it, that is. Part of Palin's appeal, in a conservative movement riven by factionalism, is that nobody knows exactly what she wants. She has been an active and effective governor, but Alaska isn't the nation by any stretch, and the right-of-center pragmatism that she applied to her home state's problems could take her in a variety of directions now that she has to grapple with a different and broader set of issues. It's possible to imagine her assuming a variety of political identities--libertarian, populist, and anything in between. But it's also possible to imagine her being entirely defined by her celebrity, never grappling seriously with policy substance in the way that the GOP desperately needs its leadership to do.

For the moment, her only agenda is John McCain's agenda, which is as it should be. But there are many aspects of the McCain agenda--especially that whole domestic-policy business--with which McCain himself is not eager to be bothered and where Palin, as a candidate and perhaps as a vice president, will have the opportunity to place her stamp.

How and where that stamp is placed--and whether it's placed at all--will go a long way toward determining whether Palin can transform her current post-Borking honeymoon into the kind of enduring appeal that transcends party lines and wins national elections. She'll be tempted to coast on her stunning popularity: The post-convention mania has demonstrated that conservatives love a star almost as much as liberals do, and I suspect that Palin will be able to turn out a crowd for years to come, whatever happens to her image among swing voters. And she'll be tempted, as well, to cede the shaping of her political identity to the army of consultants that's no doubt currently swarming around her, offering to educate her in the ways of Washington and provide ready-made answers to every question she faces. And if she does manage to strike out on her own, she may seek to remake herself as a foreign-policy maven, the better to confound the critics who expect her to fumble the distinction between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, or to start a shooting war with Russia over fishing rights in the Bering Strait.

Obviously, America needs a vice president who's up to speed on national security. But neither Palin's country nor her party needs another Republican politician who keeps changing the subject when the conversation turns to health care, or the environment, or education, or quality-of-life issues. What's needed instead is a right-wing Clinton--a politician with an eye for domestic innovation and an ability (which John McCain conspicuously lacks) to translate complicated policy proposals into language the average voter understands.

Whether Palin has this gift remains to be seen. But she should make it her business to find out--first, by making herself the mistress of McCain's domestic-policy agenda over the next two months; and then, should the ticket be defeated, by carving out a distinctive agenda of her own. There is no shortage of issues that would mesh well with her Sam's Club Republican persona--think family-friendly tax reform, restoration of our infrastructure, or an innovation-based approach to fighting climate change. But she needs to be bold enough to look beyond her talking points to champion ideas that separate her brand of right-wing politics from the exhausted conservatism that's watching the country slip slowly from its grip.

The danger for Palin is that the division of labor on display at the convention--where she played the attack dog and McCain, with evident discomfort, played the domestic-policy wonk--will persist until November, in which case she'll have missed an enormous opportunity to wed her symbolic working-class appeal to substance. And the more substance-free she seems, the more she'll end up vindicating her liberal critics, who already regard her candidacy the way conservatives regard Barack Obama's run for president--as an essentially unserious exercise, an embarrassing triumph of style over substance. We know that she has a great story, and that she gives a good speech, but the questions that have dogged Obama will be applied to her soon enough, whether in this election cycle or in the uncharted political future that awaits her beyond Election Day.

"What exactly is our opponent's plan?" Palin asked in St. Paul. "What does he actually seek to accomplish?" Those are questions she'll have to answer herself, soon enough, if she aspires to lead Republicans and not merely to be applauded by them.