The Palin Lesson

Republicans seemed to have learned from most of the Bush failures in the policy regard-namely the failure of amnesty, No Child Left Behind, compassionate conservatism big goverment and the like (save foreign policy). But Republicans seem, though i pray otherwise, to have not learned perhaps the most important and seemingly the most glaring lesson/failure of the Bush years which lays not in the arena of policy but of image. Bush gave the GOP a image that made it a laughing stock for nearly a decade on the Daily Show and Colbert Report and in a myraid of SNL sketches.

We all know what that image is, it's of the provincial hillybilly, the uncultured fratboy, and an assortment of other things we find banal and embarrsing about red state America.
Anyone under a certain age knows this sterotype of the GOP well which in part exsplains why a impulsive senile war hero in his 70's would make the election losing mistake of picking a female version of Bush to be his running mate in the most recent election. Sara Palin makes one cringe in exactly the way Bush did for eight years and she does so by the same means: her jumbled sentences, her displays of bone crushing idiocy, her especially annoying regional accent. As Bush jr. reminded one of a zealous Texan frat boy who might be able to run a baseball team but never a nation, Sara Palin reminds one not of a potential Vice President but of your long lost soccer mom Aunt from the suburbs who possess the hugs of a sweet heart but not the mind of anyone who should be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office.

It should have been quite clear to any Republican that Palin would not only hurt McCain's campaign but that worse her nomination would reinforce the worst sterotypes of the GOP. She said to Americans that the Republican Party doesn't give a damn about competence or intellect. I hope Palin has ruined herself already beyond the point of serious consideration for 2012 or any other potential role in the GOP's future but I'm not sure her recent PR follies come as a (silent) relief to my fellow travelers in the GOP and beyond Sara it isn't clear if the GOP realizes the imperative that the Republican nominee in 2012 be not just, not-Bush, but anti-Bush, not just not dumb but undeniably intellegent, persuasive, informed, cultured, etc.