Sarah Palin has presidential history in her corner

[Jeffersons Ghost]

Sarah Palin is Richard Nixon, Minus the Smarts
Tuesday November 24, 2009 1:40 p.m
by Mark Green

Sarah Palin’s rhetoric against the East and West Coast elites--and liberal media--appeals to aggrieved "ordinary Americans," in her phrase. Sounds like "middle Americans" and "the silent majority." Sarah Palin meet Richard Nixon. So alike. But not...

As Palin selectively tours the country with her talking points and book–one and the same–she’s anything but subtle. Taking off from her famous campaign references to "real Americans" and Obama "palling around with terrorists," she's an exemplar of the politics of resentment, of attempting the political math of addition by division:

"I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fat resume that’s based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles." (Palin on O’Reilly Factor, 11/20/09).

This is little more than Nixon Redux. He started it in the 1950s, when he famously went after Gov. Adlai Stevenson for his “Ph.D. from Dean Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment” Then in his years in the wilderness from ’63-’68 and as president in ’69-’73, Nixon stuck closely to the “positive polarization” strategy honed by young speechwriter Pat Buchanan. He again and again slyly salted the wound of "us versus them" opened up by Vietnam and the sixties culture wars. “It is my belief that the seeds of civil anarchy would never have taken root in this country had they not been nurtured by scores of respectable Americans: public officials, educators, clergymen, and civil rights leaders as well.”


http://airamerica.com/politics/11-24-2009/sarah-palin-richard-nixon-minus-smarts/