It's been said that Sarah Palin won't run for president in 2012 because she's not willing to endure all the things a presidential candidate has to go through -- interviews, debates, and so on. Well, we've seen in this election that there's a new right-wing technique for dealing with would-be interviewers: you just don't talk to any media figure who'll give you a hard time. Palin pioneered this. Now all sorts of right-wingers practice it.
Republicans like Daniel Webster, Rand Paul, and Jan Brewer all have refused to debate their opponents. Joe Miller refuses to talk to the media about his past. The Palin Petulance is paying dividends. She made it perfectly acceptable to trash the Village and refuse to talk to them, because they are "elitists". For a group of people who prided themselves on "guiding America" through the intricacies of political calculus, their chief qualification, years of Beltway ass-kissing passed off as wisdom, became a liability.
Now the Tea Party is priding itself on calling them out, the plan of course is to micromanage any and all appearances to be 100% friendly to the candidate. Why spin "who won the debate" after the fact when you can refuse the debate and declare victory because you don't need to put up with the "lamestream media's gotcha rules" to get your message across at all, thanks to FOX.
So, you'll see a FOX news GOP candidate debate or two when the 2012 campaign gets underway in about, oh two weeks or so. But whoever wins the presidential primary for the Republicans, there's a good chance that they'll never debate Obama. Ever. If it's Palin, you can count on there not being a single debate.
There's a chance that this could backfire, with the Village role of debate referee in serious jeopardy. They could viciously turn on Palin as a result. On the other hand, I'm sure Palin will say that the Village is doing that anyway, no matter what they actually say.
The final arbiter of spin will be Sarah Palin. Expect a host of other Republicans to refuse to talk to anyone other than FOX over the next two years.
They simply don't have to.
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2 comments:
This might be a winning strategy for Republican primaries, but I don't think it's helping Republicans in general elections. Fox News may be the most popular cable news channel, but their audience is relatively small.
How can preaching exclusively to the choir reach the people that have to be reached to win a general election? It might have some limited success in a throw-the-bums-out cycle like this one, where a ham sandwich could prevail against an unpopular incumbent in some districts.
But could someone running for president get away with it? I don't think so. There's the Commission for Presidential Debates for one thing. And a candidate who tried such a strategy could be very effectively painted as a coward.
Something tells me at most, GOP Presidential Candidate Palin would countenance at most, one debate.
And she'll get away with it. Hundreds of billions of campaign dollars on her as the new empty vessel to pour neo-con Tea Party bullshit into her empty head says she will.
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