Truly a bridge to nowhere

Reading a lot of the commentary on Palin it has really struck me how she has tried to work from George W. Bush's playbook in terms of public image and the ways they appeal to the base. Bush was the Aww-Shucks Evangelical just working on his ranch in Texas like any other man. Don't forget the overly done Texas accent.

Palin is trying to tap into that vein of resentment that the corp base of the GOP has thrived on since Nixon. The thing is though, Nixon, Reagan, Bush - they were all playing to that base but they were not from that base. Sarah Palin isn't just some typical politcian playing the old tunes about the Liberal Media and Liberal Elites in a folksy cadence. At her core Sarah Palin is truly a part of the base of the GOP.

There are local and state candidates and office holders as conservative as Palin is and just as unqualified as Palin is in every state. From a national political stand point these are useful foot soldiers but you're not really interested in letting them hog the national spotlight. The GOP establishment is pretty structurally sound, you earn your stripes over periods of decades to rise up in the ranks. Palin represents the id of that base. They've finally gotten one of their own into a position of political power and prestige.

A commenter at Yglesias' place said it well,

By the way, I agree that the one comment element between Palin and Dubya, Reagan, and Nixon is that she capitalizes to some degree on the resentments that define the GOP base. In other words, she is very much a Southern Strategy candidate. The problem is that is ALL she is, which probably wouldn’t have been sufficient for any of her predecessors, and certainly isn’t sufficient going forward in light of shifting demographics and ideological trends among young people.