As said above, that doesn’t necessarily follow. And betting on Nixon going to China is like betting on Stalin being nice – I’m sure that it happens, but only rarely (remember that Nixon got his start as a red-baiter).

Hayworth is a solid debater and no neocon. He supported Duncan Hunter in 2008, liked Huckabee and I never heard him bash Ron Paul or make fun of him the way many other radio hosts did. The media here loathes Hayworth, and he would have a tough time winning the Senate seat IF he runs and beats McCain…but who cares. McCain is “moderate” on all the wrong issues, and is enthusiastic about all the worst aspects of Bush’s policies.

As for Palin, if she came here to campaign I don’t think it would make much difference. Palin seems to have a net negative effect these days. More and more people are realizing she’s an unreflective intellectual lightweight without capacitance.

Larison really killed this one. He has been on a roll lately.

I don’t think you can put Reagan in that class. When he did something moderate, like raise taxes, it wasn’t accepted because of any other posturing on Reagan’s part. It was accepted because the GOP and conservatism was still dominated by relatively reasonable people.

Mike

OTOH, it seems to me that you give the Palinites too much credit, and in an odd sort of way you give her too little with “Perhaps Palin could come up with some tortured rationale …” The emotional frenzy of her base is self-sustaining at this point (not clear how long that will last), and should she make some mavericky public Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the more establishment GOP, then the accolytes would swing right in line. (is there some CW singer or group particularly associated with Palin? I need to get an analogy with “Songs for John Doe”).

So in the end, what she represents is a third term for the GWB crowd.
She has not framed any vision for what America should be, no sense of what government should be in relation to the people. In the absense of any overarching vision or idea, there is only identity- and it is the identity of people who are seething with rage and fear and resentment. They are angry at immigrants, at some vaguely defined amorphous “elite”- not an economic Wall Street elite, but the elite of media, of Hollywood, the people who are irreligious, the college professors who smirk at the honest small town heartland Americans.
It really is a culture war, masked behind an economic facade; AIG fleecing the taxpayers generates only token hostillity on right wing Palin-supporting blogs, but ACORN filing false voter registration forms provokes near-apoplexy.

The legacies of George W Bush and Ronald Reagan are instructive. Some Republicans can adopt moderate positions without suffering much of a fallout, provided they perform the right culture poses and infuriate the right segments. At this point, an affection for Sarah Palin has become nothing more than a surrogate means of expressing contempt for the liberal intelligentsia.

Im not saying she can ostentatiously defend all establishment candidates from grassroots challengers, but just as only Nixon could go to china, only Palin has the capital to advocate moderation in this environment. Once the GOP base decides they like someone – i mean really like them – they will perform any acrobatics, however convoluted, to prolong their worship.