To activist Republicans and conservatives, she is a heroine. She is Joan of Arc. ~Jay Nordlinger

These people are aware of how things worked out for Joan of Arc, aren’t they?  It might be considered a tremendous compliment to be compared to such a martyr (even if it is a French one in this case), but I’m pretty sure that politicians do not aspire to being likened to those who were captured and burned at the stake by their enemies.

For the better part of the last year and a half I have been baffled by the obsession with earmarks that has possessed the Republican leadership, conservative pundits and John McCain in particular.  To listen to these people tell it, earmarks are the legislative equivalent of devil-spawn–they are to be targeted for destruction, and they are the reason, perhaps the only reason, why the GOP lost control of Congress.  What is frightening is that I think some of them may believe this.  So, naturally, when McCain chose his soul running mate, a hatred for earmark spending had to be an important part of that person’s record, and this is what McCain and Palin have insisted on telling everyone about her.  There is just one small problem:

For much of his long career in Washington, John McCain has been throwing darts at the special spending system known as earmarking, through which powerful members of Congress can deliver federal cash for pet projects back home with little or no public scrutiny. He’s even gone so far as to publish “pork lists” detailing these financial favors.

Three times in recent years, McCain’s catalogs of “objectionable” spending have included earmarks for this small Alaska town, requested by its mayor at the time — Sarah Palin.

Reliance on federal funds is probably most acute in Western states, which are often among the largest net recipients of federal funding, so it is not surprising that a mayor and governor in a large Western state would look to Congress for appropriations for various projects.  McCain’s hostility to earmarking is typical of a consummate insider and long-time Washington pol who enjoys cultivating an image as a reformer by adopting boutique, process issues as his personal crusades.  In practice, this conflicts rather sharply with the demands of actual constituents, who still operate under the pleasant illusion that the federal government works for them and that it should occasionally return the money that it has confiscated.  In McCain’s eyes, this is wasteful spending, because it does not have anything to do with destroying parts of other countries, since we know that McCain would never be in favor of anything truly wasteful. 

No doubt there are many examples of earmarking that is wasteful and unnecessary, and it would be ideal if Washington had neither the power nor the means to dole out this money, but it would be refreshing if all of these “reformers” could work up half as much anger about the drain on the Treasury caused by unnecessary and unnecessarily prolonged wars as they do about small-scale grants for local infrastructure and transportation.

What has surprised me a bit about Palin’s speech tonight was how many foreign policy remarks there were, and what has been so disappointing, albeit grimly predictable, was how lamely she made the alarmist claims about Russia and other petro-states, as if regimes utterly dependent on their oil revenues to keep their creaking, mismanaged economies running are in any position to engage in embargoes.  Her remarks about the BTC pipeline are worth pondering, since they echo so much of the hysterical commentary of the last few weeks, and they should cause us to look more closely at what was going on with the BTC pipeline last month.  Hardly a publication prone to Russophilia, The Economist reported a few weeks ago that the BTC pipeline was shut down in mid-August not by the Russian campaign in Georgia, but instead by PKK terrorism in Turkey.  Contrary to the propaganda that was being regularly offered as news reporting during the early days of the campaign, the pipeline inside Georgia was never bombed and, so far as I have been able to determine, was never even targeted.  One of the central things that “everyone” claimed to know about the reason for the Russian campaign was basically wrong, and Sarah Palin just made this erroneous claim a significant part of her demonstration of her foreign policy acumen.

This quote from Mark DeMoss (via Andrew), who worked (largely unsuccessfully) on Romney’s evangelical outreach during the primaries, got me to thinking why the response to Palin has been as strong as it has been:

Too many evangelicals and religious conservative are too preoccupied with values and faith and pay no attention to competence. We don’t apply this approach to anything else in life, including choosing a pastor.” Imagine, he said, if a church was searching for a pastor and the leadership was brought a candidate with great values but little experience. “They’ve been a pastor for two years at a church with 150 people but he shares our values, so we hired him to be pastor of our 5,000 person church? It wouldn’t happen! We don’t say, ‘He shares our values, so let’s hire him.’ That’s absurd. Yet we apply that to choosing presidents. It blows my mind.

A key part of understanding the enthusiastic conservative response to Palin, particularly among evangelical Christian leaders, is remembering that this was not how the movement and evangelical leadersresponded to Huckabee when he was running for President.  Many movement activists and evangelical leaders insisted on being “pragmatic” and rallied rather half-heartedly around Romney on the dubious basis that he shared their values, but more important than this was the claim that he, unlike his rivals, was both competent and met all of the criteria for each major conservative bloc.  Despite Huckabee’s manifestly greater popularity in many early primary contests, and despite his far better conservative, particularly social conservative, record and his more extensive executive experience, practically every pundit, activist and party official you could find was absolutely certain that Huckabee was beyond the pale and would cause the GOP to implode if nominated.  Even though Huckabee was the stronger non-McCain candidate, and stopping McCain had been a top priority for all of these leaders, they opted for the safe and phony Romney.  

In the wake of Huckabee’s second-place finish to McCain, whom most of the Romneyite Christians loathed, prominent Romney backers expressed regret for not having seized the opportunity by backing Huckabee–one of their own.  The selection of Palin has provided an opportunity to make up to some extent for ignoring and even attacking Huckabee, which is one of the reasons why there has been such a powerful identification with her.  Having rejected Huckabee in the strongest terms and declared him to be unacceptable as a VP selection, movement and evangelical leaders are now rallying to someone who is “one of us” after having contorted themselves with their strained rationalizations for supporting Romney.  Having helped to sink a representative of one of the largest constituencies of the GOP, they must be relieved that they have a chance to undo what some have come to see as their colossal blunder.  Had they responded in this way eight months ago after Huckabee’s victory in Iowa, they would not now need a Palin to offset McCain’s flaws and provide a reason for them to be excited about the ticket.  The Palin enthusiasm is an expression of the desperation felt by those who are looking for a second chance.

She [Palin] spent Tuesday in her hotel suite meeting with campaign aides and working on her speech. She had private sessions with Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman and members of the pro-Israel group AIPAC, said people familiar with her schedule. An AIPAC spokesman said Gov. Palin told its members she would “work to expand and deepen the strategic partnership between the U.S. and Israel.” ~The Wall Street Journal

There is nothing terribly surprising about this, since there has already been some anecdotal evidence of Palin’s “pro-Israel” attitudes, and it is pretty much inconceivable that a major party nominee would express any other sort of views.  This item should remind antiwar conservatives and non-interventionists on the right that on some of the most important policies of this government, the same policies on which McCain is horribly wrong, Gov. Palin will have zero influence and will instead be instructed on what to say by McCain’s interventionist advisors and allies.  Meanwhile, there will be little or no controversy over anything said or done in her church related to evangelism of Jews, just as Hagee was given a free pass for his more bizarre statements because he runs CUFI.  If Lieberman considers Hagee to be like Moses, one can only imagine the gushing praise he will be able to work up in the future for a woman named Sarah.

While there would seem to be no obvious connection between the two groups, it occurs to me that the same ultimately baseless hope that has motivated certain Obama supporters is driving anti-McCain conservatives to cheer on Sarah Palin.  Like some antiwar and pro-J Street progressives waxing rhapsodic about the potential of Obama to revolutionize foreign policy, some dissident conservatives are grasping at any shred of evidence of Palin’s supposed ties to various parties and past campaigns that are very close to our own views in an expectation that someone sympathetic might be in a major leadership position.  The evidence that Palin had any of the associations that we very much would like to believe she had has been fairly weak, if not quite as weak as the evidence cited to show that Obama favored even-handedness over Israel-Palestine, and all of the claims of AIP membership and Buchanan links have been strenuously denied by the campaign and declared to be “smears.”  One has to assume that Palin either accepts that it is a “smear” to associate her with the AIP and Buchanan, among others, or she is unable to stop the campaign from making such a characterization.  Either way, it does not exactly inspire confidence that Gov. Palin will make a dent in the way a McCain administration is run. 

More to the point, to the extent that these claims are true they will compel her to be even more of a party-line follower than she was going to be anyway, just as rumors to the effect that Obama was sympathetic to Palestinians necessitated his endorsement of a fairly hard “pro-Israel” line.  Instead of having influence and flexibility to change policies in the desired direction, the mere impression of sympathy based on a few bits of anecdotal evidence constrains the candidates to be publicly less sympathetic to the respective causes to which they have been loosely linked.

I don’t know which I find more bizarre–that HuffPo liberals are attempting to make an unremarkable request at a church to pray for our authorities and armed forces into a call for messianic warfare or the idea that Palin is supposedly being treated as a “saint” by conservatives.  The first is more a function of basic illiteracy when it comes to understanding the language used by Christians, evangelical or otherwise, while the other is more of an overreaction driven by Andrew’s continued misunderstanding of the nature of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. 

What is striking is how much Palin critics and admirers have wanted to focus on her religious views, when she seems to have shown relatively more libertarian instincts in her brief time in state government.  One important source of the Palin enthusiasm is the conviction that she is basically a normal, if not exactly average, American, which is to say that she is admired as much for her ordinariness as for her accomplishments.  In other words, she is being revered, if that is the right word, because she is not elite, not a saint of either the spiritual or political world, but because it is exceptionally easy for the average conservative to identify with her as a regular, non-elite person.  That she holds executive power in the (fourth) least-populated state in the country makes her the one of the least elite, most marginal members of the political class, and her very recent entry into that class makes even this seem unimportant. 

As right as it is to complain that the choice was driven almost entirely by gender identity politics, the more significant kind of identity politics at work here is middle-class family identity politics or, more precisely, lifestyle politics.  Church-going and socially conservative views are basic parts of this way of life, or to put it another way Palin’s religiosity is a function of her ordinary family life.  Unlike the phony populism of Bush or Fred Thompson, Palin represents something very close to genuine cultural populism because she is not so very far removed from the average American experience.  To the extent that she is removed from that experience, this is a result of living in a very different sort of state.  Therefore, to fear a “pure emotional-religious wave that redefines the GOP for ever as a purely religious party” because of the strong identification with Palin is to fail to understand that religion is playing at best a supporting, secondary role in the identification with Palin. 

Above all, as I said earlier this week, the enthusiasm derives from the feeling that conservatives compelled McCain to back down from picking Lieberman and choose “one of us” instead.  Enthusiasm for Palin is as great as it is because it is the sort of thing that many conservatives assumed McCain would never do, and it is as powerful as it has been because the contempt for McCain among many movement conservatives runs so deep.  In yielding to movement demands, McCain submitted himself to people whom he has made a career of spurning.  While it is commonplace to say that the Palin choice reinforced his “maverick” and “gambler” reputation, which is still partly true insofar as the choice is politically risky in the general election, the choice really represented a moment when McCain surrendered to what he considered to be political necessity.

If not, you should start with this small symposium on the Sarah Palin pick, where I make a slightly off-the-wall reading of Palin’s effect on the Republican ticket.

Something that I have heard about Sarah Palin in the last five days that has improved my opinion of her is that she was apparently once a member of the Alaska Independence Party.  Naturally, I have no objections to state secessionist movements or to any state movement that would consider secession as a legitimate option, and I would count it as one of Palin’s virtues if she was such a decentralist and states’ rights conservative that she endorsed the party’s platform in its entirety.  However, I assume that she was drawn to the party more because it was a right-populist alternative to the GOP than out of any strong concern to break away from the U.S.  It does seem inconceivable that McCain would have chosen her had he known about any ties to such a party, since the party exists to protest against the very central government McCain has spent most of his life serving. 

At the same time, the McCain campaign’s insistence that Palin had nothing to do with the Independence Party tells me all that constitutionalists and decentralists should need to know about how this is going to go.  Regardless of Palin’s ties to the Alaska party or to any conservative populist campaigns in the past, the GOP is going to try to make Palin respectable by Washington standards by dismissing and insulting as many people on the right as they can.  There is certainly not going to be any effort to embrace Buchananites and Constitution Party members (including yours truly) to make any past Palin associations seem more “mainstream.”  That being said, do Obama supporters really want to start an argument about respective connections to political fringes?