The Palin-Schwarzenegger Smackdown
At the Daily Beast, Joe Mathews has an interesting take on the recent climate change dust-up between Sarah “Ions” Palin and Arnold Schwarzenegger: The Palin-Schwarzenegger Smackdown.
Palin seemed to see Schwarzenegger as an easy target, the sort of Republican In Name Only that her conservative partisans love to hate. But the Schwarzenegger vs. Palin comparison is not one that serves her well, not because of their differences but because of their similarities.
In a contest between celebrities, he wins both on style—he’s more famous and better at sound-bytes—and on substance.
This is why GOP regulars who want to marginalize Palin—and that should include any Republican interested in unifying the party and winning a national election—should beg Schwarzenegger to keep up his blasts at Palin.
A war of words would be good for the California governor too. For all his mistakes, Schwarzenegger has tried desperately to make the centrist compromises needed to govern. He has been defeated, again and again, by Palinist ideologues whose distrust of government has careened, in the words of the author Sam Tanenhaus, into a doctrine of “full-scale repudiation of governance itself.” Making life miserable for Palin, the hero of the anti-governance crowd, would be more than delicious payback. It would be a public service for someone so skilled at media warfare to stand up for the virtues of governance in the face of non-stop bullying from the populist right.
Frank says: