‘Mama Grizzly’ shows her claws in U.S. primary races
August 26, 2010 – 1:15 pm
REUTERS/Brian Snyder
A cutout of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin wears a "NOBAMA 2010" T-shirt in a shop window display in Edgartown, Massachusetts. The first family is spending their summer vacation on the island of Martha's Vineyard.
.Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Sarah Palin had a very good day on Tuesday in the U.S. primaries.
No, the ex-Alaska governor/ex-Republican vice-presidential nominee wasn’t running for office herself. But the candidates she threw her weight behind all did well, often pulling off upsets.
Apart from Palin’s endorsement, the other thing they had in common was their extreme conservatism — more the Tea Party end of the spectrum, than the old Big Tent GOP.
At the very least, the results mean party bigwigs are going to have to take Palin seriously, rather than dismissing her as a right-wing whacko with big hair. She’s got influence and that’s something they understand.
As Joe Miller, her pick in Alaska, made clear, her support was crucial in helping him overcome the sitting Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski. “I’m absolutely certain that was pivotal,” he told the Anchorage Daily News. As for the kingmaker herself, she crowed to the Fox Business Network she was “over the moon” at his success.
Writing in The Huffington Post, Chris Weigant says the results showed only one thing with clarity.
“Sarah Palin is definitely going to run for president. She’s been testing out her clout in the primaries, and whether her clout wins some races or loses some races, the big honking important thing (to her, at any rate) is that everybody in the media is raptly paying attention.
Major news sites not only have their traditional red/blue maps of the individual races to see the state of the polling, most of them have also now added a ‘Sarah Palin pick record’ map as well.
If you think about that for a minute, it really is kind of stunning. Nobody else in politics, that I can remember, has ever gotten the media to examine their ‘picks’ with such microscopic detail — Democrat or Republican.
But aside from the elevated media profile all of this gives to Palin, it also means that any of Sarah’s picks (be they ‘Mama Grizzlies’ or not) who actually win their general election will be in Palin’s debt on the ‘political backscratching’ scale of things. This is called building a base of support within the party. And building such a base is a crucial step towards gaining the party’s presidential nomination next time around.”
For Chris Cillizza, who blogs at The Washington Post’s The Fix,
“The stunning news that developed over night in Alaska … reveals the depth of anti-incumbent sentiment in the country, the power of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (and the Tea Party movement) and the perils of prognostication in low turnout intraparty fights … Absentees won’t start to be counted for another six days and there are clearly enough outstanding votes for Murkowski to stage a comeback. If she was to lose, however, Murkowski would be the third Senator to fall in a party re-nomination contest this year.
How did we get here?
Miller’s candidacy drew considerable national attention when he first entered the race thanks to Palin who, along with her husband, Todd, threw the weight of her endorsement behind the little known attorney.”
At NBC, Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro and Ali Weinberg discern a surge to the right.
“One of the more profound changes in American politics is how much more conservative the nominees inside the Republican Party have become. The Tea Party and Jim DeMint are now closer to the representing the centre of the GOP, not George W. Bush and his ‘compassionate conservatism.’ This has presented longtime Republican moderates/centrists with a dilemma of what to do, and we’ve seen three different responses so far, which were on display in some form this past Tuesday. One path was demonstrated by John McCain, who decided to shift his positions (on immigration, Supreme Court judges) just enough to the right. He easily won his primary on Tuesday. A second response was exemplified by Lisa Murkowski, who essentially stayed as she was … And a third trail was blazed by Charlie Crist, who decided to leave his party.”
Palin’s biggest scalp was that of Murkowski. Reporting from Anchorage, The Associated Press’s Becky Bohrer explains the long-running rivalry between the Palins and the Murkowskis.
“As Senator Lisa Murkowski watched the shocking election returns come into her election headquarters on primary night, she became painfully aware of two powerful forces in American politics in 2010: anti-government rage and Sarah Palin …
The race is the latest chapter in a long-running political saga between Palin and the Murkowski family dating back to 2002, when then-governor Frank Murkowski appointed his daughter to the Senate and bypassed the up-and-coming Palin for the position. Palin routed Frank Murkowski four years later in the primary on the way to her becoming governor, and now she may have helped derail the career of his daughter.
The women have occasionally clashed since then on the issue of health-care reform and Palin’s decision to resign as governor last summer. They have denied any bad blood, but that didn’t stop the potshots in this latest race, including attacks on Murkowski on health care that the senator said were horribly misleading and false.”
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Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/08/26/mama-grizzly-shows-her-claws-in-u-s-primary-races/#ixzz0xltAvzXp