Sarah Palin's Poetic Something Or Other

American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.

~ CHRISTINE O'DONNELL

I have found myself in recent months semi-subconsciously posting Sarah Palin soap opera episodes on Saturdays because they're low traffic days in the blogosphere and I have had a difficult time taking the Killa from Wasilla seriously. But when someone like David Frum says that she's running for president, it's time to clench the old sphincter and take notice. Hence a Monday post.

Frum, who was banished from the Republican temple earlier this year because he refused to bend to the purity tests of Palin and other right-wingers, writes that if Palin is indeed the frontrunner for the 2012 nomination, as many pundits have been saying, then "that 1964 feeling is settling upon the GOP."

That, of course, was the election year President Johnson kicked Barry Goldwater's ass from Maine to Montana, taking 61 percent of the popular vote and 486 of the 538 Electoral College votes. Goldwater, a conservative who by today's GOP standards would be a flaming liberal, took only five Deep South states and his native Arizona.

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There is a poetic something or another in a Palin presidential run, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is although I do know it has to do with the fact that Palin is the trailblazer for a new kind of candidate.

That candidate is always disparaging of government, has a platform that is a crazy quit of grievances, doesn't have a clue about the real-world consequences of what she proposes, is disparaging of smart people, people of color and people who are not heterosexual or share their ideological purity, and treats the news media as if it was an invasion-of-privacy machine and not a way to connect with voters.

There are, of course, already several Palin knockoffs. These include Sharron Angle, who seemed a sure bet to win Harry Reid's Senate seat in Nevada but looks to go down in flames; Christine O'Donnell, who thumped a career GOP moderate in Delaware, thereby handing a sure Republican gain in the Senate to the Democrats; and New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who all but guarantees that Democrat Andrew Cuomo will win.

The reasons for the likely loses are the same reason that Palin, should she get the nomination, will crash and burn:

Yes, voters are in an angry mood these days, but they're not going to vote for candidates like Angel, O'Donnell and Paladino in sufficient numbers because they're only good at pouring gasoline on the national fire, not finding ways to put it out.