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Seth Cotlar
@sethcotlar.bsky.social
Teaches US History at Willamette Univ. Working on a book about the long history of the US Right. sethcotlar.substack.com/
16.1k followers2.3k following10k posts
SCsethcotlar.bsky.social

In 2009 Rich also associated Palin with the narrative of "mainstream media is my enemy and is out to get me." The Fox News "don't trust the liberal media" line was old hat by that point, but hadn't been hammered quite as aggressively and shamelessly by top-of-the-ticket candidates (Agnew excepted).

Nowhere is the power of resentment to trump reason more flagrantly illustrated than in the incessant complaint by Palin and her troops that she is victimized by a double standard in the "mainstream media." In truth, the commentators at ABC, NBC and CNN - often the same ones who judged Michelle Obama a drag on Frank Rich Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times her husband - all tried to outdo each other in praise for Palin when she emerged at the Republican convention 10 months ago. Even now, the so-called mainstream media can grade Palin on a curve: at MSNBC's "Morning Joe" last week, Palin's self-proclaimed representation of the "real America" was accepted as a given, as if white rural America actually still was the nation's baseline.
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SCsethcotlar.bsky.social

In 2009, Rich predicted that if the GOP doubled down on Palin-esque politics it would be the death knell for the party. Interestingly, David Frum thought this too in 2009. I seem to remember similar things being said in 2015-16. And yet the party persists.

Were Palin actually to secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a fiasco for the G.O.P. akin to Goldwater 1964, as the most relentless conservative Palin critic, David Frum, has predicted. Or would it? No one thought Richard Nixon — a far less personable commodity than Palin - would come back either after his sour-grapes "last press conference" of 1962. But Democratic divisions and failures gave him his opportunity in 1968. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and a seemingly bottomless war in Afghanistan, you never know, as Palin likes to say, what doors might open.
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Seth Cotlar
@sethcotlar.bsky.social
Teaches US History at Willamette Univ. Working on a book about the long history of the US Right. sethcotlar.substack.com/
16.1k followers2.3k following10k posts
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