David Hoppe

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:: Sarah Palin's book tour

And the ghost of George Wallace

By David Hoppe

Good news for Noblesville: Sarah Palin will be visiting the Barnes & Noble bookstore there at some point between Nov. 17 and Dec. 10 as part of her Going Rogue book tour. Going Rogue is the title of Palin's new book; it's also a style the ex-Gov of Alaska has decided suits the persona she has crafted for herself since John McCain dimwittedly plucked her from obscurity in the Great White North during the summer of '08.

In keeping with this persona, Her Roguishness has decided to avoid the big cities that authors typically visit when hawking their wares. There will be no Chicago, L.A. or New York City for Palin. Instead, she will kick off her road trip in Grand Rapids and include stops in Roanoke, Ft. Bragg, Orlando and Albuquerque. The Chambers of Commerce in Columbus and Cincinnati must be wondering whether to feel grateful or insulted, because both those Ohio cities managed to make Pailn's list.

"She feels like this is where her fans are," said HarperCollins spokeswoman Tina Andreadis, "and Harper feels this is where she'll sell the most books."

Persuasion has never been Palin's point. She's a lightning rod that gives voice to the resentments and frustrations of an endlessly embattled class of white people who see their God-given right to American entitlement going down the drain. They knew what Palin was talking about when she referred to "the real America" during a stop in North Carolina during the 2008 campaign - an America, that is, outside the reach of big cities, ethnic and religious diversity, and immigrants, illegal or otherwise.

Now that Palin can forget about winning votes in favor of selling something, she's free to focus on those pockets of the real America where she can move product. Hello, Noblesville!

Palin, of course, is one of the most prominent actors - diva class -- in the on-going melodrama better known as The Struggle For the Soul of the Republican Party. This struggle has been portrayed as a battle between Republican pragmatists who fear their party can't win on a national scale without the support of a large number of independent voters, and hard core right wingers who believe the party's failings stem from a failure to hew to ideological fundamentalism. Thus the columnist Jonah Goldberg can write that the problem with American conservatism in this country is that it hasn't been given a real chance to work yet.

Yikes.

Many Republicans would like to think that all their party needs are a few fresh faces who can find the proper balance between Palin's fevered populism and the cooler temperatures favored by corporate autocrats. But in their eagerness to embrace Palin's charisma, these Republicans ignore the specter that follows Palin to their party. It's the ghost of George Wallace.

Wallace was the governor who symbolically stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama to block the enrollment of black students there in 1963. He used the principle of states' rights to fight federal efforts at desegregation, saying: "The President [John F. Kennedy] wants us to surrender this state to Martin Luther King and his group of pro-Communists."

Wallace ran in the Democratic presidential primaries in 1964 and managed to attract enough votes (almost 20 percent in Indiana) to believe he had the makings of a national base. In 1968, when he ran as a third party candidate on a law and order ticket, he altered the country's political dynamics in a way that affects our politics to this day.

As Theodore H. White observed in his book, The Making of the President 1968, for over a century, all major American third parties rose from the left. Wallace was different. In dated English, White wrote that what he called "white workingmen" in America had grown alienated and found "no expression of their problems.in the public dialogue of America." White went on to note that the white working class had been abandoned by "liberal voices" and "intellectual sponsors" who spoke up for them during the Great Depression. Wallace, wrote White, "demonstrated that of all those alienated with the set of American government, perhaps the largest group were the white workingmen of America; and in so demonstrating, George Wallace uncovered a reality that will be of concern for years."

Wallace's campaign ran on resentment, the feeling that "liberals, intellectuals and long-hairs have run this country for too long." He won five southern states in 1968's election, ending the Democratic party's hold on that region. But almost half his votes came from the north and west. Republicans were quick to capitalize on this phenomenon. Nixon developed a southern strategy that has made the south a republican bastion ever since.

The Republican party absorbed George Wallace's constituency in the 1970s, never imagining that this cohort would someday come to define the party's agenda. But that's at the core of the party's current identity crisis. George Wallace may be gone, but you can see his shadow in the outline of Sarah Palin's book tour.