The Limited Impact of Sarah Palin

The Observer asks a pertinent question about Sarah Palin:

But can she ever win the White House, or will she destroy the American right?

The answer is, of course, no to both. Palin can't win the White House. She simply isn't a credible candidate. She managed to do massive damage to the McCain campaign, has several skeletons half in her closet and half draped across every media outlet in the USA and - perhaps most crucially - she resigned as Governor of Alaska for no good reason. You can imagine what every opponent she ever comes across in the race to be Republican nominee and then President will ask: "so, former Governor Palin, if elected President, what guarantees do the American people have that you will actually serve out your full term as President? Because, y'know..." It is the sort of thing that hobbles any campaign. When you then add in the fact that the candidate would be the moronic, winking Sarah Palin then you have a campaign that is destined to sink without trace. To the very bottom of the Mariana Trench.

But Palin also won't be able to sink the American Right with any presidential bid. Hell, she probably can't destroy the Christian Coalition in the US. The American Right is so much more than one over-hyped and hyperactive former governor. In fact, I'd imagine many members of the American Right have very little time for Palin, and would love to see her fail in a Presidential bid and be forced from her embarrassingly high-profile on the US political stage.

Even if Palin does win the Republican nomination in 2012, her defeat the the General Election will not destroy the Republican party. It has put up dud candidates before - Bob Dole and Barry Goldwater spring to mind. And the Republican party also spent nearly 20 years out of the White House during the Roosevelt/Truman administrations that straddled the Second World War. Hell, the Republican party even managed to survive having the only President to resign in disgrace as a member. In the resolutely two party system of the US that has existed for centuries, it is going to take far more than Sarah Palin to destroy the Republican. Just as the utterly useless Iain Duncan Smith failed to bury the Tories in this country.

Sarah Palin is just one politician. Yes, she is a politician in over her head and hyped well beyond her talents. However, she remains just one politician. The party she is member of, and the American Right as a whole, is more than just Sarah Palin. They existed before she burst onto the national stage at the behest of John McCain, and they will exist after she had gone from that national stage. The choice facing the Republicans in the run-up to 2012 is whether they want to squander that election with Palin as their candidate, or whether they want to find a credible candidate who actually has a chance of beating Obama instead.