Our political Quote of the Day comes from Salon’s Joan Walsh who, in a piece on Sarah Palin’s star rising again among conservatives, notes Palin’s return to Fox News and what it means:
Palin’s return to Fox shows that Roger Ailes knows the GOP can’t win back the White House in 2016, so he may as well focus on consolidating his audience, and keeping them comfortable as they watch the further decline of what Bill O’Reilly called “the white establishment” that was vanquished by Barack Obama. “I have great confidence in her and am pleased that she will once again add her commentary to our programming,” Ailes said. “I hope she continues to speak her mind.”
Palin’s re-entry into the Fox News commentator line-up and her rising star also signal another thing: Republican rebranding will not happen for those who had hoped for a GOP that sought to enlarge its tent and engage in real dialogue, versus zingers, snarky sound bites and over-the-top comments about political foes and groups not in the GOP coalition.
Which means a)the GOP will continue to do well in holding onto the House and b)the GOP will have its work cut it for it in winning the Oval Office (but Democrats can do some of that work for them by poor management of the White House, inadequate response to crises, and by Democrats doing that they often do best in some tough elections — staying home because they don’t like parts of their party’s platform, their party’s candidate or because they feel demoralized).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.