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Bad news for the Republican Party: its already D.O.A. blueprint for “rebranding” that was summarily rejected by conservative talkers and Tea Partiers, and hopes that Republicans won’t continue to spend their time going after other Republicans now seem more hopeless than ever. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a quintessentially political “celebrity” who nonetheless has the ability to influence GOPers and conservative entertainment media narratives, is now calling for the impeachment of President Barack Obama over the immigration issue. And she’s calling on conservatives to use support for impeachment a new litmus test to be applied to politicians — and that includes Republicans.
She made the announcement in a typically bumper-sticker, melodramatic, rhetorically excessive way in an exclusive on the conservative website Breitbart.com. Most of the media and blog reaction raises the issue of whether Palin can be taken seriously or not (she should be because she can set or feed a narrative and still has her supporters), but the most consequentially significant part of it is this:
It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.
Although its soooooooooooo easy to dismiss Palin as a has-been when it comes to a serious, thoughtful political figure, she was at the forefront of those joining with the Tea Party to bring down GOPers deemed not conservative enough or too RINO-ish. And she came away with some political scalps. She still has the big Fox News microphone where she can influence Fox News fans and get them to pressure their elected representatives, particularly Republicans. She still has those who adore her in the party’s base and in the conservative political entertainment media complex.
And she is still the living, breathing embodiment of the poor judgment of Arizona Sen. John McCain who selected her as his running mate — a decision McCain will likely defend until his dying day (but I predict it will eventually come out that he has big regrets for the divisive force he unleashed on his party and the serial polarizer he unleashed on the country).
Andrew Sullivan is on the same wavenlength as moi:
And so a gauntlet has been laid. A vote for the Republicans this November is a vote for the impeachment of Obama. Any Republican Senate candidate who does not back impeachment will now face growing Tea Party backlash. And every single Senator will now be asked if they support impeachment or not. That seems to me the import of Palin’s endorsement of the most radical action that can be taken against a sitting president. The November elections have just become a vote on the question of impeachment.
Are the Republicans aware of the implications of this? There are plenty of voters who might have voted Republican this fall who will hesitate if they think it means subjecting the country to the kind of spectacle we saw the last time a Democrat dared to win a second term in office. There are many African-American voters who might have sat out this election – but now will see the president beset by the same forces that tried to take down Bill Clinton and may well show up in force. There are, for that matter, many women voters who, before Hobby Lobby, might have felt apathetic this fall and may not now. What I’m suggesting is that, not for the first time, the Republican party’s most treacherous opponent … is the Republican party. And McCain’s Frankenstein leads the way!
Of the many analyses on her (expected) announcement, The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake has one of the best. Here’s a big chunk of it:
If a significant pro-impeachment portion of the conservative base does materialize — and that’s a big “if” — it will put Republican lawmakers in the unenviable position of responding to questions about whether they, too, agree with the idea of impeachment.
From there, there are three options:
1) Oppose impeachment and risk making yourself a target in the 2016 primary
2) Try to offer a non-response that doesn’t really support or oppose impeachment
3) Support impeachment and, while likely saving your own hide from becoming a target, exacerbate the problem with the larger Republican Party.
And here’s his analysis of why this is bad news for the GOP:
[I] it throws a sizable and unpredictable variable into what was already shaping up to be a good election year for Republicans. That same could be said for the Benghazi investigation (though that effort appears to have the support of the American people). The name of the game for the GOP right now is maintaining their edge and trying to win back the Senate. Everything else is noise.
Secondly, it lends credence to Democrats’ argument that Republicans are controlled by the extreme wing of their party. And to the extent that Democrats can make the 2014 election a referendum on the GOP’s conduct in Congress (see: government shutdown), it’s to their benefit.
Lastly, impeachment is a very difficult issue to press. Even in the late 1990s, when an American president had an affair in the White House and then lied about it, support for impeachment was still well shy of a majority — as low as 30 percent.
Mostly, it’d rally Democrats, independents who voted with the Democrats, and create a media narrative of these Republicans who just can’t keep themselves from trying to remove from office someone who bested them fair and square at the polls.
And, not insignificantly, it would underscore a feeling that many voters have who aren’t Republicans than when a Republican comes to office conservatives accept the GOPer in office as legitimate. But when it’s a Democrat, suddenly they find all kinds of reasons to paint him as illegitimate or needing to be removed.
None of this will matter, of course, to those who will press for Obama’s impeachment — and it’ll come as surely as the next over-the-top Rush Limbaugh comment, or as surely as MSNBC’s Rachael Maddow repeating a concept over and over and over and over five times reworded before she moves onto a new thought.
But it’d continue to brand the Republican Party as a party that needs to operate on rage and outrage and can’t focus on offering serious, affirmative ideas to the American public — positive alteranatives in detail to what Democrats have promised and in some case failed to delivery.
Will some press hard for impeachment?
You betcha.
SOME BLOG REACTION:
—Doug Mataconis:
Does Palin jumping on the impeachment bandwagon mean that it’s inevitably going to happen? Of course not, and it also doesn’t mean that the Republican leadership is definitely going to be pressured to act on this issue in the manner that Blake posits. However, when you start seeing people like Palin who have large followings on the right say things like this, even though it is quite obviously completely insane for reasons I don’t think I need to get into here, it does make one wonder. If Palin is joined by others, especially prominent conservatives like Mark Levin and others, then the pressure on the GOP to act could begin to increase, especially if the GOP captures the Senate in November. It’s completely insane, it bears no logical relationship to the facts on the ground, and unlike the Impeachment of Bill Clinton it would carry with it the potential to do real harm to the GOP’s political future. However under the right circumstances, and as Blake lays out, that’s exactly how it could play out. And, in some sense, the GOP will have Sarah Palin to thank for it if it does.
But now that she’s broken the seal, it will be interesting to see if competitive pressure builds on other pols—say, the ones who want to become Obama’s successor assuming he finishes his term—to follow her lead, or conversely, to repudiate it. If nothing else, this will now become the very first question from the floor at any vaguely spontaneous GOP gathering for the foreseeable future.
So how do you see this playing out? Will Ted Cruz or Rand Paul try to corner the wingnut market (and guarantee themselves a big applause line every time they speak to a conservative audience) by echoing Palin? Is this the opportunity for someone (Bush? Rubio? Kasich? Walker?) to win cheap applause from the “Republican Establishment” and the MSM by allowing as how Obama should be allowed to complete the term to which he was elected? Will “yes to shrieking denunciations but no to impeachment” become the new “center” of GOP opinion?
It’s silly to put the country through an ordeal where the outcome is foreordained, especially when the political fallout is unpredictable and potentially damaging to the GOP. That argument becomes (slightly) harder to make, though, if Republicans retake the Senate this fall. Impeachment would still be futile: You need two-thirds of the Senate to vote for conviction to remove the president from office, and there’s no way no how no chance the GOP will have anything close to 67 seats in January. But maybe that won’t appease impeachment supporters. If you’ve got a majority, they might say, why not at least try? Even if they fail (and they will), there’ll at least be some moral sanction in reaching a bare majority to convict. It could even be that Obama will feel chastened by the rebuke and act less aggressively in 2015-16. I’m … pretty sure that wouldn’t happen, but that’ll be the argument.
Needless to say, although the prime target here is Obama, the secondary target is Mitch McConnell and the looming Senate Republican majority. I remember writing somewhere last year after the shutdown that impeachment could become the new “defund” effort — doomed to futility but sufficiently pure in intent and supported by a Republican with sufficiently high standing among grassroots conservatives that to oppose it for logistical reasons is to fail an ideological litmus test…..
….By the way, don’t be so sure there’d be a majority in favor of convicting Obama even if Republicans retake the Senate. The usual centrist suspects — Collins, Murkowski, Kirk, et al. — will be chilly to the idea. And now that Thad Cochran owes his reelection to black Democrats in Mississippi, it’s hard to believe he’d turn around and vote to remove the first black president. To even have a bare majority willing to convict, I suspect you’d need at least 57 or so seats in GOP hands next year, which is a tall order for November. But again, this is mainly about constructing a true conservative/RINO litmus test, so if a bunch of RINOs end up voting to acquit, no biggie. That’ll simply be taken as proof of the underlying point that the Senate needs more tea partiers. Speaking of which, your exit question: Does John McCain agree with his former running mate that the president should be impeached? Inquiring minds want to know!
—The Daily Banter offers The 9 Most Ridiculous Things From Sarah Palin’s “Impeach Obama” Article
—CNN’s Political Ticker:
Palin, who still remains popular and influential with tea party activists and others on the right, is hardly the first conservative to accuse the President of unlawful activity.
But her pointed call for Obama’s impeachment adds a high-profile voice to the crowd of Republicans pushing for congressional action over what they view as an overreach of executive authority.
Her cookie-cutter wisdom, little bits and phrases taken from movement fortune cookies and stirred together into an incongruous word mulch, is precisely what the wider movement wants to hear; that much, and no more. If she says impeach, it is because the conservative zeitgeist has gotten its collective undies in a bunch over the word impeach, and if she stumbles over the reasons it is because not one person in her audience truly cares what the reasons might be. If she is considered a wise owl of the movement, it is because all the people clapping are that much dumber. Paul Ryan is the Budget Wonk, because he once wrote some numbers down. They didn’t add up, but by God he wrote them. John McCain is the serious foreign policy wonk, because John McCain demands we alternately bomb or arm every last faction he hears about, which are the only two serious foreign policies that the entire vast sweep of conservative think tanks have ever been able to come up with. The CPAC crowd and the NRA crowd are entirely indistinguishable because both define “freedom” to be something you get by taking it from the other guy.
And Sarah Palin is their prophet because the job was open, and the cash is good, and because it is a requirement of the movement that you dispense a soylent mush of symbols and shibboleths and angry exclamation points to your audience without ever saying anything that would be too specific, thus causing conflict, or too moderate, thus implying weakness, or giving a general flying damn about the law, or recent history, or what you said last week. She is their prophet because she is perfect at this job. She represents the id that has overtaken the party and swallowed it up whole, the id that has given us the Scott Walkers and the Chris McDaniels and the All of Texas. She is the painted clown at the entrance to the great conservative roller coaster, the one that grins and points out a finger and says you must be no smarter than this to enter.
Another day, another opportunity for Sarah Palin to call for President Obama’s impeachment. In an ‘exclusive’ article for Breitbart.com, the former half-term Governor of Alaska wrote that the President needs to be removed from office due to the crisis at the border involving tens of thousands of refugees, most of them children, who are trying to escape violent conditions in Central America. In typical Palin fashion, she is unable to point to any law the President has broken that should lead to his removal from office. Instead, the article is nothing but a barfed-out word salad meant to energize angry racists.
A cross-section Tweets:
2b able 2 identify source of random nutzo rants? RT @debb2098: Why the hell does ANYONE listen to ANYTHING Sarah Palin has to say? #LibCrib
— Joanie MacPhee (@JoanieGentian) July 9, 2014
Sarah Palin Pens Deranged Word Salad Calling For Obama’s Impeachment Over Republican Border Crisis http://t.co/POTMmwO9iO
— ramaxe (@ramaxe1965) July 9, 2014
The case Palin makes against Obama is based on willfully ignored facts. http://t.co/M2J8BCqh8T
— Jonathan Capehart (@CapehartJ) July 9, 2014
Sarah Palin called for Obama's impeachment, then called her publicist and asked what impeachment means and if it involves throwing fruit.
— Sarah Wood (@OpinionatedDem) July 9, 2014
Sarah Palin calls for Obama's impeachment, also says she'd like to be a host on The View, "because they always need a dumb one"
— The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) July 8, 2014
I STAND WITH SARAH PALIN. IT'S TIME TO IMPEACH OBAMA AND I BELIEVE IMPEACH IS FRENCH FOR DEPORT. #tcot
— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) July 8, 2014
Palin calling for impeachment is like Curly running his eyes into Moe's fingers. You knew it was coming but it's still fun.
— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) July 8, 2014
PALIN: IMPEACH HIM! http://t.co/zx91z2anmW
— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) July 8, 2014
Any Democrat who DOES NOT show up to vote this November: IS VOTING FOR THE IMPEACHMENT OF THE PRESIDENT: http://t.co/Wa2NlXFZvX
— Malcolm Johnson (@admiralmpj) July 8, 2014
Last week, I tweeted, 'Some liberals and Democrats really seem to hope Republicans will go crazy and try to impeach Obama.'
— Byron York (@ByronYork) July 8, 2014
At Least Nixon had the Dignity to Resign ? pic.twitter.com/Mh32K7A0jy #ImpeachObama
— TheTeaParty.net (@TheTeaParty_net) July 8, 2014
GO HERE to follow more reaction from blogs.
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.