The Palin divide

last updated 8 January 2015

The Republican Party is fighting a "serious civil war," said Jason Linkins in The Huffington Post, and it's all over Sarah Palin. All those moderates who don't support the party's very conservative vice-presidential candidate are going to be "excommunicated," in the words of one conservative bigwig. Some heavy hitters in the conservative movement—including David Brooks, George Will, Colin Powell—have already been "thrown under the bus."

The thing the Palin critics have in common, said Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard, is that not one of them actually knows her. The people who have worked closely with her in Alaska say she's smart and capable, even if she has no more foreign policy experience than other governors, such as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, once did. "My advice is ignore the critics."

The Weekly Standard has proclaimed Palin to be a "tribune of the people," said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, and her critics to be "liberal media" snobs. But it's the coterie of big-city neoconservative ideologues claiming Palin is "one with the people" who have it wrong—most Americans "find her out of her depth and unfathomable."

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There's a reason for that kind of Palin bashing "by Beltway insiders—conservative and liberal alike," said Pam Meister in Pajamas Media. "She's not one of them and has made it clear that she doesn't want to be." Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer hit the nail on the head when he said the conservatives jumping ship just think McCain-Palin is going to lose and they want to make sure they get invited to Barack Obama's state dinners.