Sarah Palin: The GOP's Very Own Suicide Bomber

The curtness and vertical separation of the New York Time's reporting on Gov. Sarah Palin's (are we still calling it a "news conference"? OK) news conference on Thursday said it all:

"She was asked what had changed.

"'The campaign is over,' she said."

And that was that. Only grudgingly did the Times then concede that the presser was an arbitrarily abbreviated affair -- "Granted, the question-and-answer session lasted only four minutes, and for only four questions" -- but the paper of record's opinion had been duly recorded: The old Gray Lady was not amused.

It then swiftly compressed its coverage of Palin's subsequent speech to her fellow governors by noting, almost exclusively: "yes, she spoke of Joe the Plumber"; she "tried to play down her celebrity (even after a week in which she was featured in interviews on NBC, Fox News and CNN)"; and, in conclusion, she blurted the utterly empty, "Let us build our case with actions, not just with words."

The Times' coverage was, I thought, one of brilliant offense taken and therefore noteworthy.

Here is this nuisance of a Northern blatherskite whom we're covering only out of a competitive sense of unavoidable obligation, the paper was declaring, and not out of any duty to actually inform -- because there's not really much to say, except that she runs her mouth a lot, a seemingly involuntary condition in which words, formulated in a vacuum, bounce briefly around in her pretty head and then tumble forth.

Elsewhere in the Times, however, was a conversation with fully functioning, sentient beings of the Republican persuasion -- who, for Democrats wistfully imagining a Rovesque majority of some permanence, are the real voices to be feared.

Rather than babbling on and on "just with words" of strikingly transparent self-promotion, Rep. Peter King, for instance, reflected on just one of the recent campaign's bloody shots in the foot: "Everything is collapsing around us and we find a small earmark in a Western state and say the country is falling apart because of that?" Its piercing recoil seems to have awakened quite a few in the GOP neighborhood: "We are marginalizing ourselves," said King in admirable self-assessment, if not brutal resentment.

Or, there was Sen. Lamar Alexander, who acknowledged that the GOP had just missed the entire point of politics: "What people were listening for in this election is, what are you going to do about my pocketbook, my health insurance, my electric bill." You don't say -- which of course was the party's whole problem: it didn't.

Or, Sen. Susan Collins, another moderate who just "cruised" to [reelection] victory" not by extolling unlicensed, ideological plumbers and eviscerating education reformers from the Amb. Walter Annenberg School of Domestic Terrorism, but by "working with Democrats" on meat-and-potato(e) "issues like port security, health care and postal reform."

"What doesn’t work is drawing a harsh ideological line in the sand," said the Maine-stream senator. "The people in my state are sick and tired of the hyper-partisanship and the gridlock that has blocked action on so many important issues that affect their lives directly. The message from this campaign is a rebellion against excessive partisanship."

But Gov. Palin, bless her mulish little heart, just doesn't get it.

The Politico, which did deign to actually cover her Florida doings in some detail, reported with savage amusement that in her news conference she said "[We] want to reach out to the new administration and offer our assistance, our support," yet then in her speech defined "We" as those who "are not the many [governors] voting yea or nay or present."

My guess: the cringes were audible.

"And, in language that could have been taken directly out of her or McCain’s stump speech, Palin reminded her audience that Congress is run by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Rep. Barney Frank -- to a person, the same three stock liberal villains Republicans invoked in the final weeks of the campaign."

The Politico summarized her oratorical re-debut as "a less than auspicious return to the Lower 48."

She just doesn't get it. And I, for one, pray that this "prominent leader in the GOP and perhaps the party’s instant-front-runner for the 2012 presidential race" -- remember, it's the paleolithic, death-to-modernity base, in the primaries, that decides; not the party's more responsible leaders -- continues not to get it.

I've written before of the small and big "d" democratic need for a responsible GOP. However I hasten to add and paraphrase St. Augustine's entreaty: "Lord, give us a real opposition, but not too soon."