The RNC has spent $150,000 at Nieman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue outfitting Sarah Palin for the campaign trail. Obviously, this looks terrible – it is terrible. We’re entering what looks to be a severe recession, people are losing their jobs and homes, and the RNC’s VP candidate, who ostentatiously touts herself as a representative of small-town values, burns through 3x the median U.S. annual family income in a matter of weeks on clothing and cosmetics. Republican honchos are apparently not pleased, either – the RNC might as well have given the money directly to the Obama campaign.
More interesting, though, are the ways this illustrates how faux the already-pretty-faux populism of the Republican Party has become, and how Palin’s candidacy so perfectly captures that evolution. Palin’s wardrobe malfunction harks back in various ways to Richard Nixon’s 1952 “Checkers” speech – and it makes Nixon’s cynical exploitation of cultural resentments look heartfelt.
In the midst of the 1952 presidential race, VP candidate Nixon was accused of receiving $18,000 in illegal campaign contributions, and there were rumblings he might be dropped from the ticket. He gave a dramatic national address defending himself – an early example of a direct campaign appeal to the public via TV. “Checkers” was the name of a cocker spaniel a supporter had given the Nixons, the one contribution Nixon admitted to receiving. But the core of the speech was a recounting of the Nixon familiy’s modest family finances: his $20,000 mortgage on a $41,000 house, $4,000 in life insurance, 1950 Oldsmobile, “no stocks and bonds of any type,” a $4,000 bank loan at 4 percent interest, a $3,500 loan from Nixon’s parents, a $500 loan on the life insurance policy:
Well, that’s about it. That’s what we have. And that’s what we owe. It isn’t very much. But Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we have got is honestly ours. I should say this, that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she would look good in anything.
The speech saved Nixon’s career. And it contains the palpable anger toward “elites” – with their inconvenient, reality-based rules – that has been a constant theme in Republican politics ever since. But Nixon’s anger was at least authentic, rooted as it was in his life experience. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, may sincerely resent the heck out of “elites,” but her attitude has no basis in any real kind of disadvantage. Palin and her husband are quite well-off:
The Palins’ assets seem enviable: a half-million-dollar home on a lake with a float-plane at the dock, two vacation retreats, commercial-fishing rights worth an estimated $50,000 or more and an income last year of at least $230,000. That compares to a median income of $64,333 for Alaskans and $50,740 for Americans in 2007, according to the Census Bureau.
For decades, the Republican Party has managed to ally the interests of big business with those of its base by exploiting Palin’s brand of cultural resentment. But the “culture card” seems increasingly out of tune with current economic realities. It’s also increasingly detached from people’s actual life experience. Nixon earned his resentments the hard way. For post-baby boomers like Palin, it’s mainly an inheritance, a learned set of attitudes and useful political symbols. If anything, this seems to have conferred upon the Palins a perverse sense of entitlement. Which is why there’s something essentially artificial about Sarah Palin, and why her wardrobe choices matter as much as Pat Nixon’s cloth coat did in 1952.
