Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America

by John P. Avlon

  There are already signs of a demand for something different. In 2009, a Time magazine online poll found that the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart was the most trusted man in news.77 When self-professed “fake news” surpasses real news in terms of credibility, it can be counted as a serious protest vote against the status quo. Media manipulation by professional partisans on both sides has become so predictable that satire has emerged as the last best way to cut through the spin cycle. Viewers’ intelligence is respected even as they are entertained, and between laughs the civic backbone begins to straighten a bit because someone is calling “bullshit.” If humor can help rebalance politics by pointing out the absurdities of what passes for debate, it is preferable to the split scream or the echo chamber. It’s even better if the proponent punches both left and right as a matter of principle. More examples of independence might be what it takes for the news industry to be trusted again as the honest brokers of American politics.

  SARAH PALIN AND THE LIMBAUGH BRIGADES

  The morning after the 2008 election, David Kelly hung the American flag upside down outside his Colorado Springs home.

  “I felt our nation was in distress, going in the wrong direction,” he explained. “I was exercising my God-given, unalienable right as a citizen of this great nation to express myself. That flag in distress was telling me and my whole neighborhood that our nation is in distress and we must stand tall and turn the tide.”

  A week later, Kelly filed papers to form the Draft Sarah 2012 Committee.

  “Sarah Palin represents the silent majority of this nation, which I think scares the left and the liberal media,” the self-described Scotch-Irish American told me. “She’s everybody’s mom or sister or the girl next door. They can imagine themselves running into her at the supermarket and having casual conversation . . . She just invokes and embodies what conservative America’s all about: God and County.”

  Rarely has anyone gone from obscurity to obsession in America’s psyche faster than Sarah Palin.

  Her supporters feel a personal connection to the woman they see as a salt-of-the-earth supermom, a straight talking, pro-life, pro-gun icon—the face of conservative populism. Her detractors call her the Queen of the Wingnuts.

  Geraldine Ferraro, she ain’t. She’s been able to parlay a historic but losing vice presidential bid into the kind of devotion that leads supporters to sleep in parking lots to meet her, buy a million copies of her memoir in less than a month and push her into the front runner’s circle for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.

  Not bad for someone who was a small-town Alaskan mayor at the start of the decade and spent just thirty-two months governing America’s forty-ninth most populous state before quitting. But there’s a slight wrinkle in this conservative Cinderella story: Sixty-three percent of Americans have said they would “never” consider voting for her for president.1

  This stark enthusiasm gap reflects the deep disconnect between conservative populist true believers and the rest of the country. It is reinforced by the Wingnut media and their followers, who overflow small venues, turning them into amen corners. In this environment, there are no enemies on the right and no such thing as too extreme—the more outrageous a statement, the more it will be applauded. Narrow but intense support may be good for ratings. It may even be enough to take over a political party. But if it is defiantly uninterested in reaching out, can it lead it to national victory?

  When John McCain announced her as the surprise pick for VP in late August of ’08 Sarah Palin’s profile was very different. Instead of the most polarizing figure in American politics, she was the most popular governor in America, boasting an approval rating that had been as high as 93 percent in a state where Independents outnumber Republicans or Democrats. She had earned a reputation as a courageous reformer, taking on the corrupt Alaskan Republican political machine. Her most pronounced policy expertise was in the broadly popular area of energy independence, and she sounded themes designed to appeal to independent voters: “This is a moment when principles and political independence matter a lot more than just the party line.” She checked all the basic boxes when it came to the social conservative litmus tests, but they did not seem to define her. And no one was going to confuse her with Dick Cheney.

  Questions about her political ability evaporated after her nomination speech in Minneapolis—an instant classic written by Matthew Scully, a former Bush speechwriter and book-length defender of vegetarianism (an odd pairing with the newly famous moose hunter)—was rapturously received by the conservative crowd. Here was a formidable talent, able to smile while sliding in a rhetorical knife, the newest symbol of small-town values squaring off against the liberal elite—Spiro Agnew in a dress.

  But the combination of one of the least nationally known picks in history, paired with the oldest nominee in history, had reporters—and opposition researchers— furiously doing their due diligence into the woman who could have been one chicken bone away from the presidency. The Republican spin room seemed prepared.

  “The media doesn’t understand getting up at 3 a.m. to hunt a moose; they don’t understand eating a moose-burger,” 2 said Florida Representative Adam Putnam in an awkward attempt to pre-empt liberal media bias. It wasn’t the mooseburgers that would cause the trouble.

  Problems began when some of her more socially conservative policy positions were unearthed—like opposition to abortion even in the cases of rape and incest (a detail that had not been known by the McCain campaign senior policy staff). Then it came to light that her seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, unmarried and keeping the baby.

  This news had the unexpected effect of helping Sarah Palin hit the pro-life trifecta, with a special-needs baby (the governor had given birth to a son with Down syndrome four months before), a perfect pro-life record and an unmarried pregnant daughter carrying her child to term while in high school. If a Democratic nominee had a pregnant teenage daughter, reflexive family values attacks might have been deafening—this was the party that two decades before had pilloried Candice Bergen’s television character Murphy Brown for having a fictional child out of wedlock because it set a bad example for the nation. But now the same social conservative voices who weeks before had been tut-tutting over the teenage pregnancy of tween idol Jamie Lynn Spears found a bracing honesty and integrity in Bristol’s situation, evidence of a real American family that folks could relate to. (It should be remembered that the media feeding frenzy was stopped by none other than Barack Obama, who simply stated to reporters one disarming fact: “My mother had me when she was 18.”)

  Palin quickly became a lightning rod for the left. The netroots took their ideological opposition and added tabloid attacks that aimed at her family. Feminist icons like Gloria Steinem attacked her for representing the wrong kind of change. It was reminiscent of the anger directed at Clarence Thomas after the first President Bush tapped him to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Not just his qualifications for the office, but the legitimacy of his voice for African-Americans was at issue. Palin was the same kind of apostate—in this case, a traitor to her gender.

  All of which made her more beloved to conservatives. As long as all the social conservative and fiscal conservative litmus tests are met, they will not hesitate to rush to the defense of a fellow traveler who is under attack from the liberal media. It is both a sport and a pastime. And with Palin, they were defending a lady’s honor, which is always worth an extra dose of moral outrage.

  But the woman nicknamed “Sarah Barracuda” by her high school basketball team was no shrinking violet. She reveled in the traditional VP nominee attack-dog role, delivering most of the memorable sound bites from the GOP team: • “Our opponent is someone who sees America as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country. . . . This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America.”3

  • “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that
we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.”4

  • “Barack Obama calls it ‘spreading the wealth,’ Joe Biden calls higher taxes patriotic, but Joe the Plumber and Ed the Dairy Man, I believe that they think that it sounds more like socialism. . . . Friends, now is no time to experiment with socialism.”5

  They were more the tone of talk radio than someone on a presidential ticket, but that was the key to their resonance. Just as with a talk radio host hammering home a point, there was no such thing as too extreme: the more outrageous, the more memorable and therefore the more effective. Their accuracy or broader impact was unimportant, an elitist concern. These sound bites not only owned their own news cycle, they ended up metastasizing into the body politic.

  The more populist conservatives loved her, the more liberals loathed her. Tina Fey’s impersonation of her on Saturday Night Live often simply used Palin’s own words as a script. When she epically botched her interviews with Katie Couric, her combination of innate confidence with a disinterest in policy details caused critics to hear echoes of George W. Bush. Her fans saw Ronald Reagan.

  But some Reagan-era alumni of the conservative movement were starting to have their doubts. David Brooks pronounced her “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party. . . . Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices.”6 Kathleen Parker called on her to resign from the VP slot to “save McCain, her party, and the country she loves.”7 They weren’t the only ones: McCain staffers were starting to spew out their regrets in the press, accusing her of “playing for her own future” as a party leader and potential presidential candidate. Palin saw herself “as the beginning and end of all wisdom,” vented another.8

  No matter. Out in “real America,” Palin was the star on the circuit, drawing crowds that sometimes outnumbered the top of the ticket. She was relatable and relevant, a symbol of comforting change compelling almost spooky devotion. At a rally in Ohio, one teenage supporter offered a contrast between Obama and Palin: “He seems like a sheep, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing to be honest with you. And I believe Palin, she is filled with the Holy Spirit and I believe she will bring honesty and integrity to the White House.”9

  Sarah Palin wasn’t just polarizing the electorate, she was polarizing the Republican Party, driving a wedge between populists and centrists. Some hard-core conservatives who had long disliked McCain’s unpredictable independence—his co-authoring of legislation with Democrats like his friend and supporter Joe Lieberman—went to the polls because of Palin. “John McCain was not our guy,” explained David Kelly. “McCain is Republican in Name Only—too much of the moderate views of leaning towards the middle. . . . When I voted I had to hold my nose because had McCain not picked Sarah Palin I would not have voted for the Republican Party candidate personally.”

  For all her success at energizing the base, there was evidence Palin was losing more votes than she was attracting. By the end of October 2008, 59 percent of American voters believed that Sarah Palin was not ready for the job,10 and 47 percent of centrists said they were less likely to vote for McCain because of Palin’s presence on the ticket.11 And oddly, while she was supposed to attract women to the GOP, Palin was less popular with women than men.12

  Nonetheless, after the election, the Palin star was undimmed among the true believers. She didn’t attend the Conservative Political Action Committee conference in February ’09, but she was well represented. Buttons and bumper stickers saying, “Don’t blame me, I voted for Sarah” were pinned and plastered on unlikely surfaces, her face poked out of pamphlets and posters. Competing Draft Palin organizations were in attendance, including Team Sarah, whose Web site had rolled right over from supporting her in the ’08 campaign to priming for 2012. A look into the comments on their Web site revealed a combination of adulation (“Most people (like the media) who try to make others believe that Sara is dumb and stupid or inexperienced actually fear her because of her faith and goodness.”) and Obama Derangement Syndrome. One post caught my eye because of the fury it directed at someone conjured up as the anti-Palin, First Lady Michelle Obama: “I have never actually HATED anyone in politics before now. . . . She is stupid, mean, power hungry, manipulative, corrupt, essentially ignorant—a poster girl for Institutionalized Black Racism and Agression [sic], a take-no-prisoners warrior for Political Correctnes [sic] aka Socialist Realism and a racially driven Communist fellow traveller. Let her go run an African country. She doesn’t fit in here with the American People.”13

  Through the spring’s Tea Parties, Palin was in Alaska, but her absence made the heart grow fonder. For all the attempts of presidential hopefuls like Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich to ride that wave, Palin was the most popular by far, rivaling even Reagan for references on signs and T-shirts. She was becoming the conservative answer to Obama—a symbol of hope and change for conservatives.

  After abruptly resigning from office to “not retreat but reload,” Palin communicated to her masses via Facebook and Twitter (“I don’t have to go through the mainstream media . . . spinning my words”) firing off policy dispatches and personal updates while writing her multi-million dollar memoirs.

  Without any organized effort or op-eds, her post alleging Obama’s “death panels” single-handedly moved the summer’s health-care debate and drove the tone of the town halls. It was a compact Wingnut classic, combining self-referential patriotism with apocalyptic big government imagery and a threatened baby, to boot. “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”14

  Here again the talk radio model was proving its effectiveness—if you throw a bomb, people take notice. And when criticism came, it could be dismissed as just the liberal media knocking her again. Defenders would come. There would be no apologies, and Sarah’s army loved it that way.

  Palin’s support was deep but not broad. With approval ratings north of 80 percent among Republicans, her disapproval ratings are just as high among Democrats. And 58 percent of independents believed she did not understand “complex issues.” Given Palin’s increasingly public professions of her Christian faith on the political stage—and the news that she believed her nomination for vice president was “God’s Plan”—it’s perhaps not surprising that her strongest support comes from white evangelical protestants, regular churchgoers, and the self-described “very conservative.”

  But Palin is also hugely popular with the talk radio crowd, especially fans of Rush Limbaugh. Forty-eight percent of Limbaugh’s listeners say that Palin best represents Republican’s core values out of all likely party leaders in 2012 while 45 percent said they would vote for her in their state’s presidential primary.15

  As it turns out, the Birthers are also big fans—66 percent of those who believe that Barack Obama may not have been born in the United States say that Sarah Palin is their favorite out of the likely 2012 presidential pack.16 And when Palin subsequently was asked about Obama’s birth certificate on the Rusty Humphries radio show, she offered just enough encouragement to keep those home fires burning. “I think the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t know if I would have to bother to make it an issue, because I think enough members of the electorate still want answers.”17

  Sarah Palin fans are so eager for 2012 that they offer up vice presidential candidates on signs at rallies and on Web sites, reflecting their vision of a Wingnut dream team. A Palin-Beck ticket has been imagined, an outside-the-beltway celebrity duo selling a return to comm
on sense. After Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” at Obama during a Joint Session of Congress, Palin/Wilson 2012 signs popped up days later at the 9/12 rally.

  I asked Adam Brickley, the blogger who successfully started the push to get the McCain campaign to nominate Palin in 2008, what he made of this rush to pair Palin with some of the more angry and uncivil voices in the GOP. “Those people who are hard-core enough to carry a ‘You Lie!’ sign tend to like bluntness and straight talk and that’s what they get from Sarah Palin.”

  Bluntness and straight talk—no apologies. That’s a mantra fitting a Fox News contributor or a radio talk show host. And the big daddy of them all has nothing but good things to say about Sarah Palin: “This woman has far more patriotism and love of country and decency in her than Barack Obama could hope to have. This woman would be so much better leading this country than what we have now because we are being led into destruction. . . .We are being led by a man who’s got a chip on his shoulder for some reason about this country and doesn’t like it. She loves it.”18

  The Limbaugh Brigades

  Rush Limbaugh is the founder of the Wingnut feast. The political entertainer and professional polarizer graced the cover of Time magazine as the voice of conservative populism in the wake of the 1994 Republican revolution, and he’s been going strong ever since. A generation of conservatives had grown up listening to him trash liberals, the Clintons and “elite, country club Rockefeller Republicans.” Social issues, with the exception of abortion, are rarely discussed—he is a man of appetites. Loyal fans are called dittoheads, a label both mocking and encouraging their tendency to fall in line with El Rushbo. The son of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, is now the $400 million man, with the most lucrative contract recorded in any medium, reaching twenty million people a week.19