VP Grab Bag

Hey Vice-Precedence Blog readers! Its Matt Saxe, back from my trip to St. Louis. Thanks to Jason for posting his review of the Sarah Palin comic-if you haven't read either yet, I recommend reading both and letting us know what you think.

Besides your local comics purveyor-you may have also seen former Gov. Palin on the cover of Newsweek with the title-"The Renegade". I guess if McCain was "The Maverick" then "The Renegade" can work for a Republican hockey mom. Though I don't see why she just doesn't stick with her high-school basketball nickname "The Barracuda". Oh well.

In the July 20th issue of Newsweek in an excellent article titled "Beyond the Palin" by Rick Perlstein the author of the best-selling book "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America", he cites numerous prominent conservatives-what could be called "The Elite Conservatives", such as The Washington Posts Charles Krauthammer, former federal judge Richard Posner, and former Bush speechwriter David Frum who seem to hope that Palin and her style of Republican politics will just go away. To quote Posner: "the face of the Republican party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party." For him, the sooner Palin is out of the picture as today's Republican-the better.
Frum too thinks that its time for his party to stop trying to constantly appeal to the kind of voters Palin attracts, saying in his now widely read blog post titled "Bristol's Myth" that "the socially conservative downscale voter is increasingly becoming a mirage-and Republican politics based on that mirage will only lead us deeper into the desert."

The solution to this problem?

Well it would seem from what these guys are saying is that instead of using Palin to attract those kinds of voters who love her down-home one of the regular folks style, the Republicans who love Rush (who Frum considers "dangerous") and Fox News, is to leave them behind, and instead concentrate on attracting even more upscale voters-particularly whites, who don't like Obamas financial moves and who don't think Obama is going to make America a socialist state and take away all our guns.

After all, Whites under-30 who are low on the economic spectrum are not going to the polls in increasing numbers the way young, college educated, economically upscale whites and African-Americans are. Where will Sarah Palin fit into this Republican Party that is trying to define itself? We shall see.

In Cheney news, this morning Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano, under the instruction of President Obama, extended former VP Cheney's Secret Service protection for another six months. Usually former Veeps get six months of Secret Service protection-paid for with our tax dollars of course. However, Cheney asked the President if he could extend it for him. As everyone who has been reading this blog knows, Cheney, and his wife and daughter have all been very critical of the Obama White House and their policies-particularly on "The War on Terror", still that didn't stop President Obama from granting the extension. Cheneys friends and family have been worried for his safety since leaving office-and if this hadn't been approved, Cheney would have either had to pay for protection out of his own pocket, or had none at all. "Protectees" of the federal government can ask for extensions, so Cheney did. Will he do it again in another six months? Who knows?

Thanks for reading!

Matt Saxe.