A Shyfte in the Publick Humours

I prescribe extensive blood-letting.

The key finding in post-convention poll research is a substantial increase in those willing to identify themselves as Republicans. This party self-identification figure is one of the important benchmarks the pollsters use to validate their samples, or even to drive the sample selection.

This number--people willing to own up to their preference for the party of Bushite Misrule, and now, of the McPalin brand--has gone up about 6% in a month. It's a major development: If sustained, and if then fully reflected in November, it will have implications that are significant, though not necessarily determinant, in the Presidential election. It will also affect the Congressional races, limiting the damage to Republicans.

I would argue there are implications that go beyond this election.

Until this Bump, the Republicans were heading for the Great Elephant Graveyard, somewhere near where the bones of the Federalists and Whigs lie. Very simply, Sarah Palin has given demoralized Republican sympathizers a sense that the party still has a future, just when it was starting to look like it had none.

For most of the last eight years, the party has been Unified Bushite. McCain's unorthodoxy from 2000 was thoroughly rejected after Bush defeated him in the primaries and successfully rallied the team for Congressional parity and two narrow victories in Presidential general elections. 2006 changed things, though, and the party has been on the run, its followers hounded and embarrassed.

As with Bushite policy disasters, Republican rank-and-file activists rallied around McCain this year because they simply had no other choice. But John McCain is an aging reed to buttress the party. With another drubbing due in Congressional elections, one could hope for Permanent Minority Status--Rove's ideal inverted.

This was certainly my fondest dream. Look, I have no doubt--after 10-12 years of hegemonic rule and massive systemic change, the Democrats would certainly have split, probably around differing views of the success of the Obama programs for energy independence and for long-term financial stability through health cost control and revised taxation policies. But so much for progress like that--in 2020, we may still have to deal with these incompetent, insolvent, but ever-so-confident con artists.

Palin's most important characteristic is actually not her gender, but her youth. Here was someone that could give hope for the party's future to discouraged Republicans--of all ages, actually.

Now, it remains to be seen whether this Young Turk will survive, beyond a fringe group of passionate admirers. Everyone will desert her if she fails to fulfill her promise, either by crook, or because her performance eventually gets the hook. If she gets relegated to the Alaskan Deep Freeze, the party will once again have to find someone who can represent some vision for the future. There's also a real good chance, if the worst should happen this year, that the huge challenges of 2009-2012 will prove once again insoluble to tired Republican nostrums and, after four more years of impasse, the party may once again be on the run.

In the meantime, though, that vista of green fields and global progress has been blocked. We're getting out the machete, as it's going to be hacking through the tangle of lies and distortion from now until November, without much thought of what may lie beyond.