Palin as insult

How do you describe a Republican presidential candidate who lacks depth and policy knowledge? This week, the answer seems to be: compare them to Sarah Palin.


The budding fad is bipartisan. First, there was Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, speaking dismissively of Rick Perry on NBC’s “Meet the Press”:

He'll, he'll get some strength on the conservative side, but only for awhile. He has some challenges. One of them is that people think he's a little bit of a coffee table book, just kind of Sarah Palin with a skirt, not a substantive candidate. He's the candidate of jobs and growth, but Republicans don't think that governors and governments create them, they think businessmen do. He's running against businessmen. And he echoes the last campaign, which I think we lost, which was, you know, Obama ran against George Bush, and in many ways, Perry's just a lighter copy.

Now, less surprisingly, there’s Paul Krugman, mocking Tim Pawlenty’s economic views:

On economics, he has been awesomely clueless — making gross factual errors, demonstrating on repeated occasions that he doesn’t understand anything about monetary economics … Maybe there are some subjects on which he isn’t an embarrassing ignoramus, but I’ve yet to see them. I mean, as far as I can tell he’s Sarah Palin in a suit.

There was a time when it would have been astonishing to hear a conservative Republican talk about Palin the way Castellanos did. But it’s been a while.

This article tagged under: Sarah Palin

2012 Elections