“There are things that have to be put in place before the ship sinks,” she said on Fox News Sunday. “We don’t have to keep going down the road that we are going on today.”
The former governor of Alaska wasn’t the only possible Republican candidate for president talking like this. Over the weekend, Michele Bachmann, the congresswoman from Minnesota who is considering a run for the Republican presidential primary, told a crowd of Christian conservatives that “marriage is under siege” in the United States.
Bachmann was speaking at the Faith and Freedom Conference, a gathering in Washington at the end of last week. Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania and 2012 presidential hopeful, told the same audience, “If we don’t win this election, what we will have done is given away the great gift of America.”
Via videotaped message delivered to the conference, Newt Gingrich kept up the depressing downbeat, “You and I know that America’s clearly on the wrong track.”
All candidates for president set about convincing voters that they can lead the United States to a better version of itself.
What is at play, as represented by the recent talking points from Palin and others, is something quite different. The message to Americans is stark in its apocalyptic view of the nation. These conservatives are telling us that we live in a nation on the verge of falling apart.
For an ideology that never allows a negative word to be uttered about the land that they love, conservative candidates sure are tossing about slanders against the United States. Oh, they love America. It’s just that they prefer the mythical, trouble-free version that existed before the Great Society and the New Deal.
Republican candidates have the blues because of the current occupant of the White House. A country that would put a Democrat in the White House is a country in serious crisis, so the GOP mantra goes. That’s nothing but partisanship; and both sides play it in various ways.
Missing from many of the announced and possible Republican candidates for president is a positive message. Telling citizens they are living in a collapsing nation will only get a politician so far. Voters know a far different country than the one described by our current crop of doom-and-gloom Republicans.
Sure, we can do better, but we’re not soon to be occupying the bottom of the sea. Obama’s “hope and change” message in 2008 may be a punch line for Republicans, but it put him in the White House because it resonated with that majority of Americans who believe in working to create that more perfect union.
