Arnold and the Palin Paradigm: Rising Masters

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/10/10

Partisan politics can be painfully predictable. But the Vedic sages say the world begins again and all will be new when Vishnu is seen riding the white horse. Like that classic photograph by Annie Leibovitz, of Arnold Schwarzenegger on his white steed in earlier days when he was the most stunning man in the world. Arnold as Governator is in part a phenomenon; a psychological being. He came to us out of our suffering. We felt a need for a Big Man in a painful transition to war and conjured him and made him governor of California almost overnight by abandoning the regular process. He brought creativity and new potentials to our most important state, but as it is with all beginnings, the old and entrenched were not ready for the new. Primary victories by Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman suggest they are getting there. But the Governator may have saved the state by pitching and promoting Proposition 14. It will be devastating to the hacks, the entrenched interests, the ideologists, the pundits and the winged monkeys. Maybe the witch is really dead.

“The time for tinkering is done,” writes Jesse McKinley for The New York Times. “That was the message Californians sent when they voted Tuesday to radically rejigger elections in the nation’s most populous state. Under Proposition 14, a measure that easily passed, traditional party primaries will be replaced in 2011 with wide-open elections. The top two vote-getters — whatever their party, or if they have no party at all — will face off in the general election.”

The passage of Proposition 14 could preclude awaiting chaos and allow CA the proper amount of political disturbance it need to go forward, and if CA doesn’t go forward, the U.S. of A. will not go forward. In her very first sentence in her first national interview with Fox’s Stuart Varney at 5 am California time, Fiorina got to the center of the target. “The city of Los Angeles and California look alarmingly like Greece,” she said. Anyone who has been here since Howdy Doody knows that California is not Greece; it is the antithesis of Greece. All of our American myths have us heading west to California. It is the high pitch of American instinct and imagination. It is the new New World. And we each of us know inside that America will start there again or it won’t start at all.

Proposition 14 may be a harbinger, but the big winner in this week’s primary was Sarah Palin. As the Wall Street Journal reported, three candidates she supported prevailed in their contested primaries. Since she took the initiative to support Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in NY 23 last October, the winning cycle has followed her initiative. The Texas primary in March established the Palin Paradigm. The Republican establishment, featuring Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Bush I and Bush II and others lined up to push Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson to beat incumbent Rick Perry. Perry had Palin on his side and beat the establishment in a landslide. Palin has successfully and single-handedly incorporated Tea Party initiatives with entrepreneurial spirit of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. To look at this as pushing conservatism to the right is to use the old 1930s paradigm and miss what is happening. The Palin Paradigm is Jacksonian. It represents the rise of a free, western view in opposition to the aging, bipartisan Eastern establishment. Palin is spirit force to this “new west” direction but Arnold can be seen as champion.