Two paths to a Palin presidency (and one path to a military coup)

Sandy Levinson

There are two scenarios under which Sarah Palin could become President, neither very plausible, but, then, neither impossible:

1) She captures the Republican Party nomination and, in a traditional two-party contest, gets more electoral votes than the Democratic competitor (presumably Barack Obama). The problem I have with this scenario, descriptively, is that I find it hard to imagine that the Republican Party would grant her the nomination. There is, after all, a widespread (and totally accurate) belief even among loyal Republicans that she is totally and utterly unqualified, because of lack of knowledge and relevant experience, not to mention temperament, to be President of the United States. [Though see "update" below.]

There is, though, one way she could get the nomination, which involves the Republican Party sticking resolutely to its "winner take all" primary rules, which is the principal explanation for John McCain's getting the nomination in 2008. (The principal explanation for Barack Obama's getting the nomination is precisely that the Democratic Party adopted proportionality as its assignment rule, so that losses in the largest states really didn't matter all that much.) But one can imagine Palin coming in first in a number of states (with, say, 34% of the vote, which is exactly what McCain got in Missouri, against Huckabee's 32%, to garner all of Missouri's delegates). The question is whether Republicans, envisioning this possibility, will change their rules prior to 2012 to forestall it, given that extremely high likelihood that she would, like Barry Goldwater, lead the GOP to a disastrous loss (at least in the short-term).

Still, if as the Republican candidate, she gets (close to) a majority of the popular vote and a majority of the electoral vote, she becomes President, and I presume the military, though gritting its teeth, would recognize the principle of civilian supremacy. I simply don't think that this is a remotely plausible scenario.

2) She runs as the Tea Party candidate, getting, say, 35 electoral votes, while the Republican and Democrat split the remainder. The House would then pick among her and the other two candidates, on a one-state/one-vote basis. I can conceive of no circumstances whatsoever under which she would capture the support of a majority of House delegations and become President. This is, therefore, also not a remotely plausible scenario. But then there's

3) There are indeed, as suggested in my previous post, four "real" candidates, including Bloomberg-Bayh, and Palin manages to win a majority of the electoral college by pulling in 28% of the vote in enough states where the other three candidates evenly split the remaining 72%. This could happen, presumably, if the polls show that all of the four candidates are more-or-less evenly matched, so that there isn't an obvious "spoiler" a la Ralph Nader. That is, a "rational voter" could vote for any of the four in the belief that it was at least possible that her choice could actually become President. So, under this model, Palin gets, say, about 20% of the total popular vote (a little more than Perot did in 1992), but, because of the winner-take-all feature of assigning the electoral vote in all states save Maine and Nebraska, manages to come in first in enough states to amass her majority of electoral votes. If anyone thought this was a serious possibility, presumably the "rational" thing to do would be to emulate Maine and Nebraska and eliminate winner-take-all, though that would presumably have the consequence of throwing the election into the House. (I can also imagine that Tea Partiers would literally riot in the streets if they perceived state legislatures controlled by the "mainstream parties" as acting to "change the rules in the middle of the game.")

The coup scenario, frankly, rests on some version of scenario three, where it is obvious that a hefty majority of the voters, as well as an even greater majority of "thoughtful Americans" (including the Republicans who wisely refused to accept her as their nominee and perhaps nominate Gen. Pretraeus or someone else who has systematically attacked her capacity to serve as commander/diplomat in chief), agree that she is frighteningly unfit to become President but that, because of the idiocy of the electoral college, she nonetheless wins. This is, incidentally, why I am not an enthusiastic supporter of the Fair Vote initiative, though I heartily support Fair Vote in its attack on the electoral college itself. Insofar as one is fixated on the 2000 election, though, then the "remedy" is to say that whoever comes in first necessarily gets to the Oval Office, regardless of the percentage of votes received. Under some (foreseeable) circumstances, this is a recipe for utter disaster, and it is absolutely necessary to have some procedure for a run-off, either in a separate second election, as in France, or with an Alternative Transferrable Vote, as in San Francisco. (Rightwingers may appreciate being reminded of the fact that Salvador Allende won the Chilean presidency with a grand total of 36.2% of the vote. This factoid doesn't justify the military coup, almost certainly supported by the US, but it may help to explain why it was successful.)

The Senate, of course, could simply refuse to confirm any of her nominees for office, but what precise good would this do, given the President's status as "Chief Executive" and the modern ability to draw on unconfirmed "advisers," "kitchen cabinets," etc.? Perhaps there would be move to impeach her, but, of course, she would have skilled lawyers who could argue, perhaps even plausibly, that being totally unfit to be President is not an impeachable offense (see, e.g., George W. Bush). And, of course, it would take a lot of time and roil the country further. Can you spell "constitutional crisis"? Can you imagine that some "serious people" would call for the military to take control; as trusted generals and admirals take power and promise to return the government to civilian control, they might also simply call a new constitutional convention to address some of the problems revealed by the chaos of the past four years (i.e. 2009-2013).

All of this, of course, may be literally fantasy, no more credible, say, than the Tea Partiers version of what is going on right now in the United States. As one of the respondents to the previous post suggested, 2012 may turn out to be like 1984, where the Ronald Reagan who was in trouble in 1982 was able to run a "morning in America" campaign and trounce Walter Mondale. I doubt it. For starters, no serious person believes that the unemployment rate will be enough less than the current 10% to merit the appellation "morning in America." In 1984, the rate was down to 7.5% for the civilian labor force, down from about 10% in 1982. I would be happily surprised if that happened again, not least because I fear that the Republican Party will do "whatever it takes" to block any job-creation legislation for which Obama would be able to take credit.

So I think that such complacence would befit an ostrich, save that it appears to be a canard that ostriches bury their heads in the sand. Only humans seem to have that capacity. It should be absolutely clear that I would be appalled if this fantasy played itself out. But recall Benjamin Franklin's comment about having a Republic, "if you can keep it." What, indeed, does it take to maintain a Republican Form of Government in the 21st century. It is, most certainly, not blind and feckless commitment to a 1787 Constitution that came very close to giving us the equivalent of a military coup in 1800 (where the governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania threatened to send their state militias to Washington should the Federalists not give the presidency to Thomas Jefferson) and indeed help generate the slaughter of 2% of the American population between 1861-65 when a regional candidate with 39.8% of the vote got to the White House. (I am not remotely arguing that secession was justified; rather, I am trying to explain why American history is, contrary to some of its apologists, not a wonderful story of "stability" and "peaceful electoral change.")

Have a nice day!

UPDATE: Jules Witcover has a column suggesting that Sarah Palin could relatively easily win the GOP nomination, in part because at this point she doesn't have any very strong opponents within the Party. I agree with the latter, which is one reason that I offer Gen. Petraeus as the long-shot nominee. But his column also point out that 70% of those recently polled find her unqualified to be President; quite telling, I think, is that only 45% of conservative Republicans believe she is qualified, as compared with 29% of independents. I see nothing in her history to suggest that she will spend the next two years engaged in serious travel, study, reflection, etc. that might change these figures significantly. (Consider something so basic as speechwriting. One interesting thing that has come out about Ronald Reagan is that he in fact seems to have written his radio addresses in the 1970s, and, compared to Palin (or, for that matter, George W. Bush), he was a paragon of intellectual curiosity. So the Palin phenomenon really forces us to ask how many Republicans who know better will choose to be "useful idiots" for someone for whom they undoubtedly have contempt, but believe (I think falsely) they can control and use for their own purposes after paving her way to the White House? Perhaps here is where Weimar analogies might again be useful (though, to preclude misunderstandings, I am not suggesting that Palin is Hitlerian, only that she is scandalously unfit to be President and possesses a set of views that could quit easily become at least a "soft form" of fascism).

Posted 6:02 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]