"Class Warfare" Won't Work on Governor Palin

Something that became patently obvious after President Obama delivered his speech to the nation about the budget last week, was that not only is he now in campaign mode but his message will essentially be centered around what is considered "class warfare." As Congressman Paul Ryan stated after the president's speech:

I’m sincerely disappointed that the president, at a moment when we are putting ideas on the table, to try and engage in a thoughtful dialogue to fix this country’s economic and fiscal problems, decided to pour on the campaign rhetoric, launches re-election and passed partisan broadsides against us and making it that much harder for the two parties to come together with mutual respect of one another to get things done.

With entitlement debates ragging across the country, union involvement, and the left's tendency to pit groups of people against each other for their own gain, it's no surprise that team Obama would take this route. How effective his strategy is depends on who the Republicans pick to represent them in the 2012 election. It's much easier to envision this political (and no doubt media driven) narrative could take hold if the GOP where to nominate a run-of-the-mill, milquetoast establishment Republican. The same cannot be said about Governor Palin, if she does decide to run. But that won't stop them from trying.

In an attempt to use this tactic against Governor Palin, the IAFF Local 311 Firefighters Union put out a ridiculous call to action last week. The union has since removed the text from their original posting, but not before Jim Hoft saved a copy of it. It read:

Saturday, April 16
State Capitol
11 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Leave Station #1 at 11 a.m.
(Call J.R. for more info at 216-****)

Come one, come all, hear the call to . . .DUMP TEA! DUMP PALIN!

Please share widely. The puppets are coming, the puppets are coming! Corporate puppets Sarah Palin and “Americans” for “Prosperity” are rallying at our Wisconsin State Capitol on 4/16.

BRING PUPPETS — sock puppets, hand puppets, marionettes, shadow puppets, finger puppets and muppets!

BRING LIBERTY BELLS — that means cowbells, dinner bells, doorbells, jingle bells, you name it, and let’s ring in Wisconsin’s independence from corporate rule!

Let’s show ‘em how we really feel about big corporations passing the tax burden on to the rest of us!

The notion that Governor Palin is a "corporate puppet" is downright absurd, especially to those who are familiar with her actual record. That union is clearly banking on the fact that their members are ignorant, or at least willing to push lies.

Amanda Coyne, a journalist from Alaska who by no means is known for having a pro Palin bias, pointed out how wrong this is via her Twitter page:

Frankly the "Palin is a corporate puppet" meme is ridiculous. She's a lot of things, but that she's not.

Coyne knows Governor Palin's history and she is aware that reality clashes with what the IAFF Local 311 was selling. The governor took on the oil companies and their relationship with the corrupt members of the GOP, directly in Alaska. There's even a book titled "Sarah takes on Big Oil." Corporate puppets don't generally have books written about them on how they "took on big" anything.

It isn't just Governor Palin that this class warfare angle won't work on, it's also the Tea Party movement as a whole. A typical class warfare strategy paints the left's adversaries as greedy "billionaires" and "millionaires," but the Tea Party consists mainly of working class, patriotic Americans who are also overtaxed and feel over burdened by government intrusion. That's why the left tries to pivot to the phony "racist" meme all too often regarding Tea Party Americans. It's much easier for them to lie and say tea partiers hurled racist slurs at Democrat politicians, than it is to lie and say a middle class patriot is really a selfish bazillionaire who wants to see poor people suffer.

The Tea Party is just as sick of the back room deal making and crony rewarded system, as they are about tax rates that hurt all Americans. This is one reason that Governor Palin's message and record resonates with the Tea Party. As James Pethokoukis noted in his recent article about the governor's speech in Wisconsin:

But as it stands, she arguably represents the purest expression out there of Tea Party passion and free-market populist rejection of Washington’s bipartisan crony capitalism. If she ran, her high-wattage appearance in Madison shows just how dangerous her candidacy would be to a field of solid but stolid opponents.

See, the professional left knows all of this. They may try to sneak a fast one by, as they did with that IAFF announcement, but it doesn't pass the smell test. They can't honestly make this argument against Governor Palin in the open without being called out on it. This is one reason they fear the governor over the Mitt Romney's of the world. She effectively removes a powerful weapon from their arsenal of lies, one of which they depend on to win elections.

The left made fools of themselves last Saturday in more ways than one. But nothing looks more foolish than having one of Barack Obama's (a man with more than his fair share of cronies) "rent a mobs" attempt to distort the character of Governor Palin by painting her as a "corporate puppet." It's obvious who the puppets are in this debate, and it certainly isn't Governor Palin.