Peter Sage: Cable TV people had a field day mocking Palin's free form endorsement of Trump especially when they used at bits of transcript. Natural speech is full of half sentences. Add ons. False Starts. Her message was perfectly understandable live or on video. More important, they are missing the big point. It is as if they are looking at a kidnapper's ransom note "I'm goint to kill your son tonight" and chuckling over the "goint" and saying that the important thing is the grammar.
No. The important thing is the revolution happening in the two parties.
Trump and Cruz openly oppose the current governing center of the GOP represented by the party leadership and their business, media, interest group, and donor allies. It isn't just Trump and Palin. Especially from the religious side of traditional values Cruz is sending the same message. They aren't tweaking the GOP establishment. They are defying it.
Sanders opposes the financial supporters and the leadership of the Democratic Party. The Clintons triangulated and worked with the bipartisan Washington ruling interests. Sanders defies them, and has shown he can raise money without them.
Thad Guyer is an attorney whose practice is focuses on representing whistleblower employees. He pays close attention to what messages are persuasive to judges and juries. And voters.
Thad Guyer Commentary:
Palin’s Poetry and Prose
The poetry and prose that Up Close observes in the Republican primary are nowhere more on display than with Sara Palin’s 21 minute Trump endorsement speech in Tulsa on January 20th. The mainstream media is having a field day denigrating her as an unintelligible ignoramus. See for example, “Sarah Palin takes the GOP campaign to a new low”, by Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, Jan 21, 2016. Robinson opines that the ridiculing fun will continue for weeks, although he concedes we may soon have to conclude that Palin’s performance was instrumental in a Trump win. The New York Times conceded that Palin’s speech “has been described as performance art, a filibuster, even slam poetry”. See, “The Most Mystifying Lines of Sarah Palin’s Endorsement Speech”, by Michael Barbaro, New York Times, Jan. 20, 2016. Barbaro then dissects the speech transcript, laughs at certain lines he finds unintelligible out of context. Trump himself at some rallies has read the lyrics to Al Wilson's 1968 R&B song "The Snake" to metaphorically emphasize what Muslim refugees did to a 500 women in Germany on New Year’s Eve.
I’m sure the transcript of Palin’s speech lends itself to fun potshots, but anyone willing to listen will easily understand every thought she conveyed. See Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvlm3LKSlpU. As I watched, I recalled a different performance, that of The Last Poets, “When the Revolution Comes” (1970), also on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M5W_3T2Ye4). Its lyrics include lines only fans might understand:
“When the revolution comes some of us will probably catch it on TV, with chicken hanging from our mouths. You'll know it's revolution cause there won't be no commercials. When the revolution comes. *** The cost of revolution is 360 degrees, understand the cycle that never ends. Understand the beginning to be the end and nothing is in between but space and time that I make or you make to relate or not to relate to the world outside my mind your mind.”
I found Palin’s revolutionary prose and poetry to be compelling as she tore down “the establishment” on both the left and the right. She drew rich visuals of politicians corrupted by money and power feeding on their own careers at public expense. She effectively used nuanced lines requiring the listener to know a little history, such as when candidate Obama in 2008 used a broad brush about rural conservatives, “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion”. Palin’s speech animated the audience, they fully understood her tempo and rhyme, this being the primary goal of her live presentation. It was a complete success, effective and memorable to those who were there and to the large online streaming audiences.
When she was finished, I thought I may well have been witnessing history in the making. Palin did nothing less than call for a revolution against “the establishment”, using the establishment’s own facilities, its political parties. She made clear her intent of using the Republican primary to overthrown Republicans. Her targets were generally those of Bernie Sanders and democrats, the corrupting influence of political money and superpacs, Capitol Hill’s lobbying culture that skews legislation to benefit special interests, and the American malaise from an entrenched political class. You would have to be daft not to reflect on the historical context of her performance: The current poll front-runners, Trump and Sanders, advocate political class upheaval from the pulpits of parties to which they are not really even members. Sanders is not a Democrat, he is an independent, yet he uses the Democratic Party to attack the great Democrat Hillary Clinton. Amazing! Donald Trump is a Republican who resisted the demanded pledge, designed just for him, to not wage a third party campaign if he is not the nominee. Both political parties are now being hijacked by frontrunners intent on overthrowing them.
Poetry and prose can be powerful political theater, and that is now called a primary.
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