Look Who’s The New GOP “It” Girl

All of Sarah Palin’s dreams are going to come true . . . for Meghan McCain. Without a single new idea, Meghan is poised to become the GOP’s savior.

Because let’s face it: The GOP is not dead, or even dying. It is what it is, which is to say that it’s different from the left only inasmuch as it likes to pretend it’s for limit government.

The acronym should stand for Grand Ol’ Prevaricators – the conservative platform is an epic lie, or at least the grandest ever spin job.

Small government is no longer the conservative ideal, and maybe it never was. Republicans like to talk about limiting government, which is better than nothing – but even then it’s not actually all government they want to shrink, but rather the particular pieces of it that get in the way of the expansion they prefer.

Anyway, Meghan McCain (photos here) is going to revamp the Republican image without rescuing either its message or its mistakes. That’s the kind of rework Republicans want – all form, no substance.

Incidentally, it is form – Meghan’s form – that’s the epicenter of her sudden media magnetism.

Tinny-toned pundit Laura Ingraham once obliquely referenced Meghan’s weight. It was just one among a gaggle of Ingraham’s critical comments, but Meghan is young and vain, and, frankly, kind of pudgy, and so she took major offense.

She could have said “real women have curves” and been done with it.

That’s the customary fat-girl response to a size swipe, after all. But again she’s young and vain and more pudgy than curvy, so she instructed Ingraham to “kiss her fat ass.”

How “Sic Willie” of her.

Now, her fat ass is and isn’t the reason that she’s Republican gold. That she managed to parlay the whole thing into an opportunity to combine the words ‘kiss,’ ‘fat,’ and ‘ass’ – on TV! – is resuscitating in itself. It resuscitates the right; it rescuitates the world, frankly.

Probably it says more about the GOP than about Meghan that a crass and clichéd phrase is the most passably political comment to come from the right in … quite a while.

Republicans were late entrants in the Race of the Disenfranchised Firsts™ – they realized way late that their white guys were no match for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The right pinned all its hopes on Sarah Palin, who turned out to be kind of like snow in South Carolina – a welcome diversion that never quite sticks.

Meghan McCain is going to stick. Why she’ll stick isn’t clear, but it’s no doubt related to the fact that she’s willing to talk party reform without actually pursuing any. In fact, her very idea of “reform” is to give the right a left-ish makeover.

From one of Meghan’s blog posts:

I think most people my age are like me in that we all don’t believe in every single ideal of each party specifically. The GOP should be happy to have any young supporters whatsoever, even if they do digress some from traditional Republican thinking.

I’m often criticized for not being a “real” Republican, and I have been called a RINO—Republican In Name Only—in the past. Many say I am not “conservative enough,” which is something that I am proud of. It is no secret that I disagree with many of the old-school Republican ways of thinking.

Like father, like daugher? Speaking of, it’s deliciously fitting that John McCain – ever underwhelming – will leave as his legacy not his politics but his progeny.