The Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis, an early champion of Sarah Palin, now says he regrets boosting the former Republican vice presidential nominee and shaming her conservative critics.
Lewis came around to agreeing with the former Alaska governor’s earliest detractors in a Daily Beast column published Wednesday, following Palin’s widely mocked speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit.
“I got some stuff right, and my position was justifiable at the time, but in hindsight I regret contributing to the premature deification of Sarah Palin,” Lewis wrote.
Lewis acknowledged that back in 2008, he felt that writers like Kathleen Parker were unfairly attacking Palin and may have contributed to her hard-right turn after losing the election. But since Palin chose to cash in on that defeat by resigning the governorship in favor of reality TV and the speaking circuit, Lewis argued that she rendered herself obsolete as a long-term political force.
Palin also entered “fad” territory by “playing the victim card, engaging in identity politics, co-opting some of the cruder pop-culture references, and conflating redneck lowbrow culture with philosophical conservatism,” Lewis argued.
Even Sean Hannity, whose primetime Fox News program is friendly territory for Palin, was reaching for an explanation for Palin’s poor performance at the Iowa summit when he asked if her TelePrompTer had broken. As Lewis put it, “it’s probably time to concede that the early critics of Sarah Palin had a point.”
Read the whole thing here.
