Palin vs. Schwarzenegger: A Battle for the Heart of the GOP

Carl M. Cannon

Executive Editor

Posted:

12/17/09

As if she didn't have enough adversaries, Sarah Palin has decided to mix it up with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ostensibly, the issue was global warming. Actually, it's about the future face of the Republican Party -- whose it will be, and the ideology that person brings to the table.

The exchange of criticisms between the ex-governor of Alaska and the current California governor was provoked by comments Schwarzenegger made about Palin at the international summit on climate change in Copenhagen – a conference Palin not only avoided, but called on President Obama to boycott. With that, the gauntlet was thrown for the long-distance jousting between two of the GOP's most prominent knights.

It all began when the former body builder and action movie hero was asked by the Financial Times of London, as he was about to board a jet from Los Angeles to Copenhagen, about a recent op-ed penned by Palin in The Washington Post in which she took aim at sketchy tactics used by British scientists to squelch the views of global warming skeptics.

Those tactics came to light in a series of leaked e-mails, which Palin characterized in her op-ed as "Climate-gate." Palin noted that from her perspective in Alaska, she had been one of the first governors to take global warming seriously, and had created a sub-cabinet position to make recommendations on how to deal with it. She then added, somewhat incongruously, that because of the scandal with the British scientists, Obama ought to shun the Copenhagen conference. And she included this money quote – the one that launched a thousand rebuttals: "But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes. We can say, however, that any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs."

This assertion didn't strike Schwarzenegger, who has initiated a sweeping array of measures in California to lower carbon emissions, as very well thought out. "You have to ask: what was she trying to accomplish?" the Governator told the FT. "Is she really interested in this subject or is she interested in her career and in winning the nomination? You have to take all these things with a grain of salt."

Sour grapes, perhaps, as the foreign-born Schwarzenegger is prohibited by the Constitution from seeking the presidency himself. In any event, it's not the kind of critique that the petite but fiercely competitive woman nicknamed "Sarah Barracuda" in high school very often takes lying down – or standing up, for that matter.

On her Facebook page Tuesday night, Palin accused Schwarzenegger of doing a bit of grandstanding himself. "While I and all Alaskans witness the impacts of changes in weather patterns firsthand, I have repeatedly said that we can't primarily blame man's activities for those changes," she wrote. "And while I did look for practical responses to those changes, what I didn't do was hamstring Alaska's job creators with burdensome regulations so that I could act 'greener than thou' when talking to reporters."

Facebook is proving an effective turret from which Palin can fire salvos at her attackers. Last week she gave as good as she got with former Vice President Al Gore, who had hurled the liberals' worst insult at her: He called Palin a climate change "denier" – you know, like a Holocaust denier. "The deniers are persisting in an era of unreality," Gore told Andrea Mitchell of NBC News. "The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our eyes. What do they think is happening? It's a principle in physics. It's like gravity, it exists."

To which Palin responded on Facebook: "Perhaps he's right. Climate change is like gravity – a naturally occurring phenomenon that existed long before, and will exist long after, any governmental attempts to affect it." She added that Gore was "wrong" in calling her a "denier," noting that she has not questioned the existence of climate change – just whether the phenomenon can be primarily blamed on human beings. And then she saw his "denier" gambit, and raised him, characterizing the former vice president as a kind of Nobel Prize-winning Chicken Little going around terrifying gullible adults and small children with "doomsday scenarios."

In one sense these exchanges show that when it comes to the rational practice of politics, the Judgment Day is already at hand. If ever there was an issue that ought to unite all of mankind, the credible theory that massive pollution is causing the temperature on Mother Earth to rise is that issue. Alas, in Copenhagen, it pits the developed world against the undeveloped world, democracies against dictatorships, the haves against the have-nots.

Here in the United States it pits elites against populists, libertarians against regulators, environmentalists against business, Democrats against Republicans, and finally – in the instance of Palin and Schwarzenegger – conservative Republicans against liberal Republicans. In the short run, the loser of that final confrontation might be a weakened and divided Grand Old Party. In the long run, it could be all of us.