Yes, Virginia, There Are Republican Critics of Sarah Palin

Fred Kaplan, Slate's "War Stories" columnist, is usually right on, but his column on Sarah Palin yesterday was a bit of a dud. Charging right out of the gate, Kaplan asks: "Are there any Republican grown-ups out there, and, if there are, will they ever start coming to the aid of their party? That sentence could segue into any number of topics, but the one at hand is Sarah Palin."

Where to start? Certainly, many liberals would be delighted to see a phalanx of moderate Republicans condemning Palin—just as many conservatives were delighted to see moderate Democrats such as Evan Bayh lashing out at President Obama in the wake of Scott Brown's victory in the special election for senator in Massachusetts. But Palin's rhetoric—and that of like-minded leaders—seems to be making political hay for the GOP, at least in the short term.

More to the point, though, Kaplan is simply wrong: there are "Republican grown-ups" who haven't been shy about criticizing Palin. Let's start with the team at FrumForum (né New Majority) who have been such frequent critics that Alex Knepper has taken to anticipating backlash in his posts ("The next time I say something negative about Sarah Palin and her Baghdad Bobs tell me to 'go back to the Huffington Post' . . . ). They were even at the tea-party convention, filing tepid to critical dispatches about Palin from Nashville. But that's hardly the only example. Gingrich revolutionary turned MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said yesterday morning that "she keeps lowering the bar for herself" and that top Republicans were increasingly impatient with her "lack of substance." Looking a little further back, one of the nation's highest-profile moderate Republicans, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, took a hard swipe at Palin's global-warming stance in December. And conservative pundits in the media have been criticizing her for months, from Paul Mingeroff of the influential conservative blog Power Line to Kathleen Parker, the Washington Post columnist who unequivocally attacked Palin as unqualified to run for vice president during the 2008 campaign.

Kaplan could make the case that elected members of the GOP leadership such as Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Michael Steele, and Mitt Romney ought to be out front in promoting an alternative to Palin's ideas. Or he could take to task the anonymous Republicans Scarborough cites, who are unhappy but haven't spoken publicly. But it's incorrect to say that no one is talking.

Perhaps the greater problem here is a rhetorical one, tied to the structural weaknesses of political journalism. The "where are the moderate Republicans?" argument is just as weak as the old canard about how moderate Muslims are failing to speak out against Islamist extremists—it's not that moderates aren't out there, but all the attention goes to the latest Osama bin Laden tape. If Kaplan truly wants to encourage a Republican alternative to Palin, he might be better served by helping to amplify the voices that are out there now, rather than stifling them by pretending they don't exist.