Hello to all the holiday weekend daydreamers out there, and welcome back to my private email. Technically, the subject of today’s email lost a special Congressional election yesterday to a Democrat, of all people, in red-state Alaska. But with a general election coming up to determine a permanent hold on the seat, and her insistence that her Republican rival drop out to give her a fighting chance, it behooves us to consider the question: What if Sarah Palin, the progenitor of populism, ended up in a Congress full of evolved MAGA politicians? (And please, enjoy your long weekend; there’ll be plenty of madness to return to come next Tuesday.)
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After a decade on the political lam, Sarah Palin is back—running in two elections, brandishing her O.G. populist behavior—but is she too late to her own game?
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With the benefit of hindsight, Sarah Palin’s bright-burning, incredibly brief Kardashian-of-the-Fox set influence on our politics was one of those turning points that we never quite fully appreciated in real time. Pre-Palin, vice presidential candidates looked like Al Gore and Dan Quayle; they could defang Katie Couric; they went to Ivy League schools and weren’t grandparents in their 40s. And here was Palin, the self-professed hockey mom, ushering in an era of unabashed white-trash-chic political philistinism wherein it was a credential to view an international map like a Saul Steinberg blob, ransack a department store on a campaign’s dime, and introduce the world to Tripp, Todd, Trig, and the rest of the crew.
Now, a decade later—post-Todd, post-reality TV, post-Anchorage, post-Trump—Palin occupies an odd lane. Sure, she might be the O.G. populist, the ancestral progenitor of today’s MAGA movement. But one of the questions setting Official Washington off is what she might be like if she were to come to Congress. On Wednesday, Palin lost a special election to serve out the term of the recently-deceased Congressman Don Young, falling behind Democrat Mary Peltola by three points, but she is still Trump’s endorsed candidate for the general election in November, which will determine the future of the seat. (After her loss, Palin exhorted her Republican rival in the ranked-choice election, the relatively moderate Nick Begich, to drop out of the general election.) Should Palin win in November, after a decade-plus spent cashing in on her evanescent fame out of the political spotlight, she would be joining a Congress that contains Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz. We’re not in Wasilla anymore...
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FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT
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More details on the Stelter sacrifice and the aftershock at CNN.
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Notes on the biggest deal of the year that nobody (except every banker) is talking about.
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Tara and Peter discuss the hurdles preventing G.O.P. unity leading into the midterms.
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PETER HAMBY & TARA PALMERI
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Has the company’s yearslong quest to build a library of originals led to a pyrrhic victory?
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