Where Were You When Fairfax Went Rogue?
'Member that scene in whichever Lord of the Rings it was where Gandalf and Frodo and Orlando Bloom are trekking across that snowy mountain pass and it's real hard going for the lot of them, and then (camera pan across the Kiwi plains), you see that Christopher Lee is totally muttering a dark incantation to make it snow like the dandruff falling from his wizard-white mane all over the the good guys? I am just saying: It snowed something evil here yesterday, like the Fall of the Age of Men was near at hand. While Sarah Palin was in town.
The Washington Post reports that some 2,200 people showed up for Sarah Palin's appearance in Fairfax, ignoring the snow (and, you know, reason). Palin was on hand to sign copies of her political treatise, Going Rogue, a book that Foreign Policy assistant editor (and friend to DCist) Annie Lowery calls calls"painfully unserious . . . morally and politically." Tell that to those who love Palin and everything the Constitution stands for and lined up outside BJ's Wholesale Club in Fairfax to prove it.
The Post observes that Fairfax County seems to have flip-flopped since the 2008 election, politico-demographically speaking. Governor-elect Bob McDonnell -- who, incidentally, assembled with fellow Virginia Republicans in Williamsburg, Virginia, to celebrate last month's gains -- carried Fairfax County, which went to President Barack Obama and former Governor Tim Kaine in previous elections.
Palin's reception crystallizes the question put forward by the Post: Is Virginia growing more Republican, or more conservative? That a McDonnell or a Palin could receive robust support in a corridor widely perceived by political prognosticators (at least over the last five or six years) to be trending more progressive suggests that someone's miscalculated. It might be that those political projections failed all along to account for a silent majority in northern Virginia that still hews to very conservative values, despite the transformation of transit, density, and economy throughout the NoVA corridor.
Let's note that beyond the gaffes and the shopping sprees and the snow machines, Sarah Palin actually stands on some radically conservative ground. The Los Angeles Times notes how nuts it is for a former vice presidential candidate to pride herself on the fact that she has not, to date, endorsed the totally insane conspiracy theory that the President of the United States was born in Kenya. More telling still is that Virginia voters said that Governor-elect McDonnell's anti-feminist grad-school thesis had no effect on their vote.
Richard Nixon was able to win the support of a silent majority that pols believed had been absorbed by LBJ's Great Society. Could that happen again in 2012 -- and in Fairfax County?