Do you think we still know only the tip of the iceberg with Palin? Well, what I think was unknown was the degree of her rejection of us asking her to do anything that wasn’t her own idea. We were dealing with someone who was maybe ahead of her time. Her irreverence and disdain for the establishment of her own party and her embrace of the ‘‘isms’’ — nativism, isolationism, you know — she blew the walls out on the political norms before Donald Trump did. She was obviously onto something. She had crowds five times the size of McCain’s. We think it was all about her political skills, but it was also about her message. She railed against the mainstream media, she attacked all of us, her own advisers. That her audiences were so enthusiastic about that was the early signal that the party had changed.
.. Trump went on Twitter and attacked a Republican, his sitting attorney general and the acting director of F.B.I. — all before 11 a.m. today. If something happened in the national security realm, he’d need them to assist him in protecting the country. It’s almost like that part of the job hasn’t been explained to him.
Chris Christie’s Tutorial in Hubris
We can scoff and sneer at those images of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on his beachfront imperium, or we can learn from them. As he took in the sun, he doled out a lesson, the same one that Donald Trump is delivering on a daily basis and in a grander fashion:
Beware the politician who doesn’t give a damn for decorum. What he markets as irreverence can be something coarser and more perverse.
.. Christie was “Trump before Trump,” Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told The Washington Post’s Robert Costa in an articlepublished late Monday. “He does what he wants to do, and his success can be traced to that. But there are consequences, of course, when you work that way.”
.. The twins of tantrum, Christie and Trump had almost identical political appeals. They mocked propriety. They broke rules. They assertively peddled the impression that as happy as they were to make friends, they were even happier to make enemies, because that meant that they were fully in the fight.
.. In an era of resentment and anger, many voters thrilled to the spectacle. The problem with other politicians, these voters legitimately reasoned, was too much indulgence of vested interests and too cowardly an obeisance to convention.