Who are these people? These so called Tea Party followers of Sarah Palin that support her with so much enthusiasm.  Contrary to the caricature that those on the left and some on the right like to paint them, they are not the ignorant hicks of some back water towns that don't even have television yet.  Or escapees from a lunatic asylum.  They are in fact common folk from  the small towns in the Midwest and parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania and Kentucky. From places with one main street with a hardware store and a drug store maybe a local supermarket, unless it was forced out of business by the Walmart at the county seat. They are the people who up until about 40 years ago, lived pretty decent lives. But then Detroit started to cut back and the small parts plant they worked at closes or laid off a bunch of them.  Now their lives have become more and more precarious. The white working class and what I call the semi-professionals.  The guy who runs the hardware store. The nurse the works in the doctors office. The local real estate agent and insurance salesman. The farmers and those he employs.

The people that Washington generally ignores except at tax time.  In the towns that are passed up by republican and democratic politicians alike.  Sarah Palin knows who these people are and what their concerns are and in her own way is able to connect with them. Robert Reich also know a bit about them as well.

No prospective candidate so sharply embodies the anger of America’s white working class as does Palin. And none is channeling that anger nearly as effectively.

White working class anger isn’t new, of course, nor is the Republican Party’s use of it. Apart from the South, where the anger came in response to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the more widespread working-class anxiety began in the late 1970s when the median male wage that had been rising for three decades began to stagnate.

As I noted in “Aftershock,” families responded by sending wives and mothers into the paid workforce, working longer hours, and then, finally, going deep into debt. These coping mechanisms allayed but did not remove the growing anxiety.

They are a contradiction.  They despise the liberal,  University Educated intellectuals out east but want their kids to be able to go to college. They hate the welfare state but also hate that all too often they have had to rebuild their lives after some cataclysm such as a tornado ripping their town apart or  getting flooded because Washington does not see fit to call it a disaster. 

Over the years, Republicans have channeled the anxiety into anger, through overt appeals to a so-called “silent majority” that were overlooked by Democrats and liberals; through “tax revolts” by working and middle-class families that couldn’t afford to pay more; and in subtle and not-so-subtle appeals to racist fears (Willie Horton).

But now that the Great Recession has eliminated the last coping mechanism – ending the easy borrowing, and ratcheting up unemployment – the working class’s economic insecurities have soared. A recent Washington Post poll showed 53 percent of homeowners worried about meeting their mortgage payments. Home foreclosures have slowed largely because of bad paperwork on the part of banks, but the threat remains. Housing prices are still dropping.

The white working class has not benefitted from the recent rise in corporate profits and stock prices. To the contrary, both have been fueled by foreign sales of goods made abroad and by labor-saving technologies that have allowed American companies to do more with fewer workers here at home. 

Joblessness among the white working class is far higher than the 9.6 percent average for the nation. While the unemployment rate among college grads (most of whom are professionals or managers) is around 5 percent, the average unemployment rate for people with only a high school degree or less (blue-collar, pink-collar, clerical) is almost 20 percent.

Something that does not make the media.

Sarah Palin has special appeal because she wraps the story in an upbeat message. She avoids the bilious rants of Rush, Sean Hannity, and their ilk. But her cheerfulness isn’t sunny; she doesn’t promise Morning in America. She offers pure snark, and promises revenge. Over and over again she tells the same snide, sarcastic, inside joke, but in different words: “They think they can keep screwing us, but (wink, wink), we know something they don’t. We’re gonna take over and screw them.”

The Palin Strategy is to circumvent the Republican establishment, filled as it is with career Republicans, business executives, and Wall Streeters. That’s why her path to the Republican nomination isn’t the usual insider game. It’s a celebrity game – a snark-fest with the nation’s entire white working class. Vote for Bristol and we’ll show the media establishment how powerful we are! Buy my book and we’ll show the know-it-all coastal elites a real book directed at real people! Tune into my cable show and we’ll show the real America – far from the urban centers with immigrants and blacks and fancy city slickers!

And she is getting better and better at it. And if Sarah Palin is denied or cast aside by the establishment, there will be hell to pay.

As I believe will become clearer, the Palin Strategy will involve a political threat to the GOP establishment: Deny her the nomination she’ll run as independent. This will split off much of the white working class and guarantee defeat of the Republican establishment candidate. It will also result in her defeat in 2012, but that’s a small price to pay for gaining the credibility and power to demand the nomination in 2016, or threaten another third-party run in 2020.

Once nominated, her campaign for the general election will be purely populist. She’ll seek to broaden her base to become the candidate of the people, taking on America’s vested Establishment.

More than anything else, the Palin Strategy depends on the continuing fear and anger of America’s white working class. She’s betting that their economic prospects will not improve by 2012, or even by 2016 and beyond.

Sadly, this is likely to be the case. On Tuesday, the Fed issued a gloomy prognosis. Even if the U.S. economy began to grow at a rate more typical of recoveries than the current anemic 2 percent, unemployment won’t drop to its pre-recession level for 5 to 7 years. A minority of the Fed thought this was too optimistic.

Sadly nobody inside and few others outside the beltway has a clue.  The Democrats do not and should and the republicans surely do not since they are the embodied representatives of the vested interests.