I have had a long hiatus from posting, due in large part to a hand injury that severely limited my ability to type for quite some time, and threw me into a tailspin both physically and mentally for even longer. But the primary reason for my relative silence over the past several months is because I have been conflicted over whether I should continue to post as PalinDemocrat on my own blog and others.  Not because of the Palin part—because my admiration for her has only grown in recent months—but because of the Democrat part.  The actions of the Democrats over the last few years in general, and the last few months in particular, have caused me to question whether I want to be associated with that party in any way, even nominally.

The name itself seems to produce a visceral reaction across the political spectrum. When I joined TeamSarah and started posting as PalinDemocrat, the near universal reaction among conservatives was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and quite a bit of foaming at the mouth. And the reaction on many PUMA blogs was not much better. It was even decreed on one of them that PalinDemocrat was an oxymoron, and I might as well call myself an atheist Christian.

Personally, I don’t see the conflict. I am not an Obamacrat, and I never will be. But I was raised Democrat the way many people are raised Baptist, or Episcopalian. Everybody in my family was a Democrat, as were most of the people in my circle of friends and acquaintances. For most of them, it boiled down to “Republicans represent the rich man, Democrats represent the working man.”.

That is no longer the case, and hasn’t been for a very long time. As near as I can tell, neither major party has any interest in representing working people. The Democrats might pay lip service in an election year, and throw an occasional bone to the unions. But the reality is that they all serve corporate masters, in many cases the same ones. If they had to wear logos for all of their corporate sponsors, in proportion to the funding that they receive, their suit jackets would all weigh at least 50 pounds.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, has walked a mile in many of our shoes. She has worked her way up wearing a blue collar around a red neck, and she was willing to take on corruption in both parties to do it. The elites in both parties fear her because they know that she can relate to ordinary Americans in a way that they can’t, or won’t.

She has been the largest and most effective (and in many cases the only) speed bump on the road to Obamanation.  I don’t and nor do I have to agree with her on every issue to support that effort. And I don’t feel any particular need to abandon my political identity because my party has been hijacked by radical racists and nasty misogynists.

So at the end of the day I have decided that I will remain PalinDemocrat for as long as it suits me, but the list of Democrats I will be supporting and voting for in the near term will be very short indeed.  I can count them on one hand. Or more accurately, on one finger, one which will is directed to the Obamacrat Party for the foreseeable future.