Sarah Palin at the June 8 Republican Dinner

Last year when Neil Young was promoting some new material, people kept asking him to play the old songs. He told a reporter that he preferred doing the new material because he was a different person back then — Young headlined at Woodstock and was a leading voice into the next decade — and he can’t even remember who that person was.

That is a comment on the artist’s life well-lived, taking it as it comes and always peering ahead on the smoky river, never looking back. But it creates issues for the firm. The corporation hates change. It wants to sell the old songs in the back catalog. That is the problem the Republicans had with Sarah Palin at the Republican dinner. As said here months back, if Gov. Palin is to come forth, she will come forth at the June 8 dinner. And she did.

But the Republicans are heavily invested now in the old school. They are very old people with very old ideas who want to hear the old favorites. Palin, Todd and extended family fully change the paradigm; they are an explosive new force in American politics coming down out of Alaska like a volcano. The Palins are Neil Young, coming out of the big mountains in the northern wilderness. The Republicans want to hear the old favorites. They don’t want Neil Young. They want Perry Como. So they took her off the dais and put in that old chestnut, Newt Gingrich.

But Gov. Palin is a force of nature which cannot, will not, be held back. She was not allowed to speak, but I couldn’t find any reports about what the speakers actually talked about. However, 3 million people listened to Sean Hannity’s interview with Palin on Fox in the yard outside.

Hannity, to his credit, circumvented the market. Much as Bob Dylan did when he first awakened on the scene. Likewise, the firm Dylan was under contract to refused to play his good songs, pitching instead the old favorites; modest and moving folk songs he had played at Newport, R.I., on a wooden guitar. But the really good stuff would change everything. It would be bad news for the old crooners. It would ruin their list. So Dylan surreptitiously brought his music to a New York disco famous and trendy in the day called Arthur’s and slipped it to the DJ. Several radio people were on hand and played it in the morning all over New York. “Like a Rolling Stone” changed the record industry, changed the day, changed everything.

I’ll put Hannity’s interview with Palin last night in comparison. The Palins cannot be held back; not by Muggle network apparatchiks like Tina Fey, Charles Gibson and Katie Couric, not by the Republican National Committee, not by anything.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.