The left's Palin obsession
THE 2008 presidential campaign may be over, but Sarah Palin's moment in the spotlight has yet to run its course.He is right about the reason for the loathing. If she was as empty headed as they claim, they would not be worried about her at all. The fact that she connects with voters is what is really scary for them. They can make fun of her syntax, but voters have decoded her message and they like it.
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... A whopping 91 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of her, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, and she is the runaway favorite when they are asked to rank possible contenders for the party's 2012 presidential nominee.Elsewhere, however, the savaging of Palin continues. In The New York Times, Maureen Dowd devotes yet another column to bashing Alaska's governor ("a shopaholic whack-job diva"). The popular Washington blog Wonkette, characteristically crude, pronounces her "human garbage." At TheAtlantic.com, an obsessed Andrew Sullivan calls her "deluded and delusional . . . clinically unhinged" and describes her as a nitwit with "the educational level of a high school dropout" who "regards ignorance as some kind of achievement."
Not everyone on the left is in a gibbering rage over Palin. The feminist social critic Camille Paglia, a pro-choice Democrat, is appalled by the Democrats' anti-Palin debauch, especially their attacks on her intelligence. "As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is," Paglia writes, "and, quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma."
After witnessing the poise, energy, and panache with which John McCain's 44-year-old running mate handled herself on the national stage, can the backbiters working overtime to trash her intellect really believe she is nothing but a vain and ignorant airhead? Well, maybe; partisans and ideologues are good at seeing only what they want to see. But they might want to recall that the last Republican to inspire such ardor and admiration among the party faithful - Ronald Reagan - was also derided as a dim bulb. Diplomat Clark Clifford called Reagan an "amiable dunce." The New Republic's Robert Wright viewed him as "virtually brain dead." Nicholas von Hoffman lamented that it was "humiliating to think of this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin being our president." That "bumpkin" became one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century.
I suspect that the loathing of Palin by so much of the opinion elite is driven not by contempt for her brainpower but by fear of her political potential. She is cheerful and charismatic, an unabashed and likable conservative who generates extraordinary grassroots enthusiasm. Tens of thousands of voters showed up at her campaign rallies, and even now, when she appears on TV, record-breaking numbers of viewers tune in. "Her politics aren't my politics," Lorne Michaels said after Palin's appearance on "Saturday Night Live." But "I watched the way she connected with people, and she's powerful."
Whether Palin has the skill and stamina it would take to win a presidential nomination, let alone capture the White House, it is way too early to tell. But the smart money says she is a force to be reckoned with. That may be just what her critics are afraid of.
You've neglected to mention many of Palin's drawbacks.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, she's a prodigous liar. There's no nice way to put that. She didn't clean up corruption in Alaska, the FBI did, and they did it when she was supporting the crooks. She lied consistently about "Troopergate." She lied about being "exonerated" for the latter when she was actually found to have abused her authority. She didn't stop "the Bridge to Nowhere." She wasn't against earmarks, quite the opposite in fact. She not only did not bring "transparency to government," but she did just the opposite, making it near impossible for the people to get access to what is the people's business. Even the little lies were appalling. To embellish her foreign policy "credentials" she claimed that she'd been to Ireland and Iraq. Her plane to Kuwait stopped to refuel in Ireland and I'm not sure if she even got off to stand on the tarmac. She looked at Iraq from Kuwait. By the same standard, if you looked at Canada across the Rainbow Bridge, you've "been to" Canada. In fact, if you've looked at the moon, you're an astronaut.
As her financial records are delved into it is going to become more and more apparent that she is chronically dishonest and profligate with the public money.
There's nothing smart about her. She's a fourth rate intellect with a third rate educaton.
People in Alaska have become all too aware of her shortcomings. Her ticket with McCain will wind up with less than 60% of the vote in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats 5 to 3, and less than 4% of the population is African-American.