Two Americas separated by a common language

Mark Davis:

Talk about nerve. The very notion of leaving an elected office occupied for barely two years. Even if it is to run for president, that makes it even more peculiar in view of the candidate's lightweight résumé of political experience.

I refer, of course, to Barack Obama.

Cheap stunt, but it makes my point. Sarah Palin's electoral track record, of course, is far longer than that of Obama, who overcame his meager credentials, and longer even than that of George W. Bush when he ran for president.

Granted, the departing Alaska governor's early political career is defined within the walls of a small-town city hall, but is that somehow less valid than years spent as baseball team co-owner or a community organizer?

The 2008 election redefined experience. As such, it is comical to read the sneering attacks launched toward Palin by hateful columnists who exalted Obama's decision to chuck his elected office and reach for the White House brass ring.

One difference is that Obama did it on the public dime, while still technically a U.S. senator. Palin at least has the decency to pursue her "higher calling" without the necessary long stretches away from her actual job.

So she leaves that job for a very uncertain future. Will she use this time to broaden herself, campaign for key people in 2010 and develop a strong foundation of voters that admires her as much for issues advocacy as spunk?

If so, she becomes a commodity to be reckoned with, a fact easily readable in the venom of her mocking detractors.

I was halfway through Todd Purdum's vicious Vanity Fair piece on Palin when I heard of her decision to step down. Among the first things I read afterward were the even more acrimonious New York Times columns by Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins, ridiculing that decision.

To Dowd, Palin is a "nutty puppy" displaying "exquisite battiness." She is merely "incoherent" to the similarly vexed Ms. Collins, who surely thought herself lucid when she found irony that someone against the "choice" to kill the unborn would focus on life's choices in her resignation announcement.

But in the stagnant Manhattan mindset, only people as glib as Dowd or as cavalier about human life as Collins deserve benefit of the doubt when approaching the presidency with slim political experience.

...

I think I may have found a new calling. I can act as an interpreter for columnist at the NY Times trying to comprehend what Sarah Palin is saying. In post that followed her announcement of resignation I pointed out the reasons why she did it and why it would make sense to her, while the gals at the Times were calling her incoherent and some rather ugly names. It was not as hard as translating jive, which the Times routinely cleans up to make people like Major Owens appear more coherent than he really is.

This John Fund story confirms much of what I had been saying about her reasons for leaving. I am sure that the gals at the Times scratching post could have done some reporting and come up with the same thing. Heck they could have read this blog like some others at the Times do regularly.

What we are seeing is an unusual bias. The same people who can watch President Obama stumble through an unscripted statement , with numerous uhh's and ahh's that are tuned out of the report, will invariably insert some of Palin's verbal ticks to make her look less intelligent than she really is. They did the same thing with George Bush because they did not like the way he talked either, but they mostly don't like to hear people who are conservatives talk at all, unless they are the late William Buckley who could confound them with words they had to look up.

The news reporters at the Times seem to do a much better job of interpreting Palin's speech than Collins and Dowd. I believe the two just do not think conservatism is smart. Funny. I feel the same way about liberalism. Now we have President Obama implementing it and proving my point.