Palin defeats intellectual snobs

James Taranto:

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One can hardly deny that Palin's reference to "death panels" was inflammatory. But another way of putting that is that it was vivid and attention-getting. Level-headed liberal commentators who favor more government in health care, including Slate's Mickey Kaus and the Washington Post's Charles Lane, have argued that the end-of-life provision in the bill is problematic--acknowledging in effect (and, in Kaus's case, in so many words) that Palin had a point.

If you believe the media, Sarah Palin is a mediocre intellect, if even that, while President Obama is brilliant. So how did she manage to best him in this debate? Part of the explanation is that disdain for Palin reflects intellectual snobbery more than actual intellect. Still, Obama's critics, in contrast with Palin's, do not deny the president's intellectual aptitude. Intelligence, however, does not make one immune from hubris.

For a wonderful example of such hubris, check out this post from David Kurtz of TalkingPointsMemo.com:

Is there anything quite as unsettling as when the nation's political class (and I use that term broadly to encompass the occasionally political, like the tea partiers) turns its fleeting but intense focus to a new (for them) and complex topic, like end-of-life issues?

It seems like years of painstaking work to nudge our death-denying culture toward a more frank and humane approach to our own mortality and dying could be erased by one misguided national discussion set off by none other than Sarah Palin.

Except that Palin didn't "set off" this discussion; President Obama did by trying to ram through legislation postalizing the medical system with no time for debate or reflection. How to care for dying patients is a serious, sensitive and complicated matter, one with which American families struggle every day. If you truly don't want the "political class" involved, your quarrel is with the man who is pushing for more federal involvement in this most personal of matters. It's entirely understandable that people would respond to such an effort by shouting, "Keep your laws off my grandma!"

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Those who pretend to be intellectually superior sure beat a hasty retreat. They did so because they saw it was an argument they could not win. The left tends to think that some issues are just to complicated for voters to comprehend, but then everyone understand the frame that Sarah Palin put around the issue.