The difference between Obama and Sarah Palin
Image via WikipediaBarack Obama and Sarah Palin represent two different types of politicians. But they differ in ways that go beyond style. The survey must start with who they are. Only then can they be compared. Tom Junod at Esquire sees Obama as a rock star — a rock star from whom the spirits have unaccountably departed. “Now his gift has all but deserted him, and all that prevents the story from becoming tragic is his own apparent refusal to be affected by it.”It says something about the conceit of both Richard Cohen and Katie Couric that they both thought the question about what newspapers Palin read was some important insight into her intellect. Palin on the other had thought it was a silly question and later admitted to reading several papers that would have probably satisfied most listeners other than Cohen who she probably does not read.
The more obvious conclusion is that what made the story tragic was “his own apparent refusal to be affected by it,” his inability to reconcile himself with a descent from Olympus. But it pays to see what Junod thinks the magic was. Junod believes that the magic was “him”:
President Obama, after all, was elected by virtue of his personality, which provided not only contrast but novelty, and was grounded in his near-perfect pitch when addressing audiences large and small. Sure, he was cool and cerebral, but he was also confident, almost cocky, because he had the power to summon inspiring rhetoric on command, which meant that he had the power to summon us on command. Though many Americans didn’t know very much about him, there was one thing that was never in doubt when we saw and heard Obama on the stump: his ownership of his gift. By the way he carried himself, we could tell that he had always had it, and because he always had it, we could be sure that he always would have it. How could we resist a man who simply by opening his mouth could move mountains — and who had ascended all the way to the presidency by staking his political life on his own eloquence? How could we resist a man who seemed so sure that we could not resist him?“He” was going to save America. “He” was going to make the seas fall. “He” was going to make such music, conjure harmonies so overwhelming that even America’s enemies would come, drawn like animals to Pan’s pipe at once bewitched and converted. The whole success of the Obama administration hinged around the power of the Him.
The problem was that the skies did not open and only a very few were drawn to what in the end sounded less like piping than tootling. Jonod ends his entire essay with an insight that seems to come too late for the text. Barack Obama the Messiah is dead and the only way Obama can amount to anything is to try to become a decent, competent president. “He’ll never be Barack Obama again, now that he’s been rejected, and the oils of anointment are off of him. But Barack Obama — President Obama — can still be great, even if he has to sing someone else’s song.”
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, never presented herself as anything much. On the contrary, her chief claim to fame was that she was in some way very ordinary, a fact which horrified Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, to no end:
The mind of the demagogue is a foreign country. It has a strange culture, enemies that only the natives can see, a passion about the ridiculous and a blowtorch kind of sincerity that incinerates logical thinking. On Sunday, the custodian of one such blowtorch was on Fox News. I am speaking, of course, of Sarah Palin. …Cohen thinks it is all about winning the presidency. Putting a Her in place of the Him. It never occurs to Cohen that Palin might think more in terms of helping her country “win” than in personally occupying the Oval Office. Cohen mocks the idea of serving one’s country. He wrote, “when Chris Wallace asked her about any presidential ambitions, she did not coyly say that she had not given the matter any thought. Instead, she said that if her party needed her, if her country needed her, if the need for her was truly great, then she would sacrifice her freedom of movement, the privacy she enjoys with her family – never mind their tabloid lifestyle and addiction to publicity – and give it all up and run for president.” Who in Washington’s cynical atmosphere could actually believe that?
The fierce stupidity of this woman is hard to comprehend. It is the well from which she draws her political sustenance. … Katie Couric’s CBS, the network she thinks so unfairly skewered her by asking, for instance, what newspapers she reads. … The polls say she can’t win. I betcha Palin thinks she can’t lose.
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But his comments also convey another conceit of liberalism i.e., that those who disagree with them are not smart. Even conservatives who don't support Palin have to concede that she is generally right on the issues that most conservatives support. That makes her pretty smart in my book and it is one reason why I would support her if she decides to run.
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