Now, some of the characters
that previously "passed for decent"
that the Palin candidacy exposed as
sneering, silver-spooned snobs.
But we have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office. She is a person of great ambition, but the question remains: What is the purpose of the ambition? She wants to rise, but for what? For seven weeks I've listened to her, trying to understand if she is a Bushian or Reaganite - a spender, to speak briefly, whose political decisions seem untethered to a political philosophy, and whose foreign policy is shaped by a certain emotionalism, or conservative whose principles are rooted in philosophy, and whose foreign policy leans more toward what might be called romantic realism, and that is speak truth, know America, be America, move diplomatically, respect public opinion, and move within an awareness and appreciation of reality. [...] But is unclear whether she is Bushian or Reaganite. She doesn't think aloud. She just...says things. [...] She does not speak seriously but attempts to excite sensation. [...] In the past two weeks she has spent her time throwing out tinny lines to crowds she doesn't, really, understand. This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine. She could reinspire and reinspirit; she chooses merely to excite. She doesn't seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts. [...] In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics.
As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.
Yes, she recently met and turned several heads of state as the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York. She was gracious, charming and disarming. Men swooned. Pakistan’s president wanted to hug her. (Perhaps Osama bin Laden is dying to meet her?)
And, yes, she has common sense, something we value. And she’s had executive experience as a mayor and a governor, though of relatively small constituencies (about 6,000 and 680,000, respectively).
Finally, Palin’s narrative is fun, inspiring and all-American in that frontier way we seem to admire. When Palin first emerged as John McCain’s running mate, I confess I was delighted. She was the antithesis and nemesis of the hirsute, Birkenstock-wearing sisterhood — a refreshing feminist of a different order who personified the modern successful working mother.
Palin didn’t make a mess cracking the glass ceiling. She simply glided through it.
It was fun while it lasted.
Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.
[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phones book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true of a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid Sarah Palin has those prejudices.
Sarah Palin is now the heroine of the Republican base. Scary. During the campaign it became obvious that she is completely ignorant on the principal issues. It never became widely known that she is a religious nut: she believes in the imminent End of Days and the "Rapture," in which the saved will be suddenly wooshed up to heaven- an notion that has no basis in scripture or anything else. She believes she was elected governor because of a laying-on-of-hands by an African clergyman who had run a witch out of town for causing automobile accidents.
This stuff makes William Jennings Byran look like Martin Heidegger.
In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not." [...] In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by a man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain [...] With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was no argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not be need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist" -in other words, someone who believes there is not point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us. [...] An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on Youtube, show her being "annointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoked at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be done on Nov. 4."
This is what the Republican party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.
If Barack Obama has been the most remarkable phenomenon of the recent political scene, Sarah Palin must be second. The emotional responses to each-- especially by the media and the intelligentsia -- go beyond anything that can be explained by the usual political differences of opinion on issues of the day.
That liberals would be thrilled by another liberal is not surprising. But there are conservative Republicans who voted for Barack Obama, and other conservatives who may not have voted for him, but who are quick to see in various pragmatic moves of his since taking office an indication that he is not an extremist.
Anyone familiar with history knows that Hitler and Stalin were pragmatic. After years of denouncing each other, they signed the Nazi-Soviet pact under which they became allies for a couple of years before going to war against one another.
Pragmatism tells you nothing about extremism. But the conservative intellectuals who seize upon President Obama's pragmatism to give him the benefit of the doubt are obviously bending over backward for some reason.
With Governor Palin, it is just the opposite. The conservative intelligentsia who react against her have remarkably little to say that will stand up to scrutiny. People who actually dealt with her, before she became a national figure, have expressed how much they were impressed by her intelligence.
Governor Palin's "inexperience" is a talking point that might have some plausibility if it were not for the fact that Barack Obama has far less experience in actually making policies than Sarah Palin has. Joe Biden has had decades of experience in being both consistently wrong and consistently a source of asinine statements.
Governor Palin's candidacy for the vice presidency was what galvanized grass roots Republicans in a way that John McCain never did. But there was something about her that turned even some conservative intellectuals against her and provoked visceral anger and hatred from liberal intellectuals.
Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, "He's not one of us."
The trim, erect and impeccably dressed Alger Hiss, with his Ivy League and New Deal pedigree, clearly was "one of us." As it turned out, he was also a liar and a spy for the Soviet Union. Not only did a jury decide that at the time, the opening of the secret files of the Soviet Union in its last days added more evidence of his guilt.
The Hiss-Chambers confrontation of more than half a century ago produced the same kind of visceral polarization that Governor Sarah Palin provokes today.
Before the first trial of Alger Hiss began, reporters who gathered at the courthouse informally sounded each other out as to which of them they believed, before any evidence had been presented. Most believed that Hiss was telling the truth and that it was Chambers who was lying.
More important, those reporters who believed that Chambers was telling the truth were immediately ostracized. None of this could have been based on the evidence for either side, for that evidence had not yet been presented in court.
For decades after Hiss was convicted and sent to federal prison, much of the media and the intelligentsia defended him. To this day, there is an Alger Hiss chair at Bard College.
Why did it matter so much to so many people which of two previously little-known men was telling the truth? Because what was on trial was not one man but a whole vision of the world and a way of life.
Governor Sarah Palin is both a challenge and an affront to that vision and that way of life-- an overdue challenge, much as Chambers' challenge was overdue.
Whether Governor Palin runs for national office again is something that only time will tell. But the Republicans need some candidate who is neither one of the country club Republicans nor-- worse yet-- the sort of person who appeals to the intelligentsia. -Thomas Sowell
The snobs got their wish; President Obama. Sarah Palin and all of her witch doctor-religious-fanaticism-and-all-around stupidity went back to Alaska to run the state. So far she's doing a better job up there than President Obama and his collection of Ivy League egghead tax cheats are doing in D.C.. As I type, President Obama who recently gave The Prime Minister of our best ally, England, the raspberry is preparing to board Air Force One to fly him, his limo, and the decoy Air Force One (on another flight path) to Los Angeles. Obama is not meeting with the California governor to discuss the State's terible economic woes. Nor is he not stopping in LA on a lay over before he goes on to visit other another important ally; Japan. Obama is flying to LA to appear on The Jay Leno Show. This appearance on late night comedy television is not only a first for the first Black President, this is a first for a sitting president. Thank you snobs!
Don't be fooled into thinking Leno will be given the chance to make our President look stupid. Who do you think President Obama is? Sarah Palin? The entire script, including jokes, for the President's appearance was approved by Obama before Air Force One was gassed for takeoff. All Obama has to do is stay on script.
The snobs who sneered at Palin thereby giving us
President Obama remind me of a great Thatcher
tale:
The story as I was told it is that in the early years of her prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher held a meeting with her aides and staff, all of whom were dominated by her, even awed. When it was over she invited her cabinet chiefs to join her at dinner in a nearby restaurant. They went, arrayed themselves around the table, jockeyed for her attention. A young waiter came and asked if they'd like to hear the specials. Mrs. Thatcher said, "I will have beef."
Yes, said the waiter. "And the vegetables?"
"They will have beef too."
And do not forget, if it's Tuesday, you need to be here. Until the job is done. Literally.
.
Tremendous work.
But still trying to figure out when Christopher Hitchens ever "passed for decent."
And I mean that in the old-fashioned, common law sense.
Posted by: Mr. WAC | March 18, 2009 at 04:51 PM
I got the treat of seeing the Iron Lady in action during Prime Minister's Question Time once or twice while hanging about Parliament in 87/88.
I still remember the time that Neil Kinnock got up and decided he was going to be funny, snide and condescending about some issue or other (I forget which) for which the P.M. had been receiving some flak in the press. Mrs. Thatcher took Kinnock's remarks, crumpled them up into a figurative ball and proceeded to jam them right back down his throat. He was so stunned by her reply that he simply sank down on to the bench, his eyes bugged out and his jaw hanging sideways.
Posted by: Robbo | March 18, 2009 at 05:24 PM
Neil or Joe Biden..
I forget who said what first..
Posted by: Dave C | March 27, 2009 at 09:32 AM
I believe that you forgot another Silver Spoon critic. That would be David Frum. This is an excellent post!
Posted by: Mark J. Goluskin | March 27, 2009 at 03:13 PM
Chris Hitchens is rabidly anti-religious and has a bee in his bonnet for Christianity.
But I do not see any trace of snobbery, here or in his other public words.
Surely you are mistaken in including him in this list.
Posted by: bruce | March 27, 2009 at 07:22 PM