VDH's Private Papers::Railin' on Palin

September 4, 2008
Railin’ on Palin
Has the left made a mistake?
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO The Corner

Why Do We Like Palin?

Much has been written why Palin both brings strength to the McCain ticket and is a gamble at the same time. Why then the growing wave of popular sentiment in her favor?

Various reasons, but one I think is that millions of Americans are simply tired of being lectured at by smug elites. Jetting Al Gore made tens of millions finger-pointing at us about our global warming. Obama's America, apparently unlike Rev. Wright's Trinity Church, is a cruel, downright mean and dysfunctional place. John Kerry's United States is one of the half-educated in need of Ivy-League enlightenment and tutorials.

So along comes someone (unlike Biden's vastly inflated middle-class biography) who really is from the working class. She likes it — and finds snowmobiling, hunting, fishing and living in small-town America not as a wasteful use of carbon-emitting fuels, cruelty to animals, gratuitous depletion of our resources, or proof of parochial yokelism. Instead it is a life of action in an often harsh natural landscape, where physical strength is married to intelligence to bring us food, fuel, and progress.

Palin's symbolism is the antithesis of the metrosexual wind- or body-surfing politician, and hair-plugged, neurotic TV pundit. So at this time, right now, millions apparently like Palin's atypical 19th-century profile. Again, it's a pleasant change of pace from Harvard Law School, D.C. politics, "community organizing" and the can't-do, 'they raised the bar on me' collective complaint.

If she can beat off the frothing Newsweek/MSNBC/New York Times inbred rabid wolves, and do it with the grace she has shown so far, she will fill a deep yearning among Americans for someone like her. A lot of Americans, if they watch reality shows, prefer truckers on ice or Bering Sea crab fishing to endless psychodramas of thirty-something suburban whiners.

So apparently they are eager to see a rare politician who is unapologetic about America's past achievements (cf. Obama's "tragic history" and need for more "oppression studies"), and who reminds us with pride that a muscular world of action, not community organizing, creates the bounty that others use and take for granted but so often sneer at the methods of its acquisition.

Right now, there are millions rooting for her in a way not true of Biden — and many who are criticizing her don't have a clue why that is so.

To Palinize...

Palinize: to slander and caricature a working-class female public figure for the noble advancement of liberalism.

Sarah Palin — self-made woman, and governor of Alaska — is being reduced by the left to a hickish, white-trash mom of five, analogous to the manner that esteemed jurists like Kenneth ("cigarette lawyer") Starr and Robert Bork were slandered by the media as incompetent right right-wing fanatics, and Clarence Thomas was pilloried as an affirmative action sex-maniac.

Why does the left and liberal media, in McCarthyite fashion, now seek to destroy rather than just oppose these public servants?

First, there is the anointed’s notion that the noble ends justify the slimy means, that whether the issue is abortion or affirmative action or any other hot-button social gospel, the supposed interests of the many override the common decency that should be afforded the few.

We are supposed to think that given one's cosmic sense of fairness and caring, the white knight always is afforded a little human leeway in slaying dragons in the here and now. To save the utopian vision of "two nations" John Edwards, presidential candidate, hundreds in the media passed on verifiable stories of his adultery, the financial support of his mistress, and his blatantly untrue assertions in public press conferences; by the same token to stop "one nation" Palin, the private life of a 17-year old girl must not only be aired, but distorted and in some cases invented.

Second, as in the case of a Palin or Thomas, there is the notion that the slandered deserve it as interlopers — unauthentic women or minorities due to their conservative views, who piggyback on the hard work of feminists and those in the race/identity politics movement. They purportedly do not show enough appreciation and deference to the pioneers who suffered so much to give us abortion on demand, quotas in hiring, etc. and as ingrates thus get what they deserve. For talking-head feminists that a Sally Quinn, Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton — unlike Sarah Palin — had a well-connected, influential male around to energize her career is of no concern — except perhaps to make the animus against the outsider upstart even greater.

So class plays a lot too. The liberal left buys into the Gore notion of offsets — that by backing ever more entitlements, and public assistance, the caring liberal is allowed to feel a little tsk, tsk about Alaska moose-hunters, teenage white girls getting pregnant, and small-town mayorships, without incurring the charge of elitism. Writing a story about a struggling family or an illegal alien wrongly deported, introducing a bill to help working moms, announcing that an Obama speech is the equivalent of the Gettysburg Address, all that lets you unload on the Palin's teenage daughter or Palin herself in ways that any unbiased observer would consider sexist, snobbish, and condescendingly cruel.

Being a mother of a Down syndrome child, raising five children, rising, without money or family influence, to the governorship on an anti-corruption and commonsense platform, in addition to trying to run the largest-sized state in the union, critical to both the energy and defense security of the nation, all that should have made liberals and feminists, if reluctantly, nevertheless appreciative of her success in a mostly male political world.

Not this week, perhaps — but soon there will be a backlash against all this creepiness. Just watch...

Don't Tread on Me!

Palin bites back...

Tonight I flipped to CNN and was struck by the talking heads flipping out about the Giuliani/Palin mocking of community organizers — as if the Obama team's dismissals of "small-town" mayors was fair play. The MSM networks are going ballistic at her speech and apparently never imagined that anyone would dare bite back — and also at them, the 'elite media' of the press, no less!

Compared to what Kerry et al. said about McCain, Palin was no tougher on the other side, so it is odd to hear CNN female pundits suddenly shocked, shocked that a "woman" would dare attack a man like that, and that it may "not play" outside the hall. Like it or now we are back in a cultural and populist war, brought on by a week of liberal character assassination.

The Left made a terrible mistake in the manner they have smeared Palin, and now they seem appalled at the red-state authentic populist backlash which is a different sort than studied Bidenism, where one recalls a distant childhood, not the recent past, or the living present, to prove they are one with the people.

So things heat up and are getting ugly as they always seem to do by September in an election year. Today it was no accident in the wake of the attacks on Palin that suddenly Obama comes out with pro-abortion ads attacking the pro-life position of McCain. The timing is a sort of subtext about the current and recent Palin Jr. and Sr. pregnancies: apparently Team Obama wants the viewer to see a pregnant teenager and a Down syndrome child and ponder something like: "under John McCain abortion in these cases would have been impossible."