Editors’ Round Table on Sarah Palin: The Palin Moment
Thomas Fleming, Scott Richert, and Aaron Wolf have all offered typically thoughtful pieces raising important points to consider in evaluating Sarah Palin. But I would like to offer a different perspective, focusing on the speech Palin delivered at the Republican Convention and the reason the speech succeeded, to the point that Palin now enjoys a higher approval rating in the polls than either Barack Obama or John McCain, not to mention the hapless Joe Biden.
Once the Palin nomination was announced, Palin was subjected to a vicious media onslaught, with the same media that did its best to ignore the story of John Edwards' infidelity to his cancer-stricken wife lapping up the story of Bristol Palin's pregnancy with glee, giving credence to false rumors that Palin's Down syndrome son was actually her daughter's, and generally treating the Palins as the Clampetts of Wasilla hoping to move to a big mansion with a genuine cement pond. Many of the media criticisms reflected the leftist elite's disdain for ordinary Americans, and especially its belief that the central defining value for all right-thinking people is support for legal abortion and mandatory sex education. After all, what shocked the media was not that Bristol Palin had engaged in fornication--an activity regularly lauded in the press and glamorized in all the offerings of Hollywood--but that she had not been supplied with condoms and, when those failed, a check made out the nearest abortionist. And there were even ugly criticisms, in a variety of internet sites, of the fact that Palin had not murdered her youngest son when she learned that he would be born with Down syndrome. The Obama campaign even reacted to Palin's nomination by starting an ad campaign attacking John McCain's professed pro-life stance, no doubt intended to stir fear that if the crazy Palin makes it to the White House, women will no longer be free to kill unborn handicapped children or unborn children conceived during youthful fornication.
And then Palin took the stage and fired back with poise, confidence, aplomb, and humor. The speech was devastating to Obama because it was true: Obama does talk about ordinary Americans one way in Scranton and one way in San Francisco. And Palin was able to speak out in defense of ordinary Americans in a credible way because, much more than Obama, McCain, or Biden, she is one: she was indeed a small town mayor, and she did first get involved in politics through the PTA. She is not a multi-millionaire. She is not part of any establishment. Her husband does manual labor and belongs to a union. And she exhibits, or at least projects, some of grit and defiance characteristic of the frontier women Roger McGrath has written about in Chronicles.
The fact that Palin struck a chord with millions is a positive sign. It is healthy that millions of Americans still respond to evocations of small town life and the frontier, rather than evocations of victimization and shame in our past. It is healthy that millions of Americans revel in mockery of a corrupt and effete leftist elite, an elite that wishes to erase the last vestiges of Christian morality and pride in the America that existed before the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. And it is healthy that millions of Americans recoiled from the type of attack launched on Palin by the media and capitalized on by the Obama campaign.
To be sure, none of this is a reason to vote for John McCain, a staunch advocate of global free trade, mass immigration, and a belligerent and reckless American imperialism. But it does, in an otherwise dismal political season, offer some reason for hope. Sarah Palin may well end up proving as big a disappointment as most recent Republican politicians have been, but the fact that millions of Americans responded so positively to the speech she gave and the image she projected suggests that, one day, there may actually be a political market for the ideas and policies that, unlike those advocated by McCain, will help in preserving the America Palin's fans wish to preserve.
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Mr. Leaberry,
I think you are correct.
To all:
Mark Shea is doing an outstanding job of analyzing the leftist hatred of Palin, which he rightly sees as an example of the leftist hatred of the normal which Joe Sobran has been writing about for decades: http://www.markshea.blogspot.com/
To all:
Mark Shea is doing an outstanding job of analyzing the leftist hatred of Palin, which he rightly sees as an example of the leftist hatred of the normal which Joe Sobran has been writing about for decades.
The problem I have is what Palin's surging popularity reveals about the "normal" American electorate - especially the female half of it. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that women are "snapping up" Sarah Palin style eye glasses, shoes, and (of course) lipstick. There is even a demand for Sarah Palin wigs. Needless to say the denizens of the fashion industry are scrambling to make a financial killing off this most recent celebrity fad. Can anything be as surpassingly silly? On this basis the American people choose their rulers.
More serious is the blatant militarism of the McPalin ticket, emphasized and re-emphasized by both candidates and the me-too militarism of Obama and the democrats. The American people are bloodthirsty and eager for more war. Were a pro-war position unpopular, the candidates would be eager to conceal their own pro-war inclinations; instead they proclaim their militarism in every interview.
I have decided to write in for president the name of Otto von Habsburg. He represents everything I would like to see in a president: a strong Catholic faith, steeped in the history of western civilization, a gentleman and a scholar and one with vast experience in the ways of politics without having been corrupted by them. Draft Otto movement, anyone?
@27 Tom
I know you don't like to vote. And it's probably true that if it would change anything then "they" wouldn't let us do it. However, I still show up at the polls for 2 reasons.
1. I had to wait 10 extra years for citizenship because I was white, and even then Congressman Frank Wolf had to intervene on my behalf -- the spite factor, and
2. I vote No on any and all bond issues and Virginia constitutional amendments -- another spite factor.
Plus, since VA has no party registration I'll vote in democrat primaries for Lyndon LaRouche because he's a bull goose loony who got railroaded by the system, and he's Virginia's bull goose loony. Like Tip O'Neill said -- all politics is local.
I'm going to clone the post I put on Aaron's fine article. Dang but I hate going against all my intellectual idols! Prof Wilson: there isn't going to be any traditionalist reaction. Forget it. We didn't pass the civilization on to our children. They don't even know what you are talking about. When the pendulum of the dialectic next swings away from the statist/leftist/evil antithesis, it isn't going to be to the paleo thesis; it will be to the synthesis and that will not be to our liking. It has already swung once and the synthesis is the hated neo-cons. The next synthesis is going to be an even worse group - the libertarian types who have no sense of right/wrong nor community and yet feel a great sense of entitlement. These are the selfish heathen who cut in front of you on the freeway on a good day and will push the button on a bad one, say, after the economic meltdown.
I understand and agree with what you guys and the beautiful Mrs Boyer are saying: we shouldn't be naive about what we are getting and, yes, all those cheering fans are being very naive! But now the cloned post:
Hey all you Paleo Purists! We’ve lost the culture war. The dialectic has turned a few times and nothing short of meltdown and/or civil war is going to bring back the life we cherish. Most of us older folks haven’t even been able to pass it on to our children and certainly not to our grandchildren. No election is going to change that — as most of the Chronicles posts recognize.
So why are we being stubborn holdouts for the perfect ticket? It hasn’t happened, again. All one can do is perform a little calculus as the issues and facts parade before us and go for the team that is closer or even slightly closer to our own desires.
Other than the possibility of McCain foolishly pursuing hegemony around the world, McCain is closer to our side than is Obama. And even with Obama we are still going to have someone who thinks we should be the world’s policeman. You can count on his signing on to United Nation’s adventures and foolish treaties that usurp US sovereignty. With McCain having a Democratic congress to contend with I doubt that he will be able to engage in much imperialism.
It pains me to see so many of you whom I respect being such absolutists. Most of you are agreeing that Obama would be worse and yet you are still holding out. For what? Look, we all know the Bush years have been a disaster but at least we got a Supreme Court that recognizes the 2nd Amendment means what it says. And didn’t Bush appointees uphold the partial birth abortion ban? I hate to expouse situation ethics but that’s the choice we have before us.
(#58, Jim): You make some very good points, but I am not quite ready to call it quits on a restoration of Christian civilization, although I am not naive enough to think it's going to happen soon. After all, when St. Benedict and his monks got to work the society they had to live in was a pretty hideous mess. It took many years and it wasn't politics that made the difference. As far as being a purist, perhaps there are some but as for me I have never expected to find the perfect candidate or ticket. This is politics, after all, and there are going to be compromises and dirty deals occasionally. However, I have voted all my life for the lesser idiot so the bigger idiot would not get elected. You see the results before you. Voting for the lesser idiot is no longer satisfying. It is very tempting to vote McCain just because he isn't Obama, but I am going to resist the temptation. Unfortunately, we depend on the two major parties to supply us with candidates and when they can't do any better than this year I say a pox on both their houses. Either way I am afraid we will get what we have asked for all these years.