One of the charms of print journalism is that columns must be filed in advance of publication. This affords the reader an opportunity to judge how well they have stood up to the last evening’s breaking news. Whereas, by the time the live television commentator’s remarks have been overtaken, no one can remember what he said anyway. He can now say something else.
My Saturday column was filed, for instance, before Sarah Palin announced her impending resignation as Governor of Alaska. It follows that my passing mention of her was not, as might seem to the Saturday morning reader, an allusion to that speech, but instead an example of prescience.
My passing remark was, “all a Democrat has to do is scream ‘I smell an authentic conservative!’—Sarah Palin, for example—and the victim’s own party colleagues will immediately rub her out.”
Since her announcement, U.S. pundits have tended toward two, apparently incompatible, views of the matter. One school holds that she is in fact a conventional politician, trapped in Alaska when she has a national stage, and that she has just freed herself to run openly for president. The other holds that she really is not a conventional politician, and has had enough of politics, after all the filth that has been hurled at herself and her family.
A careful reading of Palin’s remarks, not only in the first announcement, but in her explicatory Internet post the next day, reveals that both views are true. The pundits were also right to observe that her announcement itself, with all its Alaskan superfluity, and its timing on the eve of Independence Day, the moment after the “mainstream media” had dimmed down for the long summer weekend, was evidence that, as Maureen Dowd so charmingly put it in the New York Times, “Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.”
The reason why Palin appeals so deeply to so many “middle Americans” in the “flyover country” is of course the same reason she is so profoundly detested by the pointy-heads of the coastal elites. In words, in deeds, and in electrical resonance, she expresses the life-wish of the former, and exposes the death-wish of the latter. And at the moment when the American electorate had resolved upon the Obama adventure, she presented herself as the iconic anti-Obama.
To say the American people are currently divided is to deliver oneself of a droll understatement. The “tea parties” and other populist manifestations, growing in size and force, suggest to me that President Obama’s life will not be easy. The determination on his side, to press forward with genuinely radical and economically consequential liberal megaprojects, suggests very interesting times ahead.
I doubt Palin has any specific plan, even a rough one, to run for president in 2012. That is still more than three years away, and she will still be quite young when it happens. She will most certainly try her luck as standard-bearer for the Republican anti-establishment, in the run up to the mid-term elections in 2010, and then take it from there.
One of the things that makes her an unusual politician, and also the opposite of Obama, is her sincere disbelief in plans and planning. She could be running for President in 2016, or even 2020, and will not be John McCain’s age until the presidential election of 2036.
Moreover, I don’t think anyone has a clearer view than Palin herself of her need for more breadth and national experience. Nor of the needs of her family, for that matter, given the taste she has received of what the media are eager to do to them (compared to the halo of protection they extend around, say, Obama’s young and impressionable children).
Her course cannot be easy: she knows the enemy, and she knows that the enemy “debates” by demonizing people, not by rational argument. From her view, she has received a significant personal insight into just how degrading her political enemies can be, and the whole “progressive” culture that supports them.
The word “populist” could mean many things, both good and bad. To my mind, Palin currently has both good and bad populist qualities. But these include the very best quality: a real, visceral identification, amounting to love, for the people who actually do America’s work, take America’s risks, raise America’s children, and believe in God. These people are held in contempt by the progressive elites—they are tax fodder—just as Palin is held in contempt, as “Caribou Barbie.”
Quite frankly, she has scores to settle, and on behalf of all those people. That is what got her into politics to begin with, at the PTA level, and that is what will animate the woman on the national stage. She has the heart of a lion, and she will not run away.
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