Even the dimmest Democratic strategist now realizes that beating
a “lifelong” Yankees fan with roots in Illinois may not have been
enough of a tutorial in how to stop real agents of change. But
campaign operatives spend years honing political reflexes, and so
Democratic talking points continue to trudge forward, limping from
the beating that many of them received from the Governor of Alaska
and her band of merry men, but still capable of persuading
uninformed voters.
While I am not a Republican, I am, together with such disparate
conservatives as blogger Charles Martin and rocker Ted Nugent, a self-appointed paladin for Sarah Palin.
Accordingly, it seems helpful to review and rebut the most
prominent of Democratic arguments. Martin continues yeoman service
as a rumor buster, but I’m talking more generally about the
signal-to-noise ratio that Democrats are now trying to find with
respect to how they attack the Republican ticket.
The literary parallel to this activity might be found in Louis
L’Amour’s great old western, The Sackett Brand, where
every man in the extended Sackett family rides to the rescue of a
relative who has been framed for murder and trapped by several
dozen gunslingers on Arizona’s Mogollon Rim. One Sackett realizes that he will
not reach that ground in time to lend his marksmanship to the
coming showdown. Unfortunately for opposing cowboys, the man also
recognizes three of them taking their ease in a saloon, and decides
that the best way to help his besieged relative is to “trim the
edges” of the company ranged against him. It’s the kind of ethos
that wins both wars and elections.
What legacy media types have not yet realized is that Sarah
Palin has a tribe (thank you, Thomas Lifson), and Alaska’s Mat-Su Valley is
every bit the rallying point that L’Amour made the Mogollon
Rim.
THE GENIAL BUT CREDULOUS afternoon host on a talk radio station in
North Carolina spent two days echoing Cajun confidence man James
Carville in a lament that John McCain had not picked Senators
Olympia Snowe or Kay Bailey Hutchison as running mates. There are a
lot of Republican women out there, he mused, so how does putting a
state jet on eBay and changing your mind about a bridge
construction project give anyone chops enough to stand a heartbeat
from the presidency?
The obvious answer to that lament is to reject attempts to
minimize the Palin record, which compares favorably to that of
either banana (top or second) on the Democratic side. Moreover, as
the talk show host seemed not to understand but Mr. Carville surely
does, Governor Palin galvanizes the Republican base more than any
other candidate would, while bringing impressive energy policy
credentials to the table. Despite their years of federal service,
neither Hutchison nor Snowe could turn the October 2nd vice
presidential debate into must viewing the way Governor Palin
has.
One could also reverse the question, and ask how 35 years as a
bench-warmer in the Senate gives the Democratic candidate for Vice
President claim to that office, especially when the standard-bearer
to whom he now answers already has speechifying down pat.
The few Democrats who continue to denigrate executive experience
in Wasilla and Juneau seem to assume that because Barack Obama
befriended political players in Chicago and had Annenberg Challenge
money to “organize” with, he must have run the city, at least in a
metaphorical sense. In the mother of all circular arguments, Obama
himself cited managing his own campaign as proof of his
executive abilities.
Faced with nonsense like that, the easy rebuttal is to ask why
Obama has a campaign manager, and whether management is the same as
leadership. Confuse those nouns often enough, and what you get is
what Obama has: a rationale for having voted “present” rather than
“yea” or “nay” as often as possible. The contrast with presidents
who believe that “the buck stops here” could hardly be more vivid:
any buck that stopped at Obama’s desk would be tempted to plant a
flag and beat its chest in an “I’m the first!” dance.
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal had fun with
email generated by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, but while
Taranto swatted Plouffe’s attempt to define the
responsibilities of a community organizer as “helping to elect
Barack Obama,” he let another whopper pass unrefuted. “You know
that despite what John McCain and his attack squad say, everyday
people have the power to build something extraordinary when we come
together,” Plouffe had written, as though John McCain were against
“everyday people,” even though evidence to the contrary is
overwhelming, starting with the non-lawyers on the Republican
ticket, proceeding through winsome convention speakers like U.S.
Army Captain Leslie Smith (Ret.), and ending with legions of
rank-and-file voters whose humility contrasts with the aggrieved
sense of entitlement that hobbles so many activists.
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM now suggests that Obama should ignore Palin,
because the election is about McCain, and Democrats think they can
beat the old guy who did not remember how many houses he had on
account of having married into beer money. They may be right. But
Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Rudy Giuliani once thought the same
thing, and McCain is not running by himself. With the possible
exception of Oprah Winfrey, ignoring Sarah Palin is not something
the media will be doing.
Embittered feminists sputter that Palin is “anti-choice” in the
hope that the charge casts a spell against election to federal
office. In this they forget that the “anti-choice” vote enabled
George W. Bush to beat John Kerry. Moreover, “anti-choice” flips to
“pro-life,” and away we go, because pro-life morphs easily into
pro-mommy, and if some of those moms join the PTA and sign their
kids up for hockey leagues and rifle range memberships, well,
stranger things have happened. Leaning on recycled anti-choice
rhetoric only keeps people from realizing that when the choice
involved amounts to infanticide, being “anti-choice” is a good
thing.
The continuing reverberations of Pope John Paul II’s “theology
of the body” are also a force to be reckoned with in this election,
and something that Democrats did not have to face in prior contests
for the presidency. Among other things, the “new feminist” thought
of the late pope reminds anyone who sifts through it that chivalry
is grounded in honor rather than condescension. The terms of the
abortion debate have officially changed, and that debate is not
trapped on the Mogollon Rim any more, either: When American
Catholic bishops rapped Nancy Pelosi (D-California) for confusing
fourth-century embryology with Christian doctrine, they moved with
a speed they had learned from Pope Benedict XVI, and a confidence
they had learned from Pope John Paul II. The bet here is that in
spite of their creedal differences, truth formulated by a former
Polish quarryman also resonates with certain American snowmobile
racers.
A cousin to the anti-choice charge is the idea that Governor
Palin is somehow “extremist.” Dahlia Lithwick of Slate
thinks Palin’s nomination acceptance speech
exemplified Republican efforts to “mainstream the mean girl.” Her
pout is at least two ice cubes short of a tray, in that it falsely
assumes that Palin is some kind of super freak, while confusing
pointed criticism with meanness. The rest of us applaud pointed
criticism as a useful tool for turning moose-sized egos into
mooseburgers.
Other people have already pointed out that one of Governor
Palin’s strengths is that she and her family are so endearingly
mainstream that “mainstreaming” them is wholly unnecessary. In
this, of course, Todd Palin is equally complicit, and God bless him
for it.
Professionals on both sides of the aisle tend to miss this stuff
because they still think in terms of books like The Last
Hurrah and Dreams from My Father. They should be
thinking in terms of The Sackett Brand, The Strongest
Tribe, and The Didache.
