As this writer makes clear, themedia attacks on Sarah Palin have been astonishing, over the top, and they remainunrelenting. Yet the media support forBarack Obama even prior to his decision to run for the presidency could havebeen described with exactly the same language. Just swap out support for attack.
As I posted when Sarah Palinfirst erupted onto the national scene, the American people may have doubts overher leadership and potential, but her enemies on the left had no doubtwhatsoever. Her good fortune is thatthey have spent themselves stopping her on the wrong battle field.
If she chooses to enter the 2012presidential campaign, it will be the battlefield of her choosing and heropponents have utterly spent their best ammunition to the point that they cannotreally make it up anymore.
At some point the American peoplewill speak and I suspect that her campaign could be a rout from beginning toend. Tea party support has opened a waystation for independents and she is leading that charge. The old line GOP and religious GOP factionshave no place to go and she will owe them nothing. That is why they are so grumpy.
Obama has been revealed as asocialist college professor type with no resonance with that seventy percentplus of the electorate that the tea party and GOP easily appeals to. The mish mash of the health act is deeplyresented as his utter disregard for the eleven million unemployed and thehousing disaster. He too obviouslyrespects power and wealth and that is not a basis of electoral trust. Even then he still can pull something out ofthe hat that will make him electable. Hedoes have incumbency.
The real fight will take place inthe early primaries. If she wins throughthose skirmishes, them I suspect that she is unstoppable. Recall this is a lady whose idol and indirectmentor is Margaret Thatcher.
Sarah in 2012?
Among the most astonishing phenomena of the current political scene inthe U.S. is the relentless percussion of hatred, animadversion, revilement andoutright dissimulation hurled against Sarah Palin—the mirror image of the orgyof adulation which Barack Obama enjoyed prior to his election and in theauroral days of his administration. One is put in mind of the vicious andslanderous campaign waged by the liberal-left against George Bush. But this issomething different from Bush redux. The difference is that Bush was asitting president whose policies many felt, rightly or wrongly, were steeringthe nation in a perilous direction, whereas Palin is without public office andexecutive power. The media have clearly gone beyond the limits of reason orpropriety.
The question is why. What is it about Sarah Palin that has generated sointense a degree of tractarian misprision, that has turned almost the entiremainstream media against her, and has even led many reflective people to doubther competence and her intelligence? What explains the abuse she has had toabsorb, from being dismissed as a rabble-rousing populist lightweight to beingaccused as a murderer by proxy in the Tucson
In an article for FrontPageMagazine, Evan Sayet has essayed an answer to this provocative enigma. “What isit about her that they hate?” he asks, and replies, “It has to be her lifestory” which, pace her critics, “could not be more laudable.” Andthat, of course, is the problem. Everything she represents violates theDemocratic left’s agenda and narrative: she is a self-made woman, enjoys astable marriage with her high school sweetheart, has raised a together family,refused to abort her Down Syndrome child, is equally at home in thewilderness and in the halls of State, was a successful mayor and an effectivegovernor, upholds the Constitution, is a doer and not only a talker, andexemplifies the traditional American virtue of self-reliance. Thus, as Sayetwrites, “at every turn, Ms. Palin’s story debunks the myths of victimizationand self-centeredness that is at the heart of the Modern Liberal ideology.”
In other words, Palin is neither a liar nor a parasite, but a truth-tellerand an industrious worker—two attributes that have cost her dearly in a liberalenvironment dominated by special interest groups, entitlement seekers,political predators, fiscal sycophants, tax evaders, people addicted towelfare, single-parent families living off the dole, labor union apparatchiks,official and media appeasers in the “war against terror”—in short, the swarm ofbarnacles that have battened onto the ship of state.
Historian and commentator Victor Davis Hanson concurs. In a summarizing articlefor Pajamas Media, he concludes that Palin’s being “a mom of five childrenflies in the face of the demography of yuppie careerism.” In the “binary world”of network columnists, late-night TV hosts and the culture of the left,“Sarah Palin is apparently all that they are not.” Moreover, Hanson points outwhat is palpably obvious but often unadmitted. “And how can it be fair thatSarah Palin seems stunning after five children when so many in the DC-NYcorridor after millennia on the exercise machine and gallons of Botoxare, well, ‘interesting looking’?” This latter phrase is the most tactful—andtactical—of satirical put-downs, and says volumes about unconfessed resentment.Palin’s undeniable beauty works against her, especially among the feministsorority, no less than her candidness, moral rectitude and integrity ofcharacter feature as liabilities in the eyes of her detractors.
Hanson believes that Palin is “scary not so much in 2012” as anantidote to Barack Obama, but that “she could be around—and around in anevolving way—for a long time to come.” Here I would be inclined to vary,however modestly, from Hanson’s analysis of the menace Palin represents to theliberal-left constituency. The veritable tornado of hatred and defamation towhich she has been subjected argues something far more immediate in itsimplications. What the Democrats and their supporters earnestly fear is notonly that Palin may be around for the indefinite future, but that she isindeed potentially electable in 2012 and must be stopped at all costs.This is perhaps the principal motive for so libelous a spectacle as the left’sall-out debauch of vilification. But will the strategy work?
We need to remember that the liberal-left ideology which seems sopotent and widespread in contemporary America is to a large extent the creatureof a progressivist elite and its media organs, busy collimating theirquarry. It does notspeak for the vast majority of Americans but, as ArthurBrooks clearly sets out inTheBattle, accounts for at most 30% of the nation. What he calls the 30%coalition, grounded in “European-style statism…expanded bureaucracies,increasing income redistribution, and government-controlled corporations,”advances an agenda that is not shared by the remaining 70% of the population.And it is precisely here, in the preponderant sector of the electorate, thatPalin’s real strength lies.
Palin has, as I’ve written before, all the right political instincts, alove of country and a practical understanding of foreign and domestic affairsthat the ostensible sophisticates in the newsrooms and in the galleries ofofficialdom sorely and demonstrably lack. And she has the common touch. Shedoes not fly over flyover country; she connects with the people who live there,often dismissed by their supposed betters as rustics and “clingers.” She is, toput it succinctly, down to earth.
Lest I’m beginning to sound like a hagiographer, let me assure myreaders that I’m only trying to set the record straight. Does shehave flaws? As the saying goes, you betcha. Does anyone else on the Washington
The reason, then, that Palin may appear “dicey,” a long shot for theWhite House and unconvincing as a savvy political player is owing not to anycalamitous personal deficiencies—after all, she has succeeded brilliantly inmost of her undertakings—but to the well-coordinated offensive launched againsther by the media, the special interest groups and the entrenched Beltway power brokers.That is, she has been targeted for extinction by the 30% minority who controlthe levers of power and influence. They have her in their “crosshairs.”
But this is to ignore the 70% majority of center and center-rightAmericans, many of whom have become more and more skeptical of the press andwho are correspondingly fed up with the techniques of character assassinationemployed by the agencies of the generic left. Paradoxically, Palin’selectability can be reckoned as an inverse function of the virulent campaignintent on her delegitimation. The “war against Sarah” is a clear indication ofthe feasibility of her candidacy for the presidency. The greater the fury andbluster and dissembling she is met with, the greater the likelihood that sheposes a genuine threat. One does not raise a mallet to crush an ant.The hatred meter going off the charts registers a force not easily dealt withor pragmatically resisted.
Nothing, of course, is guaranteed. As Myra Adams, who served on the McCain Ad Council, suggests,electoral calculations at the primary level require stringent caution andmilitate against nominating what she calls “Kamikaze Republicans” or“doctrinaire conservatives,” who could well lose in key states like Pennsylvania or Florida
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