The intensity of feelings Sarah Palin evokes from almost all sides is remarkable — and for me, a bit puzzling. I don’t think she has earned either adoration or contempt. But as we’re seeing, she elicits plenty of both.
Peter Wehner – “Why All This Fuss Over Sarah Palin?”
It’s because people – the people who makes Palin a “populist” – sense enduring and worsening problems and great dangers (and opportunities) that our political and intellectual betters don’t seem to grasp and, sitting on their very comfortable bottoms, may not even see a need to face squarely; and that even individuals like those Wehner mentions approvingly – “Margaret Thatcher, William Bennett, and Antonin Scalia” – haven’t been able to lead us out of.
If the country undergoes a return to relative normalcy, then Palin may not be very relevant politically in her own right, at least as a candidate for president. Anything else – and she may matter a lot, and could continue to surprise, confuse, and even puzzle the intellectuals on all sides whose main purpose in political life ought to be to anticipate, clarify, and even solve major public questions.
Comments 7
Other than her comment about death panels, what other dangers has she pinpointed? (Maybe I’m not as well read about her as I should be.)
I do think, nevertheless, that it’s fun to hear people like Alan Colmes dismiss her out of hand as a serious player while simultaneously fixating on her. I think the truth with Dems is that they fear her — perhaps rightly so. Those members of my family who donated money to Obama’s campaign damn Palin to hell.
November 18th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
She’s stronger on the enduring problems – machine politic, self-destructive and constricting energy policies, etc. – than the worsening dangers (on which she’s mainly an orthodox conservative, I think, not that that’s a bad thing), but the point is that the “puzzling” intensity on both sides doesn’t have to be about her at all. She channels it and reflects it back at its true source. Wehner doesn’t seem to recognize that IT should even exist. For people like him and those incrementally to his left – Frum, Brooks – everyone should be relaxedly reading the latest policy prescriptions of post-compassionate conservative think tanks and finding a John Thune or Mitt Romney to present them in a dignified manner.
November 18th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I struggle with Palin. I realize a number of things that both intrigue me on one hand but make me feel maybe not much is there on the other.
Whenever I get ready to completely dismiss her, I wonder why all the venom from the left about her. Why would they waste the time with her, I don’t think she can win an election, do they fear something I don’t see? Her politics in reality are pretty much the standard conservative bent; what position does she take that is that outlandish. She is more of an isolationist than other conservatives might be, and she isn’t all that energetic on topics in foreign policy, but not even she could screw up as much as the current crew has.
And then I think of our friend David Frum who seems to feel in reality we must be dem lite to be politically relevant, and David Brooks who puts his nose up at her because she has an accent and plays to the populist currents.
I have a feeling she is going to play local candidate kingmaker. And if I were a true RINO or more likely as Steyn suggests a DIABLO, I would fear her. Because if her gaze comes to your district and your voting record suggests you maybe aren’t really a republican and you have a decent challenger, you are going to lose. And everytime Brooks, Frum and the Washington elite stick up their nose at her the more dangerous she becomes to those types. Why would they want to eliminate members in Congress people who think more like them than her?
November 18th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Colmes is still not sure, that Trig is her child, I used to feel sorry for him being beaten up by Hannity, but I think he’s just a jerk now. She’s one of the reasons why cap n trade, is being shelved, her Right to Life speech in Evansville, was almost more about the resources of “God’s Country” and missile defense, than the stated topic.
She has the right values, instinct andpolicies
and she didn’t go to Harvard or Berkeley to get there. I don’t know how anyone who read her book, but would not like her, she
gives the same short shrift to the people in the State party as Schmidt and Wallace, so it’s not a surprise
November 18th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Identifying problems doesn’t seem quite the same as explaining how those problems can be eliminated.
I was able to identify that I had a problem pulling high, inside fastballs without starting my swing early.
When I realized this, did I become a good candidate for the majors?
Heck, even the LA teams refused to sign me to a four-year contract.
Luckily, I was able to find other ways to amass money.
November 18th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Agree with much of what you say, except I don’t see any evidence of “isolationism” in her at all.
She has the wit, courage, and intuition to put herself on the right side of controversial issues: She takes the hits for “death panels,” but in the process firmly establishes herself as perhaps the leading, most uncompromising critic of the Dems unpopular key agenda item. If there’s a new episode in the energy crisis, again and even more so, she will be the leading proponent of the most popular alternative to the Obamaist non-response (the impractical, oversold, counterproduction green capitalism of Cap’n'Tax). She was happy to use the dirty word “profiling” vis-a-vis Hasan, putting into one single word the “common sense” reaction to the presence of extremist Islamist murderers among us and the need to overcome political correctness.
She ain’t smooth, but looking at where she’s come from and where she is, it’s easy to apply the word genius to her as a politician. Of course, you need more than genius to become president – it may even be an encumbrance – and being a genius politician isn’t the same as being a winner or being the right person in the right place or even sounding presentable to Brooks-Wehner…
November 18th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Well, I think she is less aware of and less interested in the issues of foreign policy and more worried about the domestic, and maybe that is just because she was a governor and that was all that was important. I do think her instincts are good, which is why I said she would be better than the current crew. And I don’t mean to say she would be an isolationist in the strict GOP pre-WWII vein, but she would need some excellent people around her on foreign policy and we all know what the US State department is all about.
November 18th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
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