I hadn’t intended to write about Sarah Palin this week. Honest.
For one thing, I touched on the poster lass for populist prostitution last week. For another, I preferred not to re-conjure the implications of Palin’s ongoing, political reconnaissance – from book tour idol to Tea Party icon to NASCAR avatar — so soon, because it’s, well, depressing. Every kid’s favorite elementary-school teacher as credible candidate for the world’s most demanding, most important job. Dan Quayle never looked so substantial.
Indeed, thanks yet again, John “Country First” McCain. When we needed a true patriot, we got a real political knave.
But then I read David Broder’s column over the weekend. It was a veritable Palin paean. And Broder’s hardly one of those “shill, baby, shill,” cheerleading Fox pundits. He’s a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, author and University of Maryland professor. He’s the centrist “dean of the Washington Press Corps.” By all accounts, he should know better.
“Those who want to stop her will need more ammunition than deriding her habit of writing on her hand,” observed Broder after Palin’s Tea Party presentation in Nashville of safe bromides, pious piffle and diluted dogma. “The lady is good.”
But “good” at what? Good at what a former TV sports reporter should be good at? Al Keck was pretty good too.
I saw George Wallace at a rally in a packed, wall-to-wall-y’all hangar at the St. Petersburg-Clearwater Airport in 1972, and he was good. Work-the-house good. Funny good. Ridicule-all-things-Washington and ‘pointy-headed-liberals’ good. But not “good” enough to vote for unless you signed on to “states’ rights” as blatant code for racial superiority and segregation.
Palin is not in the populist tradition of William Jennings Bryan or Ross Perot. Or George Wallace. She’s not that smart. And it’s well documented. Thank you, Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. But she is — for the disaffected and self-disenfranchised — a template for trying times.
She is the ShamWow candidate.
She absorbs the personal frustrations, veiled racism, dogmatic simplicity, rabid jingoism and fundamentalist fears that smolder in a chunk of the electorate. Then she reflects it back: Government is the problem, the scapegoat and the arch enemy of common sense. Then cue the invocation of Ronald Reagan and pretend that he did more than inveigh against government’s size and impact. She proceeds to obliterate the distinction between the governing and the governed. She’s the “soccer mom” bull horn of the latter, awaiting their Howard Beal, “mad as hell…not going to take it any more,” lash-out epiphany.
Palin underscored her appeal the day after Nashville in a Fox interview with Chris Wallace. “I’m not going to pretend like I know more than the next person,” she pointedly noted. “I’m not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I’m going to fight the elitist, because for too often and for too long now, I think the elitists have tried to make people like me and people in the heartland of America feel like we just don’t get it, and big government’s just going to have to take care of us.”
Would that Broder hadn’t given her a political pass on that one.
Populism isn’t a synonym for knowledge deficit. Being ill-read, poorly traveled and frame-of-reference challenged shouldn’t be a form of egalitarian seduction. After all, shouldn’t we want our ultimate leader to flat-out know more than the “next person?” And not, in an “extemporaneous” aside, be limited by how much can be written on the palm of a hand?
And shouldn’t Broder have called out Palin for applying one of the lamest rhetorical hustles known to politiciankind. The specious, “us-against-them” comparison where you get to define “them” to your utter advantage. Hence, those who know more are really posturing, dictating “elitists.” Syllogistically speaking, who really needs a real-world-challenged, Harvard Law Review editor and Bolshevik theorist who is channeling Norman Thomas? Not when you can have a marginal communications student and half-term governor who can field dress a moose and raise a daughter too good for Levi Johnston.
But I did agree with Broder’s assessment that Palin was “perhaps the most visible Republican in the land.” My only quibble would be with “perhaps.” A vice presidential candidacy, Fox TV gig, reality-show celebrity status, calculated ubiquity, a GOP contender chasm and a base of vigilante-patriots ensure as much. Certainly neither Newt Gingrich nor Mitt Romney can top this act. In fact, they may be closet “elites.”
And for what it’s worth, yes, I did catch Palin’s populist-diva act down at the Convention Center in the early fall of 2008, along with lightweight acolyte Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Frankly, Wallace’s populist panderfest was better. Good thing there was no cable punditocracy and partisan politics as prime-time entertainment back then.
But, no, the lady is not good. But she is great copy, even if her unscripted syntax would embarrass a rookie Rotarian.
But her ShamWow candidacy? That’s real. And that is really scary.