WHAT SARAH PALIN DOESN’T KNOW: DOROTHY RABINOWITZ….SEE NOTE
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703444804575071330757893248.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion#printMode
Dorothy Rabinowitz, as usual, is right on target here….I like Sarah Palin as a gadfly to the GOP establishment…but if she were the candidate it would be a disaster…..rsk
What Sarah Palin Doesn’t Know
Her obsession with the politics of grievance puts her at odds with Ronald Reagan.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
From the day she turned heads at the 2008 Republican Convention—becoming at once an object of fevered controversy—one truth about Sarah Palin stood clear: She was fortunate in her antagonists.
Those in the media, especially, would stoke a mighty sympathy backlash on her behalf. That resentment would feed nicely into the candidate’s role as a voice for the aggrieved: those regular citizens under the heel of the “elites”—that immense, tentacled power whose depredations she has been describing to audiences since her star turn on the McCain ticket.
She showed resilience and not a little backbone throughout, bouncing back after a hapless on-air encounter with CBS’s Katie Couric. And after a daunting encounter with ABC’s Charles Gibson—a civilized presence and one of the most genial of men ever to occupy a news anchor’s chair—now turned into an oaf unable to conceal disdain as he questioned his guest on her capacities for office. That was, to be sure, a pale echo of other spectacles. CNN’s Campbell Brown rocketed, nightly, to impressive levels of semi-hysteria on the subject of Mrs. Palin and her incapacities.
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Addressing the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tenn., Feb. 6.
Andrew Sullivan, blogger, would become disseminator-in-chief of the theory that Mrs. Palin could not have been the mother of her youngest child Trig, and was therefore the grandmother. This was, Mr. Sullivan let it be known, a matter of urgent journalistic endeavor.
In a noteworthy message directed to Mrs. Palin in December, Mr. Sullivan allowed that he would like “this line of inquiry to end as soon as possible for the sake of all of us but especially the innocent child”—a child, he explained, who had been caught up in all sorts of secrets he didn’t deserve. A wonderful message indeed, considering that Mr. Sullivan himself was the chief architect of that inquisitory foray, which he pressed unrelentingly.
There’s no underestimating all that Mrs. Palin owes Mr. Sullivan for lines of inquiry like this. That’s not to slight David Letterman’s gross sexual insult, directed at one of the Palin daughters, when she and her mother attended a Yankees baseball game. Political gifts like these, so potent in what they convey about a candidate’s detractors—and to a vast national audience—don’t come along every day.
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Sarah Palin isn’t a candidate for office currently but the buzz of expectation surrounds her, none of it exactly vague. She could hardly have been more emphatic, in the last week, about her openness to a presidential run. All the more reason for the intense scrutiny of both her keynote speech to the Tea Party convention a week ago and a subsequent interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” Not that it required much scrutiny to see the obvious, and fast: that the Sarah Palin of election year fame has not been much transformed since last we met.
For many who look to her as a presidential hopeful, and a voice for their social views, this can’t be encouraging news.
Mrs. Palin has, it’s clear, enjoyed plenty of adulation, and displays even greater confidence than during that unexpected, bedazzling convention speech. Like Barack Obama, she is at home with adoring crowds.
There are, true, a few tonal changes: the jokes are jokier, the touches of malice heavier, and she revels more obviously than before in the playfulness she brings to her performances. It’s hard to imagine a more assured, better-timed delivery than the one evident in that down-home thrust at Obama supporters—”How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?”—in her Tea Party address.
Mrs. Palin now has, she reports, a team of Washington policy advisers who provide her with daily briefings on domestic and foreign affairs. None of them have, it appears, provided her with intelligence on the impact of certain of her central themes.
On, for instance, the unsavory echoes of her regular references to “the real America” as opposed to those shadowy “elites,” now charged with threats to the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of all real Americans. Neither does she seem to have any idea of how that low soap-box oratory—embracing one kind of American as the real kind, those builders in the towns and cities across America—rings in the ear today. It is not new.
So entrenched a place does this thinking occupy in Mrs. Palin’s bag of references that it can pop up anytime on any subject. Challenged in Mr. Wallace’s interview on alleged irregularities in her husband’s direct contacts with Alaska state officials—on judicial appointments, labor issues, and the like—Mrs. Palin countered that he was her “soul mate,” her “best friend.” The one she could trust while she was off traveling—and he busy working on “issues that meant a lot to him and to people, yes, out there in the real world with steel-toed boots and hard hats trying to build this country.”
Though it hasn’t attracted wide attention, nothing Mrs. Palin has done recently has been worthier of notice than her endorsement of Rand Paul, now running in Kentucky’s GOP senate primary. Dr. Paul, an opthamologist and radical libertarian, holds views on national security and defense that have much in common with those of the far left. Not to mention those of the considerable body of conspiracy theorists, antigovernment zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged who flocked to the presidential candidacy of his father Ron Paul, the congressman from Texas.
Read other articles by Dorothy Rabinowitz.
Rand Paul has indicated, in interviews on his policies—these so shrouded in ambiguity as to require expertise of the sort that cracked the Enigma code—that some of his views differ from that of his father. No surprise, that. Ron Paul, it will be remembered, has said repeatedly that the United States had given Osama bin Laden good cause to attack us, which bin Laden himself had explained. Bin Laden, Ron Paul opined, was no doubt “bad” but “he’s not known to be a liar.”
Rand Paul, who offers no opinion on his father’s touching faith in bin Laden’s devotion to truth, says only that his father’s statements have been misunderstood. On one or two things his own views are clear: He stands opposed to the Patriot Act and he wants to cut defense spending.
Asked about her endorsement of this candidate, Mrs. Palin informed Mr. Wallace she was proud of her choice. She admired Rand Paul’s domestic policies, not of course that she agreed with everything he stood for. It does not, apparently, occur to her that everything he stands for—and can vote on—is precisely what comes into play when, and if, he becomes a senator with her help.
Mrs. Palin regularly invokes the name of the most revered of her heroes, Ronald Reagan—among the sunniest stars ever to mount the political stage, and a leader who spoke to all of America. He did not appeal to the aggrieved. Nor did he see in the oratory of grievance, or talk of real Americans and those who were not, a political platform.
Mrs. Palin would do well to look to his model, between study of those daily policy briefings. Her supporters will have to wait a while. At a time when Republican hopes are in the ascendancy, as now (and even when they are not), it’s impossible to imagine the Sarah Palin known to the world today as their leader. It would be well for her to begin pondering the reasons.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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