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| Sarah Palin is a test for America |
| 2009-06-10 |
| "The Optimistic Conservative" I have concluded that Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and one-time VP candidate, may be a test for America. It seems like at least 30% of conservatives, let alone her natural political enemies on the left, have to constantly edit the lady. I’m trying to remember if Reagan had to endure this. You know, as in, “He says all the right things, but he’s just so folksy, blah blah blah…” Palin made a speech chock full of excellent, superb, crying-to-be-made points this week, as an introduction to a Michael Reagan appearance in Anchorage. . . . The speech was blunt and courageous, particularly as regards the danger to liberty from government gaining leverage over the people through our finances. I have not been hearing other GOP politicians make this point. . . In Palin’s words: We need to be aware of the creation of a fearful population, and fearful lawmakers, being led to believe that big government is the answer, to bail out the private sector, because then government gets to get in there and control it. And mark my words, this is going to be next, I fear, bail out next debt-ridden states. Then government gets to get in there and control the people. A few conservative websites picked up on the speech, such as, of course, Hot Air. It is actually surprising how few have run pieces on it, though, considering the “red meat” of its content. A number of left-wing sites (e.g., HuffPo) have run the obligatory dismissive critiques, . . . But the silence from some major conservative outlets has been interesting. I do note that besides Hot Air, Lucianne Goldberg’s site posted on it, citing the CNN coverage. Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin both addressed the Palin speech on their radio programs. It got no mention that I can find at NRO, however, or among the well-known contributors at Townhall. This is not, it turns out, because the concerns expressed by Palin in her 4 June speech are not topical. . . . It is not to disparage the calling of the pundits that I come here. It is, rather, to point out that what they do does not build political momentum, or form a core of leadership to rally around. Yes, I know the direction Obama is leading us. But I want to do more than ask melancholy questions, and make discouraging conclusions, on the wide road to ruin. Sarah Palin does that. Read her words from the 4 June speech: So I join you in speaking up and asking the questions and taking action, and here at home in my beloved Alaska I just say, politically speaking, if I die, I die. I’ll know that I have spoken up and I will speak up to thank people like Mr. Reagan as we honor his dad, to encourage you too, Alaskans, to do the same, and don’t just hang in there and go along to get along but stand up and speak up, and be bold and demand that Washington be prudent with our public monies and prioritize for America’s security, and forget the political correctness… and couch our words so cautiously that they lose meaning, and we lose effectiveness, and then we lose hope because we start thinking that politicians are only worried about their poll numbers and attracting campaign contributions for their next bid so that they can hold on to some title and some position. This is a politician – a politician – making a commitment to stand for her principles no matter what. She is unafraid to link Obama’s federal activism with a threat to liberty. What other major GOP politician have we heard saying such words? I hear them only saying what amounts to “This is a bad idea”; “This is too much”; “This violates the American commitment to private enterprise.” But Palin is not afraid to make the crucial point that Obama’s plans threaten the very foundation of our liberties. There are millions of Americans who do not need further documentation, analysis, or persuasion to recognize that Obamanomics is a threat to our national heritage of individual liberties and rights. And we want to do something about it. We know that the spending has to stop. The government takeovers have to stop. The “bail-outs” have to stop. Government takeovers of industry are as old as Imperial Rome, if not older, and the last century has given mankind a millennium’s worth of experience with them, around the globe: we already know how this will all turn out, if the American ship of state does not reverse course. The time is already upon us for action. Palin holds out a promise of such action: the promise of a politician who will not tack or trim to the winds of political correctness. . . . It seems clear that when conservatives speak of Palin requiring “polish,” their perspective is that of selling her to America as a candidate for national office. It’s not they themselves who need to see more polish on her, necessarily; it’s all those other Americans who will demand it. And I wonder if this is so. If it is, it is a statement about America: about who we are as a people – and how far we have come from our roots in practical liberty, unpretentious individuality, and respect for character and substance over rhetorical polish and formulaic presentation. Will we only accept the truth if it is spoken with the accents of a pasteurized political elite? But what if no one ever speaks it in those accents? Do we condemn ourselves to a future in which liberty perishes from the earth, because we were waiting for polish, and elite appeal, in the truthtellers? This is a question we must seriously ask ourselves. From what I can tell, there are quite a number of conservatives out there who have not needed to ask themselves the question, because they were never worried about the issue of “polish” to begin with, and had no trouble declaring themselves as Palin supporters. But there is also a conservative contingent that, seemingly, can’t see the message for the polish, or perceived lack thereof; and rather than merely holding back from Palin, feels compelled to comment on the “polish” issue. One take on this general phenomenon is a poignant piece from The Weekly Standard in October, in which Sam Schulman muses on the fact that in terms of “class” acceptability, parlor revolutionaries Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn have more of it than Sarah Palin. The poignancy of the piece, for me, lies not in the distance Schulman tries to establish from the issue of social class in last year’s election, but in the respect he obviously has for it. Sure, it’s ironic as heck that Ayers and Dohrn retain any respectability at all, with their personal histories. But it’s yet more ironic that in seeking to lay bare America’s uneasy perspective on class prejudices, Schulman invokes analogies for Palin like the farm girl in the Loretta Young movie The Farmer’s Daughter, who rises to politics from domestic servitude in the “big house,” and the butler in a 1902 J.M. Barrie play (Admirable Crichton) who is a better man than all whom he serves. In case you’re not fully convinced of the class distinction being made here, Schulman adduces this passage from Manhattanite Paula Throckmorton-Zakaria: We may not have a ‘’servant” class in the strict Victorian sense, but a “service” class we have indeed, and it is serving us. How do we square our egalitarian self-conceit with a liveried doorman? Not easily. For non-New Yorkers, doormen are the guys who carry the bags, organize the packages and tell you who stopped by to see your 15-year-old while you were out. They also open the door. There’s a whole America out here of people who do not see things in these terms at all: of there being a “servant class,” or even a “service class,” and of people being pigeonholed in it – or, indeed, of it being particularly scrappy, of those whom the class-conscious pigeonhole thus, to seek high political office. Not only has Sarah Palin never thought, “Gee, if I lived in Manhattan, I’d be a doorman” – millions and millions of other Americans have never thought that either. We need to ask ourselves: are we a nation that would reject someone who is telling us the truth because some might see her as the farmer’s daughter, producing dissonance among her betters with her backwoods accent? What does it say about our ear for the truth, that it can be affected by such considerations? Are we sure it is Sarah Palin who needs to change, here – and not, well, us? |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #1 We need to ask ourselves: are we a nation that would reject someone who is telling us the truth because some might see her as the farmer's daughter, producing dissonance among her betters with her backwoods accent? Or an itinerant rabbi of a carpenter's household with a Galilean accent producing dissonance among his 'betters' like the Pharisees of Jerusalem. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2009-06-10 09:37 |