The Virtue of Shutting Up

....The Virtue of Shutting Up...

And he said unto them, Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.

p.s.

…beyond antagonizing coastal elites like myself…

Of course you are, schmuck.

basman, good catch, I missed that one. And, of course, actively ignoring someone is a response in itself is a form of condescension. Down here in Mexico, all of my students are completely unaware of the Palin, and it is easy enough to avoid anything Palin, but I have to admit her zaniness is amusing. I can't actually stand to watch her speak but reading some of what she says is golden. It is like she stepped from a modern day version of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Rivals.

And I don't bear her any ill wear for her fortune, she has a special needs child that will needed to be taken care of for the rest of her life, and his after she passes.

I disagree that the Palin phenomenon is "media-driven." It's actually grass-roots-driven, which is one reason why it's worth talking about. Palin is a potent symbol, the perfect symbol perhaps, of a farce that extends beyond her own weird career -- that is the farce of American conservatism today. I read two opinion pieces this morning in the Chicago Tribune about Palin -- they were not shutting up -- but the points were worthwhile.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped1119chapmannov19,0...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-oped1119palinnov19,0,3209...

I couldn't agree with you more, Mr. Linker! Ironically, it's time to stop making fun of her and start taking this woman seriously. Once you do that you realize that she is simply a publicity hound and therefore not worthy of attention.

I guess you will be one of the small legion of shocked, "well-informed" commentators who will shake your heads, saying goodriddence when she signs on with Murdoch at Fox and proceeds to turn herself into the "real" Oprah. You will not be happy at what she does with the 2010 election. And if our President continues to act like a stranger in a strange land, he is not going to like it much either. While he continues to learn how to be president, she will be offering the commentary.

I was in a motel last week that had satellite TV with about 5,000 channels, and let's talk segmentation. There were, like, eight channels devoted to cleaning fish. Civilization is lying before Time like salmon before a sushi chef; our little minds are being sliced and diced, and propped up geometrically just so. Mine sits in front of me now, a Rubik's cube, waiting for me to solve it.

In Ye Olde Days the most segmentation happened on Sunday nights on Ed Sullivan, with maybe Julie Andrews and Topo Gigio and Wayne & Shuster filling the hour. But we've turned the corner and now how we love our deconstructions, like Sarah Palin. Palin is a unit of information. Much like the atom: it will be years before scientists discover that even smaller components exists, and we'll break the Sarah Palins of that future day down into their protons and electrons, their liptons and their quarks.

Their may be sixteen stations devoted to Palin, one to each of her sub-Sarah components: Channel 14,398 is Sarah For Parents, Channel 2809 is Sarah Couture, Channel 14,766 is Chef Sarah.

Sadly, I will not live long enough to witness the further denomination of Chef Sarah into its constituent food groups. This process is as infinite as entropy itself, as I'm sure you know.

I could not imagine anyone who shares less my political ideas and social values than Sarah Palin.

That said I have been and am dumb founded by the viscera heaped on her by others, which, for me, reached its apotheosis in the near lunatic attacks on her by the very excitable Andrew Sulivan over the campaign. And that said, I have been and am dumb founded and appalled by the sheer condescension shown to her by certain self proclaimed "elites".

I always liked Camille Paglia's take on her, even though the estimable Ms P disagreed with Palin politically. Nice and helpful to hear from a literary sensibility as opposed the self satisfied and laughable Linkers amongst us. Just listen to this condescending, self parodying goof, who, ironically, impales himself on his own insufficiency, while thinking he is doing the opposite:

..and her accomplishments are minimal at most. (Mayor of a small town? Come on. A half-term governor of the most undeveloped state in the union? Please....

"Please" is right!

She is potent and personally compelling and needs and deserves to be taken seriously even if, admittedly, as William Carlos Williams said, "The pure products of America/ go crazy."

Bill, my poem, read my poem, and tell me how much you liked it, or not. It's back on the tv, yea or nay, threadlet.

Basman, please! I think there is something a bit more aggravating about Sarah Palin than the fact that she stands for everything you disagree with. It's that she's a proud vacuous moron who's got no business near anything important. After an initial warm reception, the media figured that out -- based on politically neutral factors like her idiocy -- but many conservatives did not or didn't care. The media did their job that time, and as for those conservatives, I think it says a lot about conservatism today. Also, I really hate this "real America" business in a way that goes well beyond this or that political viewpoint. She's an aggressor in a culture war that is mainly going on in the minds of jackasses, a happy mouthpiece for Fox News talking points, and nothing else. She's not just a conservative. She's the queen of the crazies, and worthy of almost every bit of scorn that has been heaped on her for that reason.

Jhildner.

Aren't we polite!

*Please* right back attcha!

She doesn’t stand for *everything* I disagree with, though I am far removed from her anti government, libertarian, religious based, gun vouching, rugged individualistic politics and policies. But then again from what I have seen of her, heard from her, I like her, find her likable, personable and compelling. She’s no intellectual and she’s not I’m guessing widely read or a deep thinker. But she has had a meteoric political arc that’s still ascending. So I find you over reacting when you call her a vacuous moron and I will grant you that she wasn’t ready for the vice presidency, which is not to say, to my mind, that she never could be.. But it’s an overreaction to say that she had/has “no business near anything important.” Gee whiz, the people of Wasilla thought otherwise; so did the people of Alaska. You know better than them? (I have been to Alaska a few times. And I met a broad swath of sensible people of various stripes and for what it’s anecdotally worth to you, a fair number thought well of her.) I think it’s an overreaction too to call her an idiot. What are your criteria for judgment in that regard? The flaw in your rant is transposing her clear unreadiness for the prime time of presidential politics—which is a mug’s game at the best of times—onto virtually everything else she has done publically. (I think though, speaking about “publically”, she did quite well in her debate with Biden: she more or less mastered the requirements of that particular forum and fared no worse than Biden.) There were admittedly ideologues who overlooked her vice presidential unreadiness. But there are conservative thinkers I like a lot, even those who liked her, like Bill Kristol. And I don’t detect I don’t think a lot more ideological rigidity on the right than I do on the left. Heaven help me I like some folks on Fox and really don’t like some folks on MSNBC and even though I’d give the extreme talking points edge to Fox (Glenn Dreck) but omigod does MSNBC have its share too. If you grant that she is indeed a conservative—“She's not just a conservative”—you are locating her in an erstwhile intellectual and political tradition. But again I think you fall prey to overreaction when you call her the “queen of the crazies”, an aggressor in a culture war, call every social conservative a jackass, and when you suggest it was for example right for Andrew Sullivan to speculate on whether her daughter was really the mother of her grandchild, or when Marty Peretz characterizing the republican Convention wondered in print “Who are these Swilly People?”, which is to call the Republican attendees swine. But what the hell I’m just one of those people who bitterly clings to my Mochachino, New York Review of Books and my version of the Albin Countergambit.

Gotta go, the fish are bitin’ and, like time and tide, wait for no man.

I said "almost" every bit of scorn. But, really, a lot of scorn is deserved. Moron, idiot, etc. is on target. I listened rather closely. I have not heard her say anything remotely intelligent. If you want to cite the words she uttered that made you -- I shutter to think -- *like* her, I'm all ears. I have heard her spout hackneyed talking points at her most lucid, and, otherwise, ramble incoherently. It's not about debating points, although I don't know what debate you watched. It's that she doesn't think or believe or say anything that bespeaks decency, reason, or a rudimentary grasp of any issue of national importance. At best, she's a self-promoting hack who happens to be a cutie-pie. (If she's not that, who is?!)

Yes, "erstwhile" intellectual tradition indeed. It gives her too much credit to apply to her a label that implies considered judgment. Except that that label no longer implies such judgment, and Palin is Exhibit A. I'll pass for now on the false equivalence you insist upon regarding cable news networks, but the jackasses I had in mind are not every "social conservative" -- another label that used to imply some judgment about which rational people could disagree and debate before the Palin-Fox complex arrived on the scene -- but rather the tea party lunatics and those sympathetic to that mass of irrational paranoia for which there is one word, not meant to imply a deficiency of character otherwise because I know a few: deranged.

Seriously, though, let me put this on you; my position is conventional wisdom and, I think, painfully obvious: Why do you like her?

What r u doing up so l8?

Me, I can't sleep

I'll try to say a word anon.

jhildner, politically I agree she is a train wreck, but she reminds me a lot like my sister in law, and I think if you knew her pre-politics you probably would have liked her fine, in a she is a nice neighbor woman kind of way.

I agree with you that her job as Mayor of Wasilla, a very small town, means next to nothing, and her only jobs in the big time, she quit two of them (Gov. and her appointed post) and was a truly lousy VP candidate.

Since I see no way in hell she will be nominated, as I said above I don't begrudge her her fame or fortune, she is just the lead singer in a choir of the crazies.

Basman, what in the world do you find "compelling" about her? I find her utterly ordinary (in a jersey shore kind of way), not unlike so many of the women I grew up with.

Love those Jersey girls, especially with the big hair, bangles and out loud smacking gum chewing.

This weekend I plan to acquit myself of what I like about Ms P with a little help from the other Ms P perhaps.

Gotta' go: time is money and I don't have enough of either.

What about her dark and penetrating insights into Death Panels?

What about the importance of seeing, really "seeing" Russia?

Apparently some of us are not yet ready.

A highly experimental defence of the estimable Ms P with some (a lot of, I‘ve copied from her like crazy and here shamelessly and admittedly highly selectively) help from the estimable Ms P.

...Conservative though she may be Palin represents an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut, on her roll out, she seemed simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin made big step forward in feminism. In the U.S., the ultimate glass ceiling has been complicated for women by the fact that your president is also commander in chief. Women have risen to the top in other countries by securing the leadership of their parties and then being routinely promoted to prime minister when that party won at the polls. But a woman candidate for president of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. Your president also symbolically represents the entire history of the nation -- a half-mystical role often filled elsewhere by a revered if politically powerless monarch.

Young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances. The politician who comes closest to the persona of the first woman president is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San Francisco.

Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer past. She is an avatar of of frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did -- which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.

After her roll out, the leftist blogosphere unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics -- which caused a backlash that could have damage d Obama's campaign: when liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. Palin seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. Her arrival does portend the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.

Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington occupy their own mental zones -- nice to visit but not a place to stay if you value independent thought these days. Ambitious professionals in those cities, if they want to preserve their social networks, are very vulnerable to received opinion. At receptions and parties they're sitting ducks. They have to go along to get along.

I, or Ms P, may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I and Ms P enjoyed Palin's performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit.

Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal because she resembles so many women who grew up in rural hard scrabble America.

Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

Here's another example of the physical fortitude and indomitable spirit that Palin as an Alaskan sportswoman seems to represent right now. Last year, Toronto's Globe and Mail reprinted this remarkable obituary from 1905:

Abigail Becker

"Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830

A tall, handsome woman "who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all," she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper's cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont."

Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today's pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.

To automatically assume that Palin is a religious fanatic who has embraced the most extreme ideas of her local church is exactly the kind of careless reasoning that has been unjustly applied to Barack Obama, whom the right wing is still trying to tar with the fulminating anti-American sermons of his longtime preacher, Jeremiah Wright.

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.
Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and liberal I believe that government must stay relatively out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an right to control his or her body. Nevertheless, I abortion became an obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement -- leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women -- an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.

The gigantic, instantaneous coast-to-coast rage directed at Sarah Palin when she was identified as pro-life was, I submit, a psychological response by loyal liberals who on some level do not want to open themselves to deep questioning about abortion and its human consequences.

If Sarah Palin tries to intrude her conservative Christian values into secular government, then she must be opposed and stopped. But she has every right to express her views and to argue for society's acceptance of the high principle of the sanctity of human life. If McCain wins the White House and then drops dead, a President Palin would have the power to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court, but she could not control their rulings.

It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism -- one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.

But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide....

(After having read this over myself before positing it, I conclude that it is sometimes not easy being me.)

Howdy basman: I have plans this evening, and it will take me at least an hour to get my jaw back up from off the floor, so I can't get into it just now. Hopefully, I'll be able to respond later with something other than, to borrow a phrase from Tina Fey, "What the WHAT?"

Be gentle my man, it was an experimental defence, but I'm committed to it in the way one comes to love an ungainly birthmark.

jhildner:

If you ever come back to this unholy mess, consider this by Canada's own Rex Murphy, who says with better writing, more succinctly and incisively than what I meandered my way through channeling the other Ms P--being of course Camille Paglia.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/obama-inspires-palin-connec...

Dear basman, I've returned to the "unholy mess," and read the column. I'll try to be gentle, because I know you to be a rare voice of reason and considered judgment among the Internets' amateur commentators, and we all have commitments to ungainly birthmarks of one sort or another.

My first and main thought is that you don't really defend *Palin*, but rather an airy idea of her that does not remotely correspond to the actual woman. For example, you argue that "a woman candidate for president of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making," but Palin never came anywhere close to demonstrating such capacity. What was that about Putin rearing his head and threatening Alaskan airspace? Similarly, you urge that girls seeking office should study and obtain a "deep knowledge of military matters." But Palin never made such study or sought such knowledge, even after accepting McCain's offer to join the ticket. A poised and pretty athlete, she studied communications at various schools in order to become a television sportscaster, which strikes me as the perfect career ambition for her -- nothing wrong with it, and nice work if you can get it. She never showed any serious interest in anything military except that she knows her way around a gun. But that's as much a qualification for leading the military as knowing how to work a copier is a qualification for practicing law. Actually, it's probably much less. I find it useful to know how to work the big Canon.

The idea of Palin that you're defending -- her brand -- is at its most divorced from reality when you (and the columnist) invoke an ideal of a tough "frontier" woman. We don't have frontiers in this country anymore, and Palin wasn't mayor of a "frontier" town or governor of a "frontier" state. She was mayor of a tiny, undistinguished strip of exurbia and governor of one of the nation's least populous states with a narrow, small, and unique resources-based economy. Her life was not "hard scrabble" or "frontier"-related. She is the daughter of a high school teacher and a secretary. In what substantive sense, basman, does Palin resemble Abigail Becker? None.

You and the columnist loved her convention speech. I remember it well, and I remember thinking the following about it: "Oh shit, she's good, and we had better not underestimate her." (Whatever pressure she faced, though, a Teleprompter failure was not among them, so I don't buy the "technical glitches" stuff. She suggested that she ad libbed some portion of the speech -- a self-promoting lie. Her words matched perfectly the previously released text.)

My view of her as a formidable opponent was short-lived. She was not brought down by feminists or pro-choice liberals or Manhattan elitists. I have a pretty clear recollection of what happened next: She gave some script-free television interviews in which she revealed herself to be a comically shallow ignoramus -- a critical turning point which neither you nor the columnist acknowledge. Her winky, flirty debate performance -- though better than the interviews -- was not nearly enough to turn the ship back around, and, in the end, she emerged as an offensive, shrill, Michele Bachmann-esque Obama critic, shamelessly equating Obama with terrorism -- a just slightly more acceptable version of the deranged nutjobs at McCain's rallies from whom McCain was forced to distance himself. We see that left to her own devices, Palin is a Bachmann-like figure -- a wingnut with no regard for the truth. See her musings on death panels. Although McCain's campaign suffered many failings, and Obama's campaign was outstanding, Palin was a gamble that didn't pay off. She emerged as a liability, as the nation -- not typically so discerning -- overwhelmingly viewed her as woefully unqualified to assume the presidency. She continues to validate that verdict. See her bizarre resignation as governor and nonsensical utterances, in both oral and tweet form.

Basman, you're older and wiser than I, and I wonder to what extent the sort of feminism you're battling here characterizes an earlier era and/or just a few individuals and/or a few academic ideas that have nothing whatever to do with the Democratic Party or mainstream liberal politics. The overwhelming cultural attitude I perceive -- even in Manhattan where I lived for a couple of years -- is that your preferred "feminism=choice" formulation is the dominant one. I don't recall widespread outrage that Palin was pro-life. I think it was always assumed that she was. The incident about her creepy church was short-lived and a minor blip compared to the mainstream hysteria that the Wright videos provoked. Palin didn't even have to defend the incident. Obama had to give the speech of the decade.

In short, the problem with feminism you identify, which you think Palin solves, I don't think really exists. And Palin doesn't solve it anyway. (I recall that she couldn't even make up her mind as to whether she considered herself *any* sort of feminist.) In what sense is Palin a "muscular feminist" or any kind of feminist? If anything, she stands for a cultural attitude that says that women need to fulfill a particular gender role -- that of "hockey mom" -- in order to be an acceptable female candidate for high office. That's not any kind of feminism. What she really stands for, though, is the principle that many men will forgive the shortcomings of a pretty woman. Palin doesn't embody feminism; she embodies cutism -- something else entirely.

Your picture of Democratic politics is an excellent description -- of Republican politics. Today's Democratic Party is big-tent, and accommodates pro-life and other conservative views. That's why Obama can't do whatever he wants even with 60 Democratic votes in the Senate. That's why the Democrats in the House had to compromise on abortion in order to ensure passage of the health care bill, despite an overwhelming majority. Today, the GOP is the party of rigid, wingnut ideology. One difference between MSNBC and Fox News is that Fox perfectly represents the Republican Party today while MSNBC is a frequent critic of the Democratic Party because it's not liberal enough.

As for Palin, I maintain that her main problem isn't her religion or her pro-life position or her conservative views generally or her inarticulateness or her cultural identity or her hobbies or the fact that she has five kids or any of the other factors that conservative bloviators imagine enrages a silly caricature of their enemies. It's not that she's a hick. She's a hack -- a shallow, ignorant person who can sometimes put on a show of varying degrees of offensiveness, but ultimately lacks substance. And that's the main problem with your post and the column. You don't address her substance, or lack of it.

Okay jhildner I see your long post.

I'd like to say some things back: I need a bit of time is all.

Give me a day or three.

Once done I'll find you somewhere around here and let you know.

Jhildner: thank you for your thoughtful post and your kind words (or the few that were kind in any event). 

You do a pretty good job of flunking my experiment and make good points all along the way.

But a few last gasps.

Firstly, my big point goes to, and a big issue between us is, whether she deserves all the extraordinary slagging. To that point, I said in my first response to you that it was right to criticize her unreadiness for prime time politics. I argued that you mixed together that unreadiness with a general and highly personal attack on her as a moron and such like. I think, given what I admit, the issue takes in whether she was a good mayor, whether she was a good governor, and whether between those two stints she was a good regulator. So my argument is this question: even if she was adequate at those things how can she be painted in such blindingly bright colors by you? I’d say that at this level of criticism of her—denying her any ability whatsoever relating to politics, and more saying, to put it mildly that, she is an empty headed fool—the burden is on you to show her moronic inabilities at what she was doing had and had done before McCain swooped her out of Alaska.

That was a deeply cynical swoop because she was put on a stage she was clearly not ready for in substance to give McCain’s campaign some zotz and to gig up the base: other than setting McCain’s campaign on fire she was badly ill used by it and McCain and his “people” could have cared less. But how she handled an important part of a lot of it goes to her pure political talent: her poise and ease and electricity in her roll out speech as Rex Murphy describes, her great speech at the Republican Convention, her doing just fine at the “media craft” of the debate with Biden, which is to say trading talking points with him as a near equal or arguably a superior. She is one of the most politically talented people in your country.

So, again, the point is not the one you keep hammering on—the distance between what the high she sought required and what she was ready for. I heard the very savvy Haley Barbour refuse to tell Chris Matthews that Palin was qualified to be president the most he would say was that under the Constitution she was qualified—how these guys evade—and he knew nothing that disqualified her. But he said great things about her governorship, how well she knew the issues she was charged with in Alaska and generally how competent she appeared to be. In sum, the notion of her being a moron, your word, for all political purposes is misconceived.

On that we come to a cultural point. And that point goes to a number of themes: the hatred, and yet intense curiosity, she arouses; the condescension showed to her by her lesser; the rapture she arouses; her sheer political talent; her being a compelling figure. The cultural point resonates some from how Palin is a throw back to Abigail Becker. Recall the obit:

Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830
A tall, handsome woman "who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all," she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper's cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont.
So in Sarah Palin we have a handsome woman who fears God greatly and the living or dead not at all. She has a flock of children. She is a straight up outdoorswoman. She hasn’t rescued anyone but she hunts and she fishes and is a complicated mixture of rugged, can do competence and glamour. She is small town and rural yet she can take America by storm. She embodies an America, and a vision of America, that many Americans idealize and yearn for.

What is it about her: that drives her political enemies, the talking heads, and so many liberals—you—so nuts? My guess: they, many of them—not you—see in her a force and a threat that is larger than them and stands to knock them off their foundations. I find it laughable that Damon Linker, who I don’t know anything about personally, but whom, I’m guessing, couldn’t organize or administrate a Heidegger conference says, and which started our rounds of politeness:

A half-term governor of the most undeveloped state in the union? Please.

I note that you note in your dismissal of her as a moron that she showed no serious interest in anything and would have found her level as say a sports caster. But many who comment on her political future say that what she needs to do, if she wants that, is to study and master the issues, be quiet for a while, get out of the limelight and come out with some serious policy chops. She may never do that. She may even mistakenly think she doesn’t need to. But (and I’m not sure whether I differ with you here because I don’t know what you think about this) she could. And, if she did—mangled syntax and down home way of speaking and all—with her political electricity, why, she would explode onto to the presidential scene. She might not win; she might not get the nomination. But she would spank lightweights like Mike Huckabee, and spank smart but dull guys like Pawlenty, and spank slicksters like Mitt Romney. Now if there is something to my little scenario here, if she has these potentialities were she to apply herself to policy, there I think would go the thrust of your argument right out the window, and there would Linker’s insisting she’s not worth paying any attention to— A half-term governor of the most undeveloped state in the union? Please—would be even more obviously absurd than it already is, and self parodying too.

And put all that together with this: just as Sam Tanenhaus argued generally in these pages a few months ago, there at some point, maybe sooner than we’d like, in the nature of American and in fact all democratic politics, will be Democratic Party weariness and a revival of Republican fortunes. To me, and again, if this is imaginable, in the putting the boots to your argument and immolating Linker’s “elites” self parody, that time and chance could make Palin the instrument of that revival. I think it foolish to discount this as a possibility.

I’m not going to fight with you about how Palin did against Biden because, as they say, “it’s subjective”: I saw a different debate performance than did you, winks and all. But let’s not get all hung up on tics. Here’s the thing: I agree with you that Palin, way over head, doing her job, zinging the base, appealed to a low and vulgar constituency. I tend to agree with you that “she was a gamble that didn’t pay off”. And I agree with you that she has tremendous wing nut potential. But I know Michelle Bachman, and Sarah Palin is no Michelle Bachman. If she gets well advised, over and above boning up on the issues, she could, if she has presidential ambitions—who knows— shrewdly strike a more moderate course. Boy oh boy, if she managed all that—the policy cred; some moderate tacking—her political potency would be something to behold. In the case of a Michelle Bachman, that, to me, is simply unimaginable. If what I am saying holds some reasonable prospect in your mind, well just sing after me, you know the chorus by now. She has already mapped out the outlines of a plausible case for her gubernatorial resignation, which as a liability stands to get lost in the mists of political time.

(One day, maybe we’ll talk about Obama’s Wright speech. I don’t think it says much helpful about race, once I get past its stunning eloquence.)

As for her substance or lack of it, let me ask you a question as a test case. Let me just throw out a name her, talking about political hacks, give me some examples, just a few, of the substance of a Harry Reid, a Nancy Pelosi, even a Joe Biden, or even a Ronald Reagan political clout and political skills, such as they may be. Because I want to focus on what substance is in mainstream American politics as opposed to academic intelligence. I think Palin has the *political intelligence* in spades and the potential to master the talking points of policy as well as a Pelosi, Reid, Reagan or a Biden, if she wants to.

correction

...As for her substance or lack of it, let me ask you a question as a test case. Let me just throw out a name her, talking about political hacks, give me some examples, just a few, of the substance of a Harry Reid, a Nancy Pelosi, even a Joe Biden, or even a Ronald Reagan political clout and political skills, such as they may be...

should be:

...As for "her substance or lack of it", let me ask you a question as a test case. Let me throw out a few names. Give me, if you care to, some examples, just a few, of the *substance* of a Harry Reid, a Nancy Pelosi, even a Joe Biden, or even a Ronald Reagan, that substance as such being something different from their political clout and political skills as such...

After all who said this I wonder and which is all to the point of substance in politics?

“People… have difficulty grasping the distinctive and essential components of political morality, comprising the qualities necessary in a statesman or other leader. Those qualities are strategic and interpersonal (manipulative, coercive, psychological) in character. They are quintessentially social. They constitute the morality, misunderstood as cynicism, expounded by Machiavelli, the morality that Weber contrasted with an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’, his term for the uncompromising absolutist ethics that one finds, for example, on the Sermon on the Mount. The ethics of political responsibility implies a willingness to compromise, to dirty one’s hands, to flatter and lie, to make package deals, to forgo the prideful self satisfaction that comes from self-conscious purity and devotion to principle. It requires a sense of reality, of proportion, rather than self-righteousness or academic smarts. The politician must have an ‘ability to let realities work upon him with inner consciousness and calmness.’”

C'est tout pour maintenant.

I promise!

I lie.

I break my promise.

I want to end here where I started. I am miles from Palin politically and philosophically and probably every other way. But I want to push back against at the sneering, vicious dismissals of her rooted in a profound misunderstanding of her political giftedness and misunderestimation of her.

Basman, you marvel at her supposed political intelligence even though she allowed herself to become a national joke and a political failure. She may rise again, but with a lot more baggage than she had before, with a big majority of the country viewing her as unqualified for high office and/or otherwise unfavorably. It's making excuses to say she wasn't ready. She was ready for the convention speech, and, let's stipulate, the debate as well. If those were the only two data points, I might be inclined to agree with you. But they're not. Those interviews were so awful that SNL had only to put Tina Fey in a pink suit and have her more-or-less read the transcript in order to transform them from cringe-inducing to mainstream funny. Her later shtick did strike me as Bachmann-esque, and her resignation as governor was downright weird -- to everyone except Kristol who is a nice man but a little off his nut.

So, just as I dispute that Palin represents an ideal of a military woman or a frontier woman, I dispute that she represents an ideal of a politically savvy woman. Even if I were to agree with Posner's emphasis on Machiavellian skill as the key to "political morality," Palin hasn't shown that she has it -- she has repeatedly self-destructed, politically speaking. Michele Bachmann may well have more political intelligence.

You hold out hope that she might study up and emerge as a force to be reckoned with. She has demonstrated, after a year, neither the capacity nor even the inclination to do that. She might have written a book about her political vision, something to lay the groundwork for a comeback that would give conservatives hope that they can speak to a broader audience and strike fear in the heart of Democrats and liberals. Instead, she wrote (or, rather, had written) a book about how McCain/Palin was mean to her. So yeah, I doubt she has the chops, and I'm not scared of her. When your political opponents hope that you become the standard-bearer of your party, that's not a great sign. We know that Palin is a competitive lady, but she has yet to take up the challenge to know what she's talking about. My tentative conclusion -- I'm sorry -- is that she's too dumb to do that, or else doesn't care, either of which is damning.

I don't have the time to offer an elaborate defense of Pelosi, Biden, or Reid. All three have impressive records as legislators, especially Pelosi and Biden. I read a profile of Pelosi in, maybe, the New Yorker, maybe TNR, I don't remember, that convinced me that she truly is a tough, savvy woman who knows what she's talking about and knows what she's doing. Biden has always struck me as a welcome, no-nonsense presence whose recent reputation for gaffes seems overstated, much as Gore's was in '04. Anyway, these are serious people, and you can study their Wikipedia pages yourself to find more than "just a few examples," not the least of which is that they are, respectively, Speaker of the House, Vice President following a long and distinguished Senate career, and Senate Majority Leader, and all three came up through the ranks. I'm not a big fan of Reid, who sucks the life out of the room in his public appearances, but, on the other hand, may yet usher the health care bill through the Senate with no votes to spare, so I'm reserving judgment on him.

I don't like gotcha journalism and didn't think that some of the Palin gotcha moments were that big a deal -- say, her inability to name any Supreme Court decisions. But I did not think that Palin was snared on mere gotcha moments. She has revealed, with little help from the media, a broader picture of someone generally without the facility to grasp or opine on, much less lead on the major issues of the day.

I said before that I'm not scared of Palin, but, yes, I do worry about the "force" she represents. I'm scared of her in the same way I'm scared of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, though I think Beck and Limbaugh are more compelling circus acts. The source of my aggravation about her is the combination of a benign, folksy, cutie-pie manner and the political and intellectual toxic waste that she spews forth. If Palin were a dumpy guy, I wouldn't be so irritated, but, then again, she wouldn't have a political career or, maybe, any career to speak of. It's annoying to see others cast under the spell of a political charlatan with no depth, whose appeal barely extends beyond the fact that she can wear the hell out of a shiny suit from Saks. This is life, of course, but, I think, maybe a new low in American political life.

Some on Fox have argued that liberals don't like her because she's a looker -- and, by the forgiving standards of American politics, she is. But, as Jon Stewart put it recently, we don't hate her because of her "Alaska shooty prettiness. That's actually [our] favorite part about her!" No, the vexing issue is the proud, aggressive ignorance and vacuousness, coupled with the amazed disbelief that others could seriously go for it. And I make no apologies for that verdict, even if I'm in the minority (which, at the moment, I'm not).

When it comes to political prognostication, those who have been around longer than I have an advantage, and I don't want to be accused of overestimating the American voting public -- dangerous business. I recognize that many went my way in '08 for superficial reasons -- people tend to be superficial on things like this. I doubt that Palin would acquit herself well in a national campaign, but she might prove me wrong. I'm fairly confident, though, that if she did perform well, it would not be because she will have mastered any issue, but because she will have become a less transparent purveyor of rank bullshit.

Jhildner: I’m outa’ steam on this one. And your last post was an example of stelllar argument, if I say so myself.

Let’s see what the future holds for her politically.

Good catch on Posner: fess up did you know that or did you google something.? If the former, I’m impressed. If the latter: good googling.

See ya'.

...Jhildner: I’m outa’ steam on this one...

Fuck that, steam's back, I am a litigator after all.

Gimme' a minute for a brief (mercifully) reply.

Again, repeating myself:

…I want to end here where I started. I am miles from Palin politically and philosophically and probably every other way. But I want to push back against at the sneering, vicious dismissals of her rooted in a profound misunderstanding of her political giftedness and misunderestimation of her…

You say:

. …She may rise again…

Exactly!

You say:

… She was ready for the convention speech, and, let's stipulate, the debate as well. If those were the only two data points, I might be inclined to agree with you…

Chink in your excellent armor: I f she could get herself ready for the two pretty big deals, her potential to get ready for future big deals exists. She can transcend unreadiness, and all her past lousiness, by the same efforts at getting ready she showed she could do. One thing I’m fairly confident about is her resignation will fade in the mists of political time, as I said. She’s making a decent case for that resignation now and it will mean even less two years from now.

With Palin, the bad past is not necessarily prologue to the future. Think about it:: a mayor of small, small l town with no political experience whatsoever within 2 years or so is debating Joe Biden and is, arguably, holding her own. That’s different fro giving a set speech, or improvising parts of her speech if she did: that’s flat out impressive. If she wants to run and if she is well advised and is disciplined about it, why can’t the Biden debate, the roll out speech, the convention speech, the electricity she ignites, be the prologue? There is no argument as to her lamentable past in presidential politics: there is a live one, I say, as to her future.

You say:

…So, just as I dispute that Palin represents an ideal of a military woman or a frontier woman, I dispute that she represents an ideal of a politically savvy woman. Even if I were to agree with Posner's emphasis on Machiavellian skill as the key to "political morality," Palin hasn't shown that she has it -- she has repeatedly self-destructed, politically speaking. Michele Bachmann may well have more political intelligence.
You hold out hope that she might study up and emerge as a force to be reckoned with. She has demonstrated, after a year, neither the capacity nor even the inclination to do that. She might have written a book about her political vision, something to lay the groundwork for a comeback that would give conservatives hope that they can speak to a broader audience and strike fear in the heart of Democrats and liberals. Instead, she wrote (or, rather, had written) a book about how McCain/Palin was mean to her. So yeah, I doubt she has the chops, and I'm not scared of her. When your political opponents hope that you become the standard-bearer of your party, that's not a great sign. We know that Palin is a competitive lady, but she has yet to take up the challenge to know what she's talking about. My tentative conclusion -- I'm sorry -- is that she's too dumb to do that, or else doesn't care, either of which is damning..

I say: her vice presidential debate. I used to teach first year English literature. Some kids wrote horrible papers that had things in them that showed promise. I still vividly recall their improvement over the course of the course.

You say:

“I don't have the time to offer an elaborate defense of Pelosi, Biden, or Reid. All three have impressive records as legislators, especially Pelosi and Biden. I read a profile of Pelosi in, maybe, the New Yorker, maybe TNR, I don't remember, that convinced me that she truly is a tough, savvy woman who knows what she's talking about and knows what she's doing. Biden has always struck me as a welcome, no-nonsense presence whose recent reputation for gaffes seems overstated, much as Gore's was in '04. Anyway, these are serious people, and you can study their Wikipedia pages yourself to find more than "just a few examples," not the least of which is that they are, respectively, Speaker of the House, Vice President following a long and distinguished Senate career, and Senate Majority Leader, and all three came up through the ranks. I'm not a big fan of Reid, who sucks the life out of the room in his public appearances, but, on the other hand, may yet usher the health care bill through the Senate with no votes to spare, so I'm reserving judgment on him.”

I say you are conflating experience with substance. And in that you are criticizing Palin because she does not have the experience that would allow someone similarly to conflate those two things for her benefit.

Respectfully, there is a problem with saying “who sucks the life out of the room in his public appearances” of Reid. It’s substituting zotz, or lack thereof, with substance. If de, or in, flation of the air in a room are criteria, Palin has that hands down. On the substance, I’m saying that the dazzling smarts of an Obama, a Jimmy Carter, a Bill Clinton, a Richard Nixon, my Pierre Elliot Trudeau, can be a great political gift, but is not necessary let alone sufficient for presidential politics, and can be a liability—too much Hamlet in some, or bad judgment despite the real smarts, like with lawyers for example. The there are those lessers intellectually, like most politicians, who are smart enough. I want to say Palin is.

Maybe a final note of some small patch of common ground: If Palin continues to allow herself to get assimilated to the likes of Limbaugh and Beck—that is up to her and that assimilation is a real possibility--and I agree with your fearing that underbelly, the forces Limbaugh and Beck represent—then I agree with your view of her being, I would desperately hope, I’ve gotta’ think, in a doomed political wasteland.

Howdy Basman, if you're still paying attention. Briefly, I'll just point out that you put a lot of stock in Palin's debate performance, which I do not recall being as impressive as you thought it was, but I would have to watch it again and, well, I don't feel like it. But even granting that it was an okay, competitive, passable, adequate, etc., presentation of campaign talking points (it's not as though anybody actually answers the questions in debates anymore), and that the convention speech was strong (putting aside its insidious content), these decent performances are outliers when looking at her overall performance on the national stage to date. You suggest that her flops -- her resignation as governor, for example, which involved a laughable speech -- will be lost to the sands of time while, I suppose, her triumphs will be remembered well. I don't think so. The overall impression right now is based on the more frequent flops, and the impression we all got from the convention speech is a distant memory, replaced by subsequent blundering and the snowballing of a sense that, along multiple dimensions, she's simply not high office material. You could make the transformation argument -- she can turn it around -- about anybody. My view is that the two data points you rely on are not enough to rescue that possibility from the realm of the ulikely, given all the others that go the other way.

As for that patch of common ground, I think it's apparent that she is associating herself rather firmly with the immoderate wing of an already immoderate party. Christopher Hitchens thinks that this is cynical on her part. Perhaps. Frankly I'm not sure she has enough intellectual heft to be cynical in the way Hitch means. I think she simply gravitates toward buzzwords, and that it's easy for her to believe what she says when she says it, because she lacks any sophisticated depth of conviction or knowledge to start with. Yeah, yeah, I know I'm being mean, but, as I've argued already at length, I think she's a pretty offensive figure who's got it coming.

p.s. Anywho, it's been fun. Thanks for forcing me to test my views on Palin and tone them down a touch. As for the Posner quote, I'm shocked -- shocked! -- that you would suggest that I would cut and paste a chunk of the quote into Google in order to find out who said it and subsequently toss off a casual reference to Posner as though I knew it all along in order to impress you that I have a greater depth of knowledge than I actually have. Shocked and appalled. And that is all I have to say on that subject.

Okay JH, see ya' round the bend.

Are you saying I've gone round the bend?!

Jh, my bent friend, I am glad you are still here. A friend, also bent, sent me this http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/sarah-palin-is-coming-to...

I'm not starting this all up again--life is too short-- but thought of our little tete a tete here when I read it and wanted to get it to you.

And Stanley Fish, an irascible mother fucker to be sure and idiosyncratic for sure, is nobody's fool.

C'est ca.

Thanks for the link. I haven't read the book, but I find Fish's column -- what's the word? -- dubious. He begins by saying that it doesn't matter whether any of the facts in the book are true. He later says that it doesn't matter whether you agree with any of the broader points she makes. Okay. So what *does* matter? That the book represents an "authentic voice." Hmm. Even though it's likely ghost-written. Even though, in Fish's description, it speaks the language of hammy cliches about the alleged folksy virtues of "small town America." We are to understand that the key to Palin's character is her political perseverance. Even though she resigned as governor and, in Fish's description, believes things other than politics are more important. Well, okay. We'll see....