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It Was Never About Experience. This Election Is About Elitism

On NRO’s the Corner, Victor Davis Hanson’s answer to the question “Why Do We Like Palin?” pretty much nails exactly why Sarah Palin is the most polarizing candidate we’ve seen in the election so far (Yes, more so than HRC.)

Various reasons, but one I think is that millions of Americans are simply tired of being lectured at by smug elites. Jetting Al Gore made tens of millions finger-pointing at us about our global warming. Obama’s America, apparently unlike Rev. Wright’s Trinity Church, is a cruel, downright mean and dysfunctional place. John Kerry’s United States is one of the half-educated in need of Ivy-League enlightenment and tutorials.

So along comes someone (unlike Biden’s vastly inflated middle-class biography) who really is from the working class. She likes it—and finds snowmobiling, hunting, fishing and living in small-town America not as a wasteful use of carbon-emitting fuels, cruelty to animals, gratuitous depletion of our resources, or proof of parochial yokelism. Instead it is a life of action in an often harsh natural landscape, where physical strength is married to intelligence to bring us food, fuel, and progress.

Palin’s symbolism is the antithesis of the metrosexual wind- or body- surfing politican, and hair-plugged, neurotic TV pundit So at this time, right now, millions apparently like Palin’s atypical 19th-century profile. Again, it’s a pleasant change of pace from Harvard Law School, DC politics, “community organizing” and the can’t-do, ‘they raised the bar on me’ collective complaint.

If she can beat off the frothing Newsweek/MSNBC/New York Times inbred rabid wolves, and do it with the grace she has shown so far, she will fill a deep yearning among Americans for someone like her. A lot of Americans, if they watch reality shows, prefer truckers on ice or Bering Sea crab fishing to endless psychodramas of thirty-something suburban whiners.

So apparently they are eager to see a rare politican who is unapologetic about America’s past achievements (cf. Obama’s “tragic history” and need for more “oppression studies”), and who reminds us with pride that a muscular world of action, not community organizing, creates the bounty that others use and take for granted but so often sneer at the methods of its acquisition.

Right now, there are millions rooting for her in a way not true of Biden—and many who are criticizing her don’t have a clue why that it is so.

Well I know why I’m criticizing her, and that is because I’m a libertarian and I remember the election of 2000. Her “reforming” political views and “down-to-earth” “symbolism” only remind me of George W. Bush in his first run for president. Naturally, it wasn’t the huntin’ and fishin’ that won over independents/libertarians, but his platform on limited government, free trade, and non-interventionist foreign policy. When you think about it, Bush in 2000 sounded a lot more like Ron Paul than John McCain today. From a libertarian’s perspective now, the worst thing Democrats can do is raise taxes. But I can’t even conceive of the worst possible Republican actions because the party has consistently gone beyond my most cynical expectations.

Foreign policy is the president’s direct responsibility, the economy is mostly out of his hands (Not that they’re unrelated: a hugely expensive war doesn’t help things.) Andrew Sullivan wrote, “Do you really believe that Sarah Palin understands the distinctions between Shia and Sunni, has an opinion about the future of Pakistan, has a view of how to exploit rifts within Tehran’s leadership, knows about the tricky task of securing loose nuclear weapons? Does anyone even know if she has ever expressed a view on these matters?”

I don’t fear Palin is the female Quayle but potentially the female GWB: a weak leader nevertheless capable of getting elected for the likability factor, falling under the influence of the people surrounding her while moving up the ranks. Remember, Bush had “executive experience” as a governor of Texas before the presidency. And they share a speechwriter.

From the Washington Post: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and McCain campaign manager Rick Davis “suggest Palin would be able to handle foreign policy matters by leaning heavily on McCain’s staff.” You aren’t electing a person, you’re electing a party.

While much is made about her lack of “experience” canceling out Obama’s, now the Palin pick finally makes sense: this election is about “elitism.” As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “The entire Sarah Palin pick comes down to one thing–the hope that George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, or (God forbid) Will.I.Am. will make a joke about moose-burgers.”

Class in our country isn’t well examined or understood, mostly as the division has much to do with race relations. And that makes Obama’s “elite” status so bizarre given his race and upbringing.

To the GOP, “elite” has nothing to do with money or race. It has to do with “values.” “Elite” is any social liberal. Which is why the left badly needs to reframe this debate and claim its side of the culture war as reasoned, principled, logical, honorable, any word other than something suggesting the result of a college education.

It all comes back to Karl Rove’s remark, “Even if you never met him, you know this guy… He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”

As Jon Stewart put it, “Doesn’t elite mean good?…This job you’re applying for — if you get it, and it goes well, they might carve your head in a mountain. If you don’t actually think you’re better than us than what the fuck are you doing?”

(BTW, if I had Photoshop on this computer I’d impose Palin and McCain’s faces on Grant Wood’s painting. And oh, maybe mash-up Cindy McCain and Marie-Antoinette.)

Update 9/4/08: More Sarah Palin 2008 = George W. Bush 2000 articles now. Sarah Palin’s real soul mate in Salon and George W. Palin in Huffington Post

Previously:

The President Isn’t Your Boss

Boris Johnson isn’t London’s New Bicycle

How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle

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It Was Never About Experience. This Election Is About Elitism

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