From The Times

September 5, 2008


Sarah Palin: it's go west, towards the future of conservatism

Her thrilling convention speech showed that the Governor of Alaska is a force to reckoned with. But she might be more than that


Gerard Baker


The best line I heard about Sarah Palin during the frenzied orgy of chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion that greeted her nomination for vice-president a week ago came from a correspondent who knows a thing or two about Alaska.

“What's the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”
“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let's be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.

“The other kills her own food.”

Now we know, thanks to her triumphant debut at the Republican convention on Wednesday, that Mrs Palin not only slaughters her prey. She impales its head on a stick and parades it around for her followers to jeer at. For half an hour she eviscerated Mr Obama in that hall and did it all without dropping her sweet schoolmarm smile, as if she were handing out chocolates at the end of a history lesson.

There's a powerful danger in the sheer thrill that has followed her astonishing performance that we could get carried away with John McCain's running-mate. Some of the coverage has a hyperbolic tone to it. Not since Paris handed that apple to Aphrodite has a man's selection of a woman had such implications for the future of our civilisation.

So let's stipulate one obvious and important piece of wisdom about US elections. The choice of a vice-presidential candidate rarely makes much of a difference. The pundit class waxes historical in the excitement of the moment but usually the vice-presidential choices go back to playing second banana. However mawkishly we dwell on the mortality of the presidential contenders, it is they who determine the voters' decision.

This one, to be fair, could be different. For at least the next few weeks the press will follow Mrs Palin's present and dig deeper into her past, still hoping for some morsel of stupidity or evidence of cupidity to doom her. But in the end, barring such a discovery, this is still an Obama-McCain contest.

But let me try to explain why Mrs Palin, whatever impact she might have in November, may be a figure of real consequence in our lives.

It's partly about what she represents and partly about what she has already done, but mostly about where she and her ilk might take the Republicans - and possibly America.

It never ceases to amaze me how the Left falls again and again into the old trap of underestimating politicians whom they don't understand. From Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to George Bush and Mrs Palin, they do it every time. Because these characters talk a bit funny and have ridiculously antiquated views about faith, family and nation, because they haven't spent time bending the knee to the intellectual metropolitan elites, they can't be taken seriously.

So the general expectation was that Mrs Palin would stumble on to the stage in high heels, clutching her sprawling, slightly odd family (five children! how weird), mispronounce the name of the Russian Prime Minister, mutter a few platitudes about God, and disappear for ever to a deafening chorus of sniggers.

No one paid much attention to the fact that she had been elected governor of a state. Or that she got to that office not because, unlike some politicians I could mention, her husband had been there before her, or because she bleated continuously about glass ceilings, but by challenging the entrenched interests in her own party and beating them. In almost two years as Governor she has cleaned out the Augean stables of Alaskan Government. You don't win a statewide election and enjoy approval ratings of more than 80 per cent without real political talent.

Never mind all that. She didn't have a passport! She was a former beauty queen! It was so axiomatic that she was a disaster that I was told by lots of savvy men - with deliciously unconscious sexism - that the real problem was what the choice said about Mr McCain and his judgment: cynical, irresponsible, clueless. It was as if Mrs Palin wasn't really a human being at all, but an article of Mr McCain's clothing that showed his poor taste, like wearing brown shoes with a charcoal suit.

So here's why she matters.

First of all she offers an opportunity for an ailing Republican party to reconnect with ordinary Americans. She's conservative, but her conservatism is not that of the intolerant, uncomprehending white male sort that has so hurt the party in recent years. She is much closer to a model of the lives of ordinary Americans - working mother, plainspoken everywoman juggling home and office - than any Republican leader in memory.

The contrast with Mr Obama is especially powerful. The very fact that Mrs Palin didn't go to elite schools but succeeded nonetheless - the very ordinariness with which she so piquantly jabbed Mr Obama on Wednesday - is what will make her so appealing to Americans. And as a pro-life conservative she debunks in one swoop the enduring myth that all women subscribe to the obligatory nostrums of radical feminism.

But there's more to it than that.

The Republicans have decided that they are not going to make the mistake Hillary Clinton made and run against the effervescent Mr Obama on the premise of experience.

Experience hasn't got Americans into a very comfortable place. They want change. Before he signed up to some of the less attractive Republican attitudes this year, Mr McCain's career had embodied that change - the anti-establishment candidate running against his own party. Now he is joined by a woman who, in her short career, has done the same thing.
Democrats think that Mr McCain, with the social conservative Mrs Palin, will launch an old-fashioned culture war at them, using her appealing manner to drive a populist assault on the familiar Republican issues of God, guns and gays.

Perhaps this Manichean interpretation will prove true. But I suspect that it misses the real appeal of the Republican team. The opportunity for McCain-Palin is not reaction, but reform - a reform rooted in a distant conservatism that could be due for a comeback.

Hailing from Arizona and Alaska, the Republican ticket has a chance to rekindle a western conservatism different from the old Yankee paternalist sort or the Bible Belt version. They like their guns out there (some still kill their own food) and they are pro-life and deeply pro-America, of course. But at a time of grave challenges, the themes of economic freedom and opportunity, the resistance to the idea that government holds all the answers, could resonate with voters.

This is an election, as the Democrats have realised all along, about an America on the cusp of change. With the moose-hunting, establishment-taunting Mrs Palin at his side, Mr McCain might represent a bigger change than the one that his opponents are offering.

__________________
Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

I agree with him: westerners do love their country. I wonder how they feel about succession.

__________________
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. Einstein

Do you mean secession?

Lol, yeah. Sorry, I'm in law school.

__________________
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. Einstein

Oh, oh, another spellmeister, it must run in the family, signed Med!

__________________
Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

Damn! That explains everything.

Vi

__________________
Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

Correct me if I am wrong. This article basically says we should all love a "woman" acting like a man, who kills her own food, and can read a teleprompter? Oh wait and also due to adversity, she became the governor of a state with less population than many major cities and dare I say whose intelligent citizens move the Hell away from there as soon as they are able to.

I resent that remark. My entire family from my mother's side hails from Alaska. I have family there and I've visited there for almost a year. It is a wonderful state...although many urbanites might "thumb their noses" at folks who hail from a state that is predominately rural, full of a lot of hard working, intelligent countrymen.

Get over yourself!!!!

I am willing to bet you "thumb your nose" at many of your "countrymen". There are a lot of African Americans in the U.S. and what it comes down to with far too many people is race. I listen to one radio program in particular with a heavy Southern and middle American listenership and not a day goes by when several of my "countrymen" call in to ask the host, who is Pro-Obama, "How can you vote for a N****r?!!!!" I don't have this hang up. Talk about any inexperience issues you want all day long, but when the strongest argument one can present is based upon race there is a tremendous problem in our country. It's a sad world we live in where we basically all have to gamble on who's going to run our lives the best. Personally, I think decentralization and states rights would be fine, but then who would support all the people out there who feel they're owed a life and whatever money and items they need to live on. I've been working steadily since the age of 15 and I am now pushing 40 and everyday I get mad/depressed at having to pay into our social welfare system for people who are to lazy to get their own. You go visit a low income or section 8 housing unit for 24 hours and watch woman after woman entertain several gentlemen and then drag their 7 kids all by different fathers out for ice cream and a crack rock and then get back to me on how great this country is. I don't want to leave and I think it can be fixed, but it isn't going to be anytime soon and it certainly isn't going to be with politics as usual.

As of 2006, the population of Alaska was 670,053.

As of 2006, the population of Delaware was 853,476.

Sarah Palin's opponent, Sen. Joe Biden, is the Senator from Delaware. Joe Biden has been a U.S. Senator for 22 years. He has managed nothing. He has never met a payroll, nor has he ever produced anything. He is part of the business-as-usual team and an entrenched Washington politician.

Governor Palin has demonstrated her skills at running an entire state. She has ruined the corrupt bureaucratic mess that she promised to end, and in the process, has produced a budget surplus and has returned over $3000 to every qualified man, woman and child in the state.

So, what was your point again ...??

Vi

__________________
Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.