Victor Davis Hanson answers it perfectly:
I have been asked by many why I have such confidence in a rookie Alaskan governor, given the rigors of the campaign to follow. (Many Republican pundits apparently do not.) I think we are starting to see the answers to that question. The proverbial “they” hacked into her private email accounts. They swore that her daughter was the real mother of her Down Syndrome baby. They sent legions of reporters and lawyers to Alaska to dig up dirt. They wrote columns suggesting that she was stupid, uneducated, dishonest, a liar, and worse still. All this was the work of moralists, who, in their more extreme manifestations, tried to flood a Chicago radio station to disrupt guests, who doctored photos of McCain to subvert his portrait, who disgraced the Atlantic brand by trafficking in pregnancy rumors, and who now publish the private email of Palin.
And? She is still smiling and apparently unmoved. Had they done this to Biden, he would have gone berserk. Wait—they didn’t do this to Biden, and he seems near berserk in his daily gaffes.
I happened to catch a little bit of Governor Palin speaking in Florida today and there she was – just as fresh, positive and combative as she was during her magnificent acceptance speech at the GOP convention. The people on the left who have been hammering her don’t seem to realise that they’ve got another Reagan on their hands – a calm, confident person who doesn’t need politics for self-validation and, furthermore, who doesn’t care what anyone in the MSM/Leftwing echo chamber thinks about her. For Sarah Palin (as for Reagan in the past), the constituency is God, family, friends and the people…news media, other politicians and elitists of various stripes don’t make the cut.
One day the left will get it – she’s one of us. She’s of that part of America – the overwhelming majority – which believes in God, believes in fellow Americans, loves this nation, would rather a child become a soldier than some bizarre, pierced and tattoo’d weirdo participating in anti-globalization demonstrations, is generous to a fault and is keenly aware of personal failings while conscious of the promise of ultimate redemption. Right now, the left doesn’t get it – because they aren’t of us; and the reason Obama is failing to close the deal in an anti-GOP political climate is because he’s so outside the experience of average Americans. Leftists convince themselves this is due to racism but the truth of the matter is that people who love Condi Rice are dismayed with Barack Obama (and, lefties, Condi Rice – for all her superlative brilliance – is still one of us…she’s risen high but hasn’t cut herself off from the average American).
Meanwhile, the left’s failure to “get it” works to our advantage – though Hanson notes that eventually Obama will figure out that attacking Palin (ie, making the battle “Palin vs Obama”) is a sure loser, we can count on Obama, his Democrats and the larger left to continue to impale themselves upon the conservative spear called Sarah Palin. By the time they turn, bloodied an incomprehending, back to the real battle, it may be too late for them to retrieve the situation.
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