And why is that? Victor Davis Hanson tells the tale:
…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.
The left also hated – with a white-hot passion – Ronald Reagan. In 2004, when the great man passed away, the left tended to ignore its own savagery against Reagan. To hear some of them tell it, Ronald Reagan was the sort of conservative lefties wished were still around. Of course, the left needs more Ronald Reagan’s like it needs a hole in its head (or, more accurately, yet more holes in their head) – but the reality, for those of us who were adults in the 1980’s, was quite different. Reagan was also compared to Hitler; Reagan was called senile; a fool; a crazed cowboy (any of this starting to sound familiar?); a man who didn’t think about things before acting; a man who was just a tool of evil corporate interests; a religious fanatic; someone who actually hated gay people and other minorities; a hypocrite who spoke of traditional morality but who was divorced and re-married…on and on it went, no slander was too vile for the left to heap it upon Reagan. And, of course, Reagan didn’t give a damn what his critics thought of him and with a grace unequaled in American politics, he deftly dodged the brickbats of the left and went right on to his goal. And the people loved him. Why? Because he was one of us.
To be sure, by the time he became President he was a very wealthy man, but not as wealthy as people like Kerry, Rockefeller and Kennedy are today. But his wealth was incidental – and the result of hard work and personal risk taking. Reagan talked like us; had a life story similar to millions of middle class Americans; went to an unremarkable college where we performed unremarkably academically; worked his way up from the bottom…when I visited the Reagan ranch in 2007 and saw the way the Reagan’s lived away from the bright lights of Hollywood and politics, I saw a house that any middle class American would feel instantly at home in. While a lot of the GOP primary fight this year was argument over who was the most Reaganite, the fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin is Reaganite to the core, and without even having to make an effort at it. Like him, she’s one of us.
The left seems to sense this – sense, that is, that Palin is antithetical to them, able to beat them and – the worst sin of all – entirely unconcerned with what the left says or thinks. The left sees Sarah Palin and quakes with fear…knowing that even if they beat McCain in November, they’ll have Palin to deal with in 2012 and beyond, unless they can destroy her now, right out the gate and not making the mistake the left made with Reagan when they let him alone early on, sure that Reagan’s views would be rejected by the American people. And the worst nightmare, of course, is Palin helping McCain to victory, helping a re-energised GOP challenge the Democratic Congressional majority, becoming – in her turn – the GOP Presidential nominee…and right behind her, the younger Bobby Jindal to carry it forward. The left is reaching for complete victory and feels that they are sure to win in November…and Palin is a threat to that.
Too bad, lefties – not only will you not be able to destroy Governor Palin, but each nasty, vile, slanderous attack you launch just binds the GOP more tightly to her. Palin is the gravedigger of leftwing hopes, and one day Jindal will bury the casket of your dead ideas. You’re time is up, even if you manage to eke out a win in November.
UPDATE: Obama tries to use the abortion issue to respond to Palin being on the ticket…
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